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Michael Balint remains a somewhat shadowy figure in American psychiatry and psychotherapy. While a contemporary of Winnicott and Fairbairn, he has never achieved the attention or interest or following that these two pioneers have won. I myself always had an interest in learning more about his thoughts and work but like so many others of my colleagues that interest was never strong enough to motivate exploration. His range of interest covered working with primary care physicians in teaching dynamic therapy and understanding, focal or short-term therapy, and the importance of early relationships and their breakdown in psychopathology and the treatment of these early relational disharmonies in adult psychoanalysis. He is considered by many to be an important cog in the British Object Relations school of psychotherapy.
As far as I can tell, Balint was not a trained psychiatrist, though an M.D., but arrived at his interest in psychotherapy through his studies in biochemistry (likely to have played a role in his interest in working with general physicians), a master's degree in psychology, and lastly studies in psychoanalysis, where he was very early on taken by the work of Sandor Ferenczi, the noted Hungarian psychoanalyst.