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Even though I have had little experience in groups of general practitioners or “Balint-groups,” as we call them in Argentina, I am very much interested in discussing this stimulating paper, since I feel quite at home in the area of seminars: from the inception of our Institute in 1943, I have been conducting them, at first alone, and lately with a staff made up of Janine Puget, Eduardo Teper and myself.
We have recently carried out an investigation to determine the possible or necessary modifications to be introduced into our present way of teaching psychoanalysis. Thus we became aware of a number of problems very similar to those Enid Balint points out, and we have written some papers about it. The last one, entitled “A Methodological Approach to the Teaching of Psychoanalysis,” was published by the “International Journal” in 1964. Many of my remarks here are direct quotations from it.
To start with, I shall state the viewpoints I share with Enid Balint. I quite agree that learning is in itself useful to ego development, and also that learning in a group which concentrates on the study of concrete human relations has its especial features. We may compare Balint-groups specifically with case-supervising seminars. We may observe that not only in this kind of seminar but also in theoretical and
clinical ones there appear compliance, rebellion and identity troubles; and that in both cases the evolution of these feelings towards identity will depend, to a great extent, on how the group is led and on the atmosphere created by the leaders.
There are, however, significant differences between Balint-groups and seminars. Enid Balint mentions only one: that candidates are, due to their own analysis, in a state of regression and are “compelled to function simultaneously in two different worlds,” while general practitioners are not in analysis. I shall add some other differences in various fields, which, to my mind, are of importance in accounting for compliance, rebellion and o