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Dr. Balint is a faculty member of the London Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, and Editor of “Mind and Medicine Monographs.” Former Consultant to the Tavistock Clinic and Honorary Clinical Assistant at University College, London, Dr. Balint has more than 100 publications to his name.
The aim of Psychoanalytic Pioneers is to describe the lives, the personalities and the principal ideas of the most prominent of that curious and talented group of people who were so impressed by Freud's early writings that they changed their careers and became psychoanalysts. For many of them, reading Freud was their only training; others had, by present standards, an inadequate analysis with Freud. Those who joined the group a few years later were in turn analyzed briefly by some of Freud's early pupils.
Forty-one such analysts are described in this volume—an impressive number. It becomes still more impressive when one realizes how many who should have been included have been left out. The editors frankly admit that their selection was not as systematic as they would have liked. Scarcity of biographical material, lack of suitable contributors, limited time, and possibly difficulties in deciding who should be counted as psychoanalytic pioneers and who not (good examples are Stekel and Sullivan, both of whom were omitted), all had their share in shaping this volume. Of course, one could have adopted some simple objective criteria such as: date of birth before 1900; the name appearing in the list of the International Association; the first paper being published by an arbitrary date, etc. As no such measures were used, the book conveys an idea of who are thought of today as having contributed substantially to our science in its early phases.
Of course, I felt it unfair to exclude so many names. To mention a few, and only from the branch societies of the International that I know well, I missed, from the old Vienna Society, Nunberg,