Michael Balint's Contributions to the Psychoanalysis of Literature

If Jung's fondness for populating psychic elements with exotic and mythic personages was excessive, psychoanalysts have not always avoided dreaming up new terms for harnessing their clinical data or for specifying seemingly new psychic functions. (Should this tendency be called the Adam complex, based on the illusion that Paradise once consisted in the naming of flowers and animals?) Some of these terms—Isakower phenomenon, the dream screen, and the blank dream form one cluster—have proven their worth. Others like identity18 and false self may end up as popular but problematic. New terms seem to crop up around specific problem areas.a Creativity, which has both fascinated and troubled psychoanalysis from the outset, is still being defined and redefined. Weissman's dissociative and synthesizing functions9 and Eissler's doxalatheic function7 come readily to mind, while Freud was content to stick with creative imagination and lay down his analytical arms before its elusive operations. Perhaps it had served him too well to be tampered with.

For new terms time appears to be the best test, and accordingly I temper my own otherwise unreserved interest in two words first introduced into the literature by Michael Balint in 1959, but since then rather neglected, or so it seems in America. These terms would augment without abolishing certain established ways of referring to very early phases of development, which he feels, rightly I assume, are either slighted by the stepping stones of oral-anal-phallic, or are indiscriminately lumped as pre-Oedipal (sometimes pregenital) on the one hand and bound by the historically inconsistent terms primary narcissism, oral dependence or greed, auto-eroticism, and primary identification on the other.3