Forty years ago M. Balint dwelt upon the presumed disproportion between the progress made in psychoanalytical technique, which was very great in his opinion, and the particularly slow and precarious developments that psychoanalysis seemed to have registered on a theoretic plane .

Nowadays, not only does this disproportion seem to have disappeared, but, in some aspects, what appears lacking is a consideration on the implications that the theoretic developments of the last few years seem to have had on analytical procedure.

Two of the most fruitful lines of study followed up so far, since the end of the forties are, to put it very sketchily, for the first half of the aforesaid period, studies on object relations carried out above all by M. Klein and her school, and, for the last twenty years, the hypotheses on the more primitive levels of mental functioning and their connection with the somatic.