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Up to this point I have reported only on patients who went through a successful therapeutic regression, which may have created the impression that in my opinion regression was all that mattered in a difficult analytic treatment, and furthermore, that Freud's repeated warning for caution when dealing with a regressed form of transference was without much clinical foundation, while Ferenczi's technical ideas were all in the right direction, and only his premature death prevented him from proving that this was so. To dispel these false impressions, let us return to clinical observations.
Some years ago (Balint, M., 1952) I dealt at some length with the problem of those patients who, though capable of regression, were not able to reach the arglos unsuspecting state which is an absolutely necessary pre-condition for new beginning, and whose treatment had to be terminated with a partial result. Though these results were quite acceptable, they were below those achieved after a proper new beginning. For details I must refer the reader to the original publication.
According to my experience — apart from the partial successes due to the inability of the patient-analyst unit to reach the area of the new beginning — patients fall into two groups: in some treatments only one, or at most a few, periods of regression or new beginning occurred, after which the patient spontaneously emerged from his primitive world and felt better, or was even cured — as predicted by Ferenczi; while with some others it seemed that they could never have enough; as soon as one of their primitive wishes or needs was satisfied, it was replaced by a new wish or craving, equally demanding and urgent. This in some cases led to the development of addiction-like states which were very difficult to handle, and in some cases proved — as Freud predicted — intractable.