14 Facts About Michael Balint

Michael Balint was a proponent of the Object Relations school.

Michael Balint completed his medical studies in Budapest in 1918.

Michael Balint began attending the lectures of Sandor Ferenczi, who in 1919 became the world's first university professor of psychoanalysis.

Michael Balint married Alice Szekely-Kovacs and about 1920 the couple moved to Berlin, where Michael Balint worked in the biochemical laboratory of Otto Heinrich Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1931.

Michael Balint now worked on his doctorate in biochemistry, while working half time at the Berlin Institute of psychoanalysis.

Michael Balint was employed at the Budapest Psychoanalytical Institute, becoming its director in 1935 after Ferenczi died.

John Rickman advised all Jewish analysts to leave and with his assistance Michael Balint emigrated to London settling in Manchester, England, in early 1939, where Michael Balint became Clinical Director of the Child Guidance Clinic.

In 1944 Michael Balint remarried, but the relationship soon ended, although they were not divorced until 1952.

In 1949 Michael Balint met Enid Flora Eichholz, who worked in the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations with a group of social workers and psychologists on the idea of investigating marital problems.

Michael Balint became the leader of this group and together they developed what is known as the "Balint group": a group of physicians sharing the problems of general practice, focussing on the responses of the doctors to their patients; the first group of practising physicians was established in 1950.

In 1968 Michael Balint became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Lacan wrote that 'Michael Balint has analysed in a thoroughly penetrating way the intricate interaction of theory and technique in the genesis of a new conception of analysis.

On that basis, Michael Balint thereafter explored the idea of what he called '"the basic fault": this was that there was often the experience in the early two-person relationship that something was wrong or missing, and this carried over into the Oedipal period '.

Michael Balint introduced two new concepts into psychoanalytic language in his book Thrills and Regression: ocnophilia and philobatism.