Psychobiography Reading Group of the Psychohistory Forum – 20th Meeting
Michael Balint — Primary Love, the Basic Fault,
and a Life Lived Between Worlds
October 24, 2026 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM ET/NYC)
Virtual Live
This meeting is free to attend, but RSVP is required.
Please RSVP by using the Registration Form below

Michael Balint (1896–1970) was the Budapest analyst who carried Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas into the English-speaking world and then made something of his own out of them: the theory of primary love, the “basic fault,” benign and malignant regression, and the ocnophil and philobat. He also invented an entirely new way of teaching doctors to listen — the Balint group.

Born Mihály Bergmann (the spelling varies in the sources) in Budapest, the first of two children of a Jewish general practitioner, he grew up watching his father’s medical practice and, according to biographers, became interested from a young age in what passes between a doctor and a patient. He would have preferred to study engineering; under his father’s influence he studied medicine instead. His studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served on the Russian front and then in the Dolomites, where he was wounded.

Even the name he carried is a psychobiographical puzzle. As a young man Balint changed his name from the Jewish-sounding Bergmann to the more Hungarian Bálint — against his father’s will, and in much the same spirit as Ferenczi’s own father had Magyarized the family name a generation earlier. It was the first of many crossings: from the doctor’s son to the rebellious son; from medicine to biochemistry (he took his doctorate in Berlin in 1924, working in the laboratory of Otto Warburg) and from biochemistry to psychoanalysis; from Budapest to Berlin and back; and finally, in 1939, from Budapest to Manchester and then London. The friend who first put Freud’s works in his hands was Alice Székely-Kovács, who became his first wife, the mother of his son John, and — as Jonathan Sklar has argued — a far more important influence on his thinking than has usually been recognized. Analyzed first by Hanns Sachs in Berlin and then by Ferenczi in Budapest, Balint became Ferenczi’s student, friend, successor as director of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Institute, and literary executor.

The years of exile were also years of loss. Soon after the family arrived in England in 1939, Alice died suddenly, leaving Balint to raise their son alone. Toward the end of the war, he learned that his parents, facing arrest by the Nazis in Budapest, had taken their own lives. The father who had opposed his change of name and steered him toward medicine, and whose degradation before his death is recorded by Balint’s biographers, is a figure who stands behind much of the story. Balint was, in the most literal sense, a man who lost his home, his first wife, and his parents within a few years — and who then wrote, at length and with great originality, about early failures of “fit” between an infant and its environment, about the longing for a lost harmony, and about the possibility of a “new beginning.” What we can and cannot responsibly say about the relationship between these two facts is one of the central questions of this meeting.

In England Balint found a home within the Independent tradition of the British Psychoanalytical Society, in conversation — and sometimes disagreement — with Klein, Winnicott, and Fairbairn’s and Guntrip’s object-relational world, and with Lacan, who read him closely. His early paper on primary object love (1937; later reprinted in Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique) argued against Freud’s primary narcissism and for an original, object-directed love between infant and mother. Thrills and Regressions (1959) described two contrasting ways of managing the anxiety of separateness, clinging to objects (ocnophilia) or seeking thrill in the empty spaces between them (philobatism). The Basic Fault (1968) offered a bold account of regression to a level of experience before words and before the Oedipal triangle, and of what the analyst must and must not do when a patient arrives there. From 1950, at the Tavistock Clinic and later at University College Hospital, working with Enid Balint, whom he later married, he led the seminars for general practitioners that gave us The Doctor, His Patient and the Illness (1957) — and the well-known phrase about the doctor as the most frequently used “drug.” Balint was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society when he died, on 31 December 1970.

Two threads make Balint an unusually rewarding subject for psychobiography. The first is his loyalty to Ferenczi. Balint spent decades defending a teacher who had been dismissed by Freud’s inner circle — in particular against Ernest Jones’s claims about Ferenczi’s final illness — and he worked to see the Freud–Ferenczi correspondence and Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary published, a goal achieved only after his death. Those of us who attended our August meeting on Ferenczi will recognize the pattern: a loyal student who stayed with an abandoned teacher, and who then made his own name in a very different place. The second thread is the way that his principal ideas — the fragility of early trust, the harm done by an environment that cannot “fit” the child, the need for a therapist who can tolerate regression without exploiting or rejecting it — and the shape of his life seem to speak to each other. In this meeting we will try to hold both possibilities in view: that Balint’s life shaped his psychoanalytic vision, and that a psychoanalytic vision can also be a way of speaking, obliquely, about what cannot be said directly.

The readings (mandatory and suggested) will be posted here later this week.

The Psychobiography Research and Publication Group of the Psychohistory Forum created the virtual Psychobiography Reading Group in 2023. We meet in alternate months, with a summer break, and we work hard to keep it as a serious psychoanalytic approach to psychobiography. Subsequently, our focus will be on classic works of psychodynamic psychobiography, with the bottom-up approach rather than the one coming from explicit underlying theories. As always, the Group fosters open, respectful dialogue and integrative thinking across disciplines — psychobiography, psychohistory, clinical practice, literature, and the arts. We welcome returning members and newcomers alike.

RSVP is required; confirmation will include Zoom access, with a reminder sent the day before the meeting. Recordings will be available to all who RSVP-ed for this event.

To learn more about our previous meetings of our Psychobiography Reading Group, visit https://psychohistoryforum.com/psychobiography-reading-group/.

We look forward to deepening our knowledge of this psychohistorical approach together, as we probe the lives of fascinating and important people.

If you are interested in joining this group, even if you cannot attend this meeting, please fill out the RSVP form above. Please feel free to contact Inna Rozentsvit at inna.rozentsvit@gmail.com or Paul H. Elovitz at cliospsycheeditor@gmail.com with any questions or clarifications.

Best regards,
Inna and Paul

Inna Rozentsvit, MD, PhD, Associate Editor of Clio’s Psyche and Director/Convenor of the Psychohistory Forum; Founder of NeuroRecovery Solutions, Inc.; Founder & Editor-in-Chief of ORI Academic Press, MindConsiliums, and MindMend Publishing; Programs Director @ the Object Relations Institute, NYC. E-mail: inna.rozentsvit@gmail.com

Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, Historian, Research Psychoanalyst, Online Psychohistory Professor, Psychohistory Forum Director, and Editor, Clio’s Psyche; Author, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (Routledge, 2018); Editor, The Many Roads of the Builders of Psychohistory (ORI Academic Press, 2021); Author/Editor of other books. E-mail: cliospsycheeditor@gmail.com