The work of Michael Balint, a leading object-relations theorist, has been neglected since his death in 1970. This book re-establishes his major contributions to psychoanalysis.

Michael Balint is above all known for the "Balint Groups", which came to be a generic term for groups involved with the training of doctors and caregivers in the patient-caregiver relationship. Despite this, the origin and full import of his work has been somewhat overlooked. Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman provides us with a concise account of how reading Balint has enriched psychoanalytic theory and its practice by broadening the indications for the psychoanalytic cure and the debate on psychotherapies and the training to the professional care-giver-patient relation. Reading Michael Balint: A pragmatic clinician shows how Balint must be considered as one of the major figures in the British Independent School of psychoanalysis, along with Winnicott and Fairbairn. Oppenheim-Gluckman argues that his ideas, and the implications of his work with groups of medical practitioners, have remained hugely influential within modern psychoanalysis and training in medical psychology. Reading Michael Balint presents a clear overview of the main tenets of his work. It provides a fresh perspective on Balint’s contribution and its importance for modern object relations theory and practice and brief psychotherapy. It will be an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, counsellors and trainee psychoanalysts and doctors. Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and has a doctorate in fundamental psychopathology and practises in Paris. She is a member of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne, the Société Médicale Balint, and a Balint Group "leader". She has published several books and a number of articles in psychoanalytic, medical, psychiatric and political-cultural journals.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1965 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

In this volume, Michael Balint, who over the years made a sustained and brilliant contribution to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, develops the concept of the 'basic fault' in the bio-psychology structure of every individual, involving in varying degree both mind and body. Balint traces the origins of the basic fault to the early formative period, during which serious discrepancies arise between the needs of the individual and the care and nurture available. These Discrepancies create a kind of deficiency state. On the basis of this concept, Balint assumes the existence of a specific area of the mind in shich all the processes have an exclusively two-person structure consisting of the individual and the individual's primary object. Its dynamic force, originating from the basic fault has the overwhelming aim of 'putting things right'. This area is contrasted with two others: the area of the Oedipus complex, which has essentially a triangular structure comprising the individual and two of his objects, and whose characteristic dynamism has the form of a conflict; and the area of creation, in which there are no objects in the proper sense, and whose characteristic force is the urge to create, to produce

Michael Balint’s work grew out of a desire to analyze the doctor-patient relationship and improve diagnosis and treatment, and is now known and implemented internationally. In The Theory and Practice of Balint Group Work Heide Otten presents a practical guide to Balint groups and their relevance to clinicians in the modern world of internet diagnoses, distant patients and teams of specialists. The book begins with a history of the therapeutic relationship and its influence on the development of Balint’s work. Otten demonstrates how the sessions work, and goes on to look at the practical aspects of Balint group work with various professional and student groups, with participants of different cultural backgrounds and nationalities, and internationally. The requirements for leading a Balint group are then explored, and the book concludes with research findings and a look at how the practice can be extended to other professional groups. Case material from the author’s own work is included throughout, and suggestions for additional creative elements such as sculpting, role play and psychodrama are also featured. The Theory and Practice of Balint Group Work is an essential guide for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, counsellors and medical practitioners and theorists coming to group work for the first time or utilising Balint’s ideas in their day to day practice. It will also appeal to others working in the helping professions seeking to strengthen the therapeutic relationship.

Contents: Part One - Thrills; Part Two - Regressions; Part Three: Appendix; Part Four - Conclusions. This book includes the paper "Distance in Time and Space" by Enid Balint.

This book explores the life and theories of Michael Balint, who kept alive Ferenczi's analytic traditions in Budapest and brought them to London, where they became a vital part of the Independent Group's theory and practice. Balint's theoretical understanding of regression, 'new beginnings', 'basic fault', as well as his profound impact on medicine, are all described. The work in the Balint groups by general practitioners, psychiatrists, and physicians are explored. Whole person and psychosomatic medicine, championed by Balint, is contrasted with today's more compartmentalised approach to medicine, including the increasing separation of the GP from the family. In the second part of the book Dr Sklar reflects on the complex tasks involved in psychodynamic assessment. Vignettes illustrate the importance of understanding the forces in family dynamics, the value of an early memory and a dream, and the sexual life of the patient. The author argues that Balint's ideas are of particular significance to us today, in our world of quick fixes and the overspecialisation of medicine.

Contributing Authors Franz Alexander, Michael Balint, William Gillespie, And Others.

The Hungarian-born historian and concert pianist shows how every time America moves away from its founding principles it moves in the direction where a fantasy of "social justice" is pursued through ever-greater government control.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.