Concept
Basic fault
Michael Balint's term (1968) for a flaw laid down very early in the structure of the personality by a lack of fit between the infant's needs and the care it received. Patients feel it not as a conflict but as something missing or wrong in themselves, which only another person can put right. He set this two-person, pre-verbal level, where ordinary words lose their force, between the three-person level of the Oedipus complex and a one-person level of creation.
Read more- Introduced by
- Michael Balint
- Key works
- 1
- Related
- Primary love
introduced by
- Michael Balint 1968 The Basic Fault (1968), Balint's last book, names a level of the mind below the Oedipal conflict: a two-person relation in which the patient feels something missing rather than a conflict, and in which ordinary interpretation loses its hold. He sets it between the three-person Oedipal level and the one-person level of creation.
derives from
- Primary love 1968 The basic fault grows out of Balint's earlier theory of primary love. It is the mark left when the early relation between the infant and its surroundings, which primary love describes, falls short of what the infant needed.