Concept
New beginning
Michael Balint's term, from 1932–1934, for a phase that appears towards the end of a deep enough analysis: the patient, having partly regressed, starts again to seek simple, object-directed gratifications in the relation to the analyst, and from there finds new, less defended ways of loving. Balint saw it as one of the essential mechanisms of cure.
Development
1935
Michael Balint introduced by
In his Lucerne congress paper of 1934, printed in 1935, Balint names the new beginning: towards the end of deep analyses patients again seek simple, pleasurable gratifications, all of them aimed at an object, and he counts this as an essential mechanism of cure.
Relations
- 1935 introduced by Michael Balint
In his Lucerne congress paper of 1934, printed in 1935, Balint names the new beginning: towards the end of deep analyses patients again seek simple, pleasurable gratifications, all of them aimed at an object, and he counts this as an essential mechanism of cure.
Works
- 1935
The Final Goal of Psycho-Analytic Treatment
Michael Balint read this paper at the International Psychoanalytical Congress at Lucerne in August 1934, and it appeared the following year. He asks whether clinical experience alone, rather than a philosophical, moral or biological ideal of health, can define the point towards which an analysis naturally tends. He starts from re-analyses and difficult cases, which show the obstacles to cure more plainly than smooth ones, and from an observation: in deep analyses the final months bring almost no new unconscious material, yet that is when patients actually get well. Judged against this, the 'classical', structural definitions, all of them Freud's (making the unconscious conscious, lifting the infantile amnesia, overcoming the resistances), are neither necessary nor sufficient. The 'romantic', affective ones are too general or too narrow: abreaction of strangulated affects, the full reliving of the Oedipal relation (Ferenczi and Rank), abreaction of the birth trauma (Rank), the working-off of the repetition factor (Vilma Kovács), and orgastic potency (Reich). Balint develops the 'new beginning' he had described at Wiesbaden in 1932. Near the end of treatment, patients revive long-abandoned infantile wishes and seek to have them gratified. At first they do so timidly, then with an addictive passion. If this is mishandled, it turns into insatiable demands and an inflated narcissism. If patient and analyst persevere, it gives way to a realistic object relation. Because these wishes are always directed at an object, Balint turns to Ferenczi's theory of the erotic sense of reality. He argues that every drive is object-bound from the first and has a passive aim, to be loved and satisfied, which lasts throughout life. Autoerotism and narcissism, like active object love, are detours that frustration imposes. The anal-sadistic and phallic phases are artefacts of uncomprehending upbringing, not normal stages. Neurosis therefore always has a real cause in the environment. Balint presses this point against the stress on structure and constitution in the analysis of his day, taking Melanie Klein's The Psycho-Analysis of Children as his example. The final goal of treatment, then, is that the patient dare to begin loving anew. What must begin again is object love itself, not particular partial drives, and the analyst helps by noticing and protecting these tentative beginnings. Balint admits that patients who can only demand to be loved remain beyond his technique. He closes with the motto 'less sadism and more love'.
See also
People
References
- The Final Goal of Psycho-Analytic Treatment1935 Evidence for a relation