Concept
Primary love
Michael Balint's name for the infant's earliest relation to its world: not a self-absorbed narcissism but a wish, directed from the start at the environment, to be loved and cared for without having to give anything in return. He held this phase to be unavoidable and every later relation to carry traces of it; in treatment it shows when a patient, near the end of a deep analysis, can again expect simple, unconditional gratification from the analyst.
- Introduced by
- Michael Balint
- Key works
- 3
opposes
- Primary narcissism 1937 Balint puts primary object love in the place Freud's theory gave to primary narcissism. What can be studied at the start of life is the child's primary relation to objects, and the narcissism seen in the clinic is secondary, mixed with remains of a mutilated object love.
developed by
- Alice Balint 1937 Michael Balint names Alice Balint's research, with Imre Hermann's and his own, as one of three independent lines of thought whose results support each other and together make up the thesis of a primary object love.
gave rise to
- Basic fault 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.
- Symbiotic phase Mahler owed the idea of a mother-infant dual unity, which became her symbiotic phase, to the Balints and to Therese Benedek. The link to the Balints' primary love is therefore one of origin; the two concepts are not the same.