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.
Development
1937
developed by Alice Balint
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.
In Early Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love (1937)
1937
introduced by Michael Balint
At the Budapest meeting of 1937 Balint gathers his own findings and those of Alice Balint and Imre Hermann into one thesis: a primary, or primitive, object love comes before any narcissism, every child must pass through it, and all later relations keep traces of it. He collected the papers on it in Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique (1952).
In Early Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love (1937);Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique (1952)
Relations
- 1937 opposes Primary narcissism
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.
- 1937 developed by Alice Balint
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.
- 1937 introduced by Michael Balint
At the Budapest meeting of 1937 Balint gathers his own findings and those of Alice Balint and Imre Hermann into one thesis: a primary, or primitive, object love comes before any narcissism, every child must pass through it, and all later relations keep traces of it. He collected the papers on it in Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique (1952).
- 1968 gave rise to Basic fault
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.
- gave rise to 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.
Works
- 1937
Early Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love
Balint presented this report at the first symposium of the second Four Countries Conference, in Budapest in May 1937. Its subject is the sharply conflicting theories of the earliest stages of mental life, which had grown into almost 'local' views in London, Vienna and Budapest. Balint holds that the clinical material is the same everywhere and that the disagreement comes from different standpoints, expectations and terminology. As common ground he takes Freud's description of infantile love in 'Female Sexuality' (1931): boundless, exclusive, insatiable and ambivalent. The London school, as Joan Riviere presents it, explains these traits by an innate oral sadism rooted in the death drive, by early projection and introjection, and by anxieties about bad objects. Robert Waelder's Viennese critique rightly disputes London's evidence and concepts, but it leaves the children's greed and hostility unexplained. The Budapest group (Alice Balint, Imre Hermann and Balint himself, following Ferenczi) treats the recurring formal features of the analytic situation as transference and as traces of the earliest experiences. Each member supports this from a different field: comparative pedagogy, primate studies and sexual theory. Balint reports that, deep in analysis, patients come to want small, primitive gratifications such as a kind word or being touched. When these are refused, the patients show despair, hatred and fear of retaliation. When they are granted, the patients fall into an addiction-like bliss that collapses at the first frustration. The wishes themselves are always aimed at an object, and when they are met at the right time and in the right measure they produce no more than a quiet sense of well-being. Two further lines of work point the same way. Hermann studied the instinct to cling, which develops in the human infant because it is torn from its mother's body too early. Alice Balint described the mother's equal libidinal share in the mother–child unity, and an archaic, naively egoistic love that assumes the partner's wishes are the same as one's own. From these lines of work Balint draws the concept of primary object love. It is an early phase that cannot be skipped and is not tied to any erogenous zone. Its aim is passive: to be loved and gratified without giving anything in return. Narcissism and active object love grow from it as detours. London and Vienna are both right and both wrong. London studied only the vehement reactions to frustration and missed the quiet experience of satisfaction. Vienna could explain the infantile phenomena only with ad hoc hypotheses. Both cling to the hypothesis of primary narcissism, which Balint names as the source of their confusion of tongues. Primary narcissism, he argues, is a negative concept reached by extrapolation and defined by 'not yet', and the play between 'already' and 'not yet' protects it from every objection. It has never been observed clinically: what appears is only secondary narcissism, mixed with remnants of damaged object love. It also fits poorly with everyday facts, such as the hypersensitivity and insatiability of narcissistic people, or a crying newborn who calms when picked up. Balint notes converging work by Glover, Federn, Isakower, Müller-Braunschweig and E. P. Hoffmann. He answers the objections that the infant knows no external world and that sucking and grasping are mere adaptations. He warns that the logically simplest state need not be the original one, as biology learned with the amoeba. Primary object love is also an extrapolation, but a shorter and testable one, and Balint offers it as a working hypothesis for the study of infants and psychotics.
- 1952
Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique
Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique collects papers Michael Balint wrote between 1930 and 1952, the earlier ones in Budapest under the influence of Sándor Ferenczi and the later ones in Britain, together with a paper by Alice Balint on the child's love for its mother and the mother's love for her child. The first part revises the psychoanalytic account of early development. Balint questions Freud's primary narcissism and the picture of libido unfolding through fixed pregenital organizations, and argues that the infant is related to objects from the start. Its earliest relation is a passive, archaic object love: the wish to be loved and gratified unconditionally, without effort or return, by an environment it takes for granted. Narcissism, autoerotism, sadism and hate then appear as secondary formations, consequences of and defences against the frustration of this primary love. The same view shapes his account of adult genital love, in which genital satisfaction is fused with pregenital tenderness and with regard for the partner as a person whose interests become one's own. The second part turns to technique. Balint treats the analytic situation as a relationship between two people, in which the analyst's behaviour and personality help shape the transference, and asks for a theory that takes both into account. Building on Ferenczi's technical experiments, he describes how, when regression in treatment reaches the level of primitive object relations, a patient may give up long-standing defensive attitudes and begin to love again in a less anxious and less suspicious way. He calls this phase the "new beginning" and regards it as the final goal of treatment and the mark of a completed analysis. Further papers deal with character analysis, ego strength and its education, transference and countertransference, the changing aims of analytic technique and the termination of analysis. The collection prepared Balint's later work on regression and the basic fault and is a principal statement of the Budapest school's contribution to object-relations theory.
- 1968
The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression
Michael Balint's book, published in London in 1968, distils four decades of clinical work into an account of why some analyses stall and what the analyst can do when they do. It begins from an observation: with certain patients, at certain moments, interpretations stop working as interpretations. They are heard as attacks or seductions, or do not register at all; the analyst's most casual words and gestures take on enormous weight; and a patient who is not understood does not become angry but sinks into emptiness and futility. For Balint these are signs that the work has left the level on which Freud's technique was built. Part I sets out three areas of the mind. The Oedipal area is triangular, organised by conflicts that interpretation can resolve, and conducted in ordinary adult language. The area of the basic fault is strictly two-person; what operates there is not a conflict but a deficiency, a fault in the geological sense of a structural flaw, and conventional words are unreliable in it. It originates in a marked lack of fit, in the earliest phases, between the infant's needs and the care and affection available. The area of creation contains no external object, only 'pre-objects'; it is the place of artistic and scientific creation, of insight, and of the first phases of falling ill and of spontaneous recovery, and its processes cannot be hurried from outside. Part II replaces Freud's primary narcissism, which Balint finds contradictory and unproductive, with primary love: an original relationship to an undifferentiated environment, a harmonious interpenetrating mix-up comparable to our relation to the air, in which the environment is simply taken for granted. Objects with firm contours, and with them narcissism, hate, ocnophilia and philobatism, emerge only once this harmony is disturbed. Adult love tries to restore it through the work of turning an indifferent object into a cooperative partner. Part III describes the gulf between the analyst and the 'child in the patient', and the problem of language: every analytic school teaches its patients its own idiom. Balint weighs three responses to regression. Classical technique keeps the work at the Oedipal level and so depends on careful selection of patients. Consistent, confident interpretation, associated with the Kleinian school, teaches the patient the analyst's language at the price of an inequality between an all-knowing analyst and a weak patient. The management of regression, associated with Winnicott, risks an unending spiral of demands. The cautionary case is Ferenczi's late 'grand experiment', which Balint watched at close range, in which Ferenczi tried to meet one patient's every need. Part IV, the heart of the book, distinguishes two forms of therapeutic regression. Benign regression aims at recognition: the patient needs an environment that tacitly consents to be used, a trusting, unsuspecting ('arglos') atmosphere forms, and the regression ends in a 'new beginning', the discovery of freer ways of relating. Malignant regression aims at gratification through the analyst's action: trust repeatedly breaks down, desperate clinging appears, and ever-renewed demands of suspicious intensity drift towards addiction-like states; Balint links it with severe hysteria. Because regression happens inside a relationship, its form depends on the analyst's response as well as on the patient. Balint reads the Freud–Ferenczi disagreement through this distinction: Freud generalised from malignant cases, Ferenczi from benign ones. Part V draws the technical consequences. At the level of the basic fault the analyst should avoid becoming a mighty, knowing, omnipotent object, whether through incessant transference interpretation, through gratification, or through promises to see the patient through. The analyst should let the patient use them as a primary substance is used, the way water carries a swimmer, and should provide time and a quiet setting in which the patient can find a personal way to objects. During the regression interpretation is used sparingly and acting-out is accepted as communication, to be worked through once the patient is back at the Oedipal level. The fault itself cannot be analysed away: at best it heals with a scar, and a successful treatment includes mourning for the original defect.
See also
People
References
- Early Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love1937Evidence for a relation
- Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique1952Evidence for a relation
- The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression1968Evidence for a relation