Person
Alice Balint
Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist of the Budapest school, Michael Balint's first wife. Analysed with him first by Hanns Sachs and then by Ferenczi, she wrote on the mother–infant relation and child rearing, and her view of the mother's love as the infant's first object relation fed into their shared idea of primary love; she died in Manchester months after their emigration in 1939.
- Born
- 1898
- Died
- 1939
- Known for
- Primary love
- Influenced
- Margaret Mahler
analysed by
- Hanns Sachs 1921 Alice Balint was analysed in Berlin at the same time as her husband.
- Sándor Ferenczi 1924 Like her husband, Alice Balint finished her analysis with Ferenczi after returning to Budapest.
developed
- Primary love 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.
collaborated with
- Michael Balint 1939 Balint presents his work on early object relations as converging with Alice Balint's and Imre Hermann's, reached by separate paths. In 1939, from Manchester, the couple published a joint paper asking whether transference is the patient's work alone or whether the analyst's behaviour shares in it.