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.
Ideas
- 1937 developed Primary love
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.
Influence
Lineage
- 1924 analysed by Sándor Ferenczi
Like her husband, Alice Balint finished her analysis with Ferenczi after returning to Budapest.
Affinity
- 1939 collaborated with Michael Balint
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.
- influenced Margaret Mahler
Alice Balint, Mahler's school friend from Budapest, brought her into Ferenczi's circle. With Michael Balint and Therese Benedek she gave Mahler the idea of a mother-child dual unity, which Mahler later developed as symbiosis.
References
- Early Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love1937Evidence for a relation