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.