Thrills and Regressions

Thrills and Regressions (1959), Michael Balint's third book, begins with an everyday pleasure: the excitement people seek on funfair swings, switchbacks and roundabouts, and in risky sports. From it Balint builds a theory of the earliest object relations and of regression in analysis. He defines a thrill by three elements. There is awareness of a real external danger, a deliberate exposure to it, and a confident hope that it can be survived and that one will return safely. People respond to such situations in opposite ways, and from this Balint derives two basic attitudes, for which he coined the terms ocnophilia and philobatism. For the ocnophil, objects are safe and the spaces between them are horrid and empty. The ocnophil clings to objects, needs to be near them, feels anxious on leaving them and is ambivalent towards them. For the philobat, open spaces are friendly expanses and objects are unpredictable hazards. The philobat relies on their own skills and keeps a distance from objects. Balint follows the two attitudes through aggressivity and auto-erotism, love and hate, and reality testing, and into people's relation to ideas. He argues that each attitude rests on an illusion. To explain why both persist, he posits an earlier state of primary love. This is a harmonious mix-up of the individual and the environment, in which there are no separate objects yet, and it is more like a world of substances such as water or air than of bounded things. It may even be a prenatal state. Inevitable frustrations and separations destroy this harmony, and firm objects emerge. Ocnophilia and philobatism then appear as two secondary reactions to that trauma. Here Balint revises his own earlier view: clinging to the analyst is no longer an expression of primary love but a defence against the fear of being dropped. The second part of the book turns these ideas on the analytic situation, and also reads flying dreams and Bertram Lewin's dream screen in their terms. Balint describes patients who must get up from the couch, and others who only slowly learn to close their eyes and turn inward. The analyst, he argues, should become part of a friendly environment for the regressed patient rather than a demanding object. He criticises the theory and technique of his time as biased towards ocnophilia. Interpreting everything as transference makes the analyst an object that is always offered to be clung to. The patient may then introject an idealised analyst in place of the old internal objects and acquire an "efficient shell" that equips them for life but narrows what they can feel. An appendix gathers short notes on related themes, and a chapter by Enid Balint, "Distance in Space and Time", completes the book. The book stands between Balint's earlier papers on primary object-love and The Basic Fault (1968). There he placed the basic fault between primary love and the two attitudes, and drew the distinction between benign and malignant regression.