https://www.karnacbooks.com/Author.asp?AID=18381
This is the first of two volumes, 「Michael Balint and his World: The Budapest Years」（2023) and Michael Balint and his World: The London Years.
Ferenczi, who remained single for a very long time, lived in a hotel on a boulevard of Pest. The Hotel Royal was nothing like the usual bourgeois home. After delivering his informal teaching in his hotel room, he received his colleagues at the café in the evening. It was in this atmosphere that Bálint received his “psychoanalytic education” over snacks at a café table. They spoke about Sándor’s “great experiment”, which is how Michael referred to Ferenczi’s encounters with his patient R.N. (Elizabeth Severn) and the difficulties with this analysis. (Judit Szekacs-Weisz, 2023, Chap 2)
For me, one of Bálint’s most significant messages is not to be scared of regression, but to work with it as a partner, which may lead to a new beginning. Jumping into the sea (evoking Ferenczi’s Thalassa), crossing the waters and always staying confident in them, is an important aspect of the psychoanalytic cure. Not getting hung up on the structures of ego psychology but exploring the unconscious in the company of the analyst, in a deep transference, on a journey which is also a renewal of life. All of this takes courage, and Bálint had quite a lot. (ibid, Chap 2)
To demonstrate Michael’s independence of mind, let me add an anecdote: while he was a visiting professor in Cincinnati, during a supervision, he put his hand gently on a presenter’s folder thus suppressing dependence on the pre-existing text and opening the space to association, to freedom. This should remain an indelible symbolic gesture in psychoanalytic history. It recalls a model of supervision conceived by his mentor Sándor Ferenczi as a pursuit of personal analysis with the same training analyst, on the couch. （ibid, Chap 2)
