Michael Balint justified the idea of a “new beginning” within the framework of his basic fault theory by treating it as a therapeutic return to the point of earliest relational failure, followed by a corrective emotional experience that could restart development.
Here’s the structure of his justification:
1. Basic fault and regression as precondition
- For Balint, the basic fault is not just a trauma but a developmental lacuna — a gap in the early formative relationship, often before the oedipal stage.
- He believed that some patients could only make lasting changes if therapy enabled them to regress to that earliest “fault-line” in the personality.
- Such regression was not inherently pathological — it could be therapeutic if the analyst provided a stable, non-intrusive, responsive presence. This became the “regression to dependence” model.
2. New beginning as “re-beginning of growth”
- The new beginning is the stage when the regression has reached the level of the basic fault, and the patient experiences an environment (in the analytic relationship) that repairs what was missing.
- It is not about erasing history, but about reinstating the developmental momentum that was lost.
- Balint argued that if the early lack was truly addressed, psychic structures could reorganize in a more integrated way, making possible a qualitatively different life trajectory.
3. Guardrails and risks
- He was explicit about the dangers: not all regression is reparative — there’s a “malignant regression” where dependency becomes endless or destructive.
- The analyst must distinguish between fruitful dependence (leading to new beginning) and parasitic dependence (leading to therapeutic impasse).
- In practice, this meant tolerating the patient’s primitive needs without smothering or controlling — a stance he partly inherited from Ferenczi’s emphasis on analyst tenderness, but moderated to avoid enmeshment.
4. Philosophical-ethical subtext
- For Balint, “new beginning” is an ethical wager: believing that relational trust can be built where it never existed before, and that human development is not strictly linear or irreversibly fixed.
- This aligns with a more hopeful, reparative vision of psychoanalysis, in contrast to purely conflict-driven or fate-bound models.
If you like, I can also map Balint’s new beginning to your earlier remark about Klein’s apology and decolonial apology, showing why — for Balint — the absence of such an act leaves people stranded in a loop, and why the new beginning is a kind of belated but real “apology enacted in practice” rather than in words. That would make the ethical resonance more visible.
