Michael Balint's Word Trail: The ‘Ocnophil’, the ‘Philobat’ and Creative Dyads

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss how Michael Balint arrived at the concepts of ‘ocnophil’ and ‘philobat’, which refer to two kinds of object relations. I look at the correspondence between Balint and the classical scholar David Eichholz. The two crafted these words together in a passionate exchange of letters. By recognizing the importance of creative dyads in psychoanalysis, we gain more insight into the creation of psychoanalytic knowledge beyond the frame of individual authorship. I read the collaboration between Balint and Eichholz in its historical and theoretical context, particularly in relation to the Budapest School of psychoanalysis, where intellectual collaborations had an important place. The Budapest School was Michael Balint's first home, and it shaped his epistemic and psychoanalytic style. Balint constructed his psychoanalytic theories in a spirit of openness, maintaining a commitment to conversations between psychoanalysis and other disciplines.

Proving nothing and illustrating much: The case of Michael Balint

“…British psychoanalysts before and after World War II were very much influenced by the early 20th-century Budapest School of psychoanalysis, established by the influential psychoanalysts Sandor Ferenczi and his successors, Michael Balint more than anyone else. Indeed, as this ‘knowledge in transit’ (Secord, 2004) between Budapest and London is now well documented (Bar-Haim, 2019; Erős, Szekacs-Weisz, and Robinson, 2013; Soreanu, 2018, 2019), it should come as no surprise that Winnicott and Balint were part of the same tradition of thinking in cases.…”

Supervision for our times: countertransference and the rich legacy of the Budapest School

“…With the clinic, Friday meetings became regular, and they brought together Sándor Ferenczi, Alice and Michael Balint, Vilma Kovács, and also Endre Almássy, Robert Bak, Lilly Hajdu, Imre Hermann, István Hollós, Kata Lévy, Edit Ludowyk-Gyömröi, Sigmund Pfeiffer, Géza Róheim, and Lilian Rotter. Senior analysts gave lectures, and they were followed by a seminar in psychoanalytic technique, led by Vilma Kovács (Soreanu, 2019).…”

“…In their essay "Why Psychoanalysis Has No History", Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Murray Schwartz (2012) comment on a regression of psychoanalytic history-writing into biographic writing, memorializing, or criticizing Freud. What is creating this proliferation of fragmented stories is the fact of not acknowledging the trauma history of psychoanalysis (Soreanu, 2019). The trauma relates in important ways to the different waves of migration of psychoanalysts before and during the First and Second World Wars, mostly to England and to the Americas, and to its deep consequences in terms of dislocation and communal fragmentation (Young-Bruehl and Schwartz, 2012, p. 140).…”