This fascinating collection explores the life of renowned theorist Michael Balint in his native Budapest. With a Balint revival in mind, Michael Balint and his World: The Budapest Years brings together the work of psychoanalysts, social thinkers, historians, literary scholars, artists and medical doctors who draw on Balint's work in a variety of ways.
The book focuses on Balint's early years in Budapest, where he worked with Sándor Ferenczi and a circle of colleagues, capturing the transformations of psychoanalytic thinking as it happens in a network of living relationships. Tracing creative disagreements as well as collaborations, and setting these exchanges in the climate of scientific, social and cultural developments of the time, Michael Balint and his World: The Budapest Years follows the development of psychoanalytic thinking during these critical times.The book recalls the story of several 'lost children' of the Budapest School and reconstitutes Balint's important early contributions on primary love. It also examines his little-known relationship with Lacan, including the extended discussion of Balint's work by Wladimir Granoff in Lacan's first public seminar in Paris in 1954, published here for the first time.
This important book provides a fresh perspective on Balint's enormous contribution to the field of psychoanalysis and will interest both scholars and clinicians. It will also inspire those interested in clinical practice and the applications of psychoanalysis to the cultural sphere.
About the Author: Judit Szekacs-Weisz, PhD, is a bilingual psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Born and educated (mostly) in Budapest, Hungary, she has taken in the way of thinking and ideas of Ferenczi, the Balints, Hermann, and Rajka as an integral part of a "professional mother tongue". Living and working in a totalitarian world sensitised her to the social and individual aspects of trauma, identity formation and strategies of survival.
Raluca Soreanu is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro. She is the project lead of FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant).
Ivan Ward is the former Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum London, where he worked for 33 years. He is author of a number of books and papers on psychoanalytic theory and the applications of psychoanalysis to socio-cultural issues. He is an honorary research fellow at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.
