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

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.

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

In this paper I ask what an investigation of the Budapest model of supervision may add to our psychoanalytic imagination. The Budapest model confronts us with a number of crucial questions for contemporary psychoanalysis, including the question of envisioning ways of working on the countertransference of the analyst. I discuss the lack of memory that surrounds the Budapest model, and I read it in relation to the unsettling issues it stirs up, including those of authority, horizontality, and the ethics of psychoanalysis. In the Budapest model, supervision can be seen as a form of "double dreaming" or of "dreaming up of a dream". In particular, in drawing on the writings of Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint, I point to some principles behind the Budapest model and to the epistemic, technical, and ethical implications of their ideas. I also work toward a Ferenczian "translation" of the idea of "parallel process".

O estilo epistêmico de Michael Balint: “Grupos Balint”, utopias médicas e o legado da Escola de Psicanálise de Budapeste / The Epistemic Style of Michael Balint: Balint Groups, Medical Utopias and the Legacy of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis

Este artigo analisa a relação entre as ideias teóricas de Michael Balint sobre saúde e doença, sua prática de trabalho em grupo com médicos (“grupos Balint”) e algumas ideias epistemológicas menos conhecidas da Escola de Psicanálise de Budapeste – lar psicanalítico de Balint. Embora Balint tenha começado a explorar o trabalho com grupos nos anos 1920 e 1930 em Budapeste, seu método amadureceu depois de seu exílio na Inglaterra, nos anos 1950. Este artigo baseia-se na rica correspondência de Balint encontrada nos arquivos da Sociedade Britânica de Psicanálise, e em documentos que apreendem a construção dos “grupos Balint”. O objetivo aqui é recuperar a radicalidade de Balint em seu trabalho com médicos, assim como propor uma genealogia desta radicalidade. Em primeira instância, reconstruímos o clima cultural e político de Budapeste nos anos 1920 e 1930. Em um segundo momento, nos concentramos nas ideias de Sándor Ferenczi sobre epistemologia e sobre a relação entre psicanálise e medicina. Em seguida, discutimos o lugar da contratransferência na Escola de Psicanálise de Budapeste. Finalmente, abordamos as particularidades do encontro entre psicanálise e medicina tal como se deu na Inglaterra, nos anos 1950.(AU)

The article analyses the relation between the thereotical ideas on health and illness of Michael Balint, his practice of working in groups with medical doctors (“Balint groups”) and some lesser known epistemological ideas of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis – Balint’s psychoanalytic home. While Balint started his explorations with groups in the 20s and 30s in Budapest, his method ma-tured after his exile in Great Britain, in the 50s. Grounding the analysis in the rich correspondence of Balint, found in Archive of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and in documents that capture the emergence of “Balint groups”, the article aims to show the radical nature of Balint’s work with medical doctos, as well as to propose a genealogy of this radical quality. Firstly, we reconstrue the cultural and political climate in Budapest in the 20s and 30s. Secondly, we focus on Sándor Ferenczi’s epistemological ideas about the relation between psychoanalysis and medicine. Thirdly, we discuss the place of countertransference in the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis. Finally, we approach the particularities of the encounter between psychoanalysis and medicine, as it occurres in Great Britain, in the 50s.(AU)

The Psychic Life of Fragments: Splitting from Ferenczi to Klein.

The present paper starts from the reflection that there is a curious "phenomenological gap" in psychoanalysis when it comes to processes of splitting and to describing the "life" of psychic fragments resulting from processes of splitting. In simpler terms, we are often in a position to lack a precise understanding of what is being split and how the splitting occurs. I argue that although Melanie Klein's work is often engaged when talking of splitting (particularly through discussions on identification, projection and projective identification), there are some important phenomenological opacities in her construction. I show that by orchestrating a dialogue between Melanie Klein and Sándor Ferenczi, we arrive at a fuller and more substantive conception of psychic splitting and of the psychic life of fragments which are the result of splitting. This is even more meaningful because there are some unacknowledged genealogical connections between Ferenczian concepts and Kleinian concepts, which I here explore. While with Klein we remain in the domain of "good" and "bad" objects-polarised objects which are constantly split and projected-with Ferenczi we are able to also give an account of complicated forms of imitation producing psychic fragments and with a "dark" side of identification, which he calls "identification with the aggressor". While attempting to take steps toward imagining a dialogue between Klein and Ferenczi, I note a certain silent "Ferenczian turn" in a late text by Melanie Klein, "On the Development of Mental Functioning", written in 1958. In particular, I reflect on her reference to some "terrifying figures" of the psyche, which cannot be accounted for simply as the persecutory parts of the super-ego but are instead more adequately read as more enigmatic and more primitive psychic fragments, resulting from processes of splitting.

Something Was Lost in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Ferenczian Reading.

Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) brought a lot of new possibilities to psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of losses. While I recognize the importance of the death drive as a metapsychological construct, I argue that the first thing that went missing with the arrival of this groundbreaking Freudian text is the theorization of the ego instincts or the self-preservative drives. Freud never articulated some plausible inheritors of the ego instincts. I follow the Budapest School, and especially the voice of Sándor Ferenczi, for addressing this loss. The second thing that went missing after Beyond the Pleasure Principle is our openness in thinking through repetition. With the seductive formulation of the "daemonic" repetition in this 1920 text, our theoretical imagination around repetition seems to have been affected. I draw on the work of Sándor Ferenczi for exploring new forms of repetition. Finally, I offer a Ferenczian re-reading of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, which I see as crucial in the process of pluralizing our thinking on repetition.