Michael Balint

Michael Balint (Hungarian: Bálint Mihály, pronounced [ˈbaːlint ˈmihaːj]; 3 December 1896 in Budapest – 31 December 1970 in London) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst who spent most of his adult life in England. He was a proponent of the Object Relations school.

Balint was born Mihály Maurice Bergsmann, the son of a practising physician in Budapest. It was against his father's will that he changed his name to Bálint Mihály. He also changed religion, from Judaism to Unitarian Christianity. During World War I Bálint served at the front, first in Russia, then in the Dolomites. He completed his medical studies in Budapest in 1918. On the recommendation of his future wife, Alice Székely-Kovács, Bálint read Sigmund Freud's "Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie" (1905) and "Totem und Tabu". He also began attending the lectures of Sándor Ferenczi, who in 1919 became the world's first university professor of psychoanalysis.

Bálint married Alice Székely-Kovács and about 1920 the couple moved to Berlin, where Bálint worked in the biochemical laboratory of Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883–1970), who won the Nobel Prize in 1931. His wife worked in a folklore museum. Bálint now worked on his doctorate in biochemistry, while also working half time at the Berlin Institute of psychoanalysis. Both he and his wife Alice in this period were educated in psychoanalysis.

In 1924 the Bálints returned to Budapest, where he soon assumed a leading role in Hungarian psychoanalysis. During the 1930s the political conditions in Hungary made the teaching of psychotherapy practically impossible, and they emigrated to London in 1938, settling in Manchester, England, in early 1939, where Bálint became Clinical Director of the Child Guidance Clinic. Here Alice died, leaving Bálint with their son John. In 1944 Bálint remarried, but the relationship soon ended, although they were not divorced until 1952. In 1944 his parents, about to be arrested by the Nazis in Hungary, committed suicide. That year Bálint moved from Manchester to London, where he was attached to the and began learning about group work from W.R. Bion; he also obtained the Master of Science degree in psychology.

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