Michael Balint - The Three Stages

The Three Stages

Balint 'took an early interest in the mother-infant relationship...a key paper on "Primary Object-Love" dates from 1937'. Thereafter, developing an idea of John Rickman, he argued that 'mental function is quite different, and needs to be described differently, in three-person and two-person relationships, and different in creative activity alone'. Lacan wrote (almost approvingly) that 'Michael Balint has analysed in a thoroughly penetrating way the intricate interaction of theory and technique in the genesis of a new conception of analysis... the catchphrase, borrowed from Rickman, of a "two-body psychology"'. On that basis, Balint thereafter explored the idea of what he called '"the basic fault": this was that there was often the experience in the early two-person relationship that something was wrong or missing, and this carried over into the Oedipal period (age 2-5)'.

By 1968, then, Balint had 'distinguished three levels of experience, each with its particular ways of relating, its own ways of thinking, and its own appropriate therapeutic procedures'.

'Psychoanalysis begins at level 3 - the level at which a person is capable of a three-sided experience...primarily the Oedipal problems between self, mother, and father'. By contrast, 'the area of the Basic Fault is characterised by a very peculiar exclusively two-person relationship'; while a 'third area is characterised by the fact that there are no external objects in it' - level number 1.

'Therapeutic failure is attributed by Balint to the analyst's inability to "click in" to the mute needs of the patient who has descended to the level of the basic fault'; and he maintained that 'the basic fault can only be overcome if the patient is allowed to regress to a state of oral dependence on the analyst...and experience a new beginning'.