On Michael Balint, Cases and Countertransference’

The article looks at the place of cases in the psychoanalytic universe of Michael Balint, while giving special attention to his work Balint groups. I argue that the case was at the heart of Balint’s work of orchestrating a complicated and creative encounter between psychoanalysis and medicine. I evoke Balint’s explorations and his formative years in Budapest, in the 1920s and 1930s, where he was greatly influenced by the epistemological ideas of Sándor Ferenczi. I discuss Ferenczi’s lesser known idea of “utraquism” of the sciences, and his medical utopia, which puts psychoanalysis at the centre. I also look at the place of countertransference in the theories and practices of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis. These early elaborations on countertransference constituted “the case” as a particular kind of epistemic unit and produced some mutations in terms of the contexts where psychoanalysis can be imagined to work creatively.