In the early 1950s, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint, still a newcomer in London, was asked by Enid Eicholtz, a caseworker and the first secretary of the Family Discussion Bureau (FDB), to help her at the Bureau. 1 Eicholtz became interested in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis while working with dislocated families that she helped find a new home. However, she noticed that these people were mainly interested in talking about 'their personal experiences and relationships' rather than in finding new accommodations. Her conclusion was that 'behind many practical problems were relationship problems-more specifically marital problems-and that these were surprisingly difficult to resolve'. 2 Eicholtz then decided to train in psychoanalysis. She was supervised by the senior psychoanalyst John Rickman. Her engagement with him and other psychoanalysts enabled her to make connections also with Tavistock psychiatrists, some of whom, like John Bowlby and Henry Dicks, helped her establish the FDB. It was there that she met Balint, who very soon became not only her professional partner but also her husband. The two co-designed a psychoanalytically informed training for family counsellors which showed them how analysing the relationship between couples and their counsellors can reveal crucial elements in the problematic relationship between the partners themselves. This new approach to counsellor training (which Balint called research-cum-training), led Enid to establish a new innovative peer group, this time for general practitioners (GPs). Their goal was to create a group where GPs would discuss case studies of a psychosocial nature with their peers.

This paper examines the history of the concept of ‘regression’ as it was perceived by Sandor Ferenczi and some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century. The first part provides a short history of the notion of ‘regression’ from the late nineteenth century to Ferenczi's work in the 1920s and 1930s. The second and third parts of the paper focus on two other thinkers on regression, who worked in Britain, under the influence of the Ferenczian paradigm – the interwar Scottish psychiatrist, Ian D. Suttie; and the British-Hungarian psychoanalyst, and Ferenczi's most important pupil, Michael Balint. Rather than a descriptive term which comes to designate a pathological mental stage, Ferenczi understood ‘regression’ as a much more literal phenomenon. For him, the mental desire to go backwards in time is a universal one, and a consequence of an inevitable traumatic separation from the mother in early childhood, which has some deep personal and cultural implications. The paper aims to show some close affinities between the preoccupation of some psychoanalysts with ‘regression’, and the growing interest in social and cultural aspects of ‘motherhood’ and ‘the maternal role’ in mid-twentieth-century British society.

John Forrester’s book Thinking in Cases does not provide one ultimate definition of what it means to ‘think in cases’, but rather several alternatives: a ‘style of reasoning’ (Hacking), ‘paradigms’ or ‘exemplars’ (Kuhn), and ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein), to mention only a few. But for Forrester, the stories behind each of the figures who suggested these different models for thinking (in cases) are as important as the models themselves. In other words, the question for Forrester is not only what ‘thinking in cases’ is, but also who might be considered a ‘thinker in cases’. Who could serve as a case study for such a thinker? The major candidates that Forrester considers in his book to be ‘thinkers in cases’ are Kuhn, Foucault, Freud, and Winnicott. In what follows, I will argue that one name is missing from this list, as well as from Forrester’s book more generally: Michael Balint. This name is missing not only because Balint was a great ‘thinker in cases’, but also because we have some reasons to believe that Forrester himself thought so and wished to add him to the list. Forrester, I will argue, found in Balint an exemplar for a thinker in cases that combined elements from Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and Foucault’s philosophy of the case-based sciences.

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This article presents and discusses a two-decades-long correspondence between Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott. Alongside closeness and friendship, the letters reveal tensions, disagreement and even rivalry between these two figures on three main levels: personal, cultural and theoretical. The debate can be framed around the question of whether or not the British School of psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1950s – and in which Winnicott and Balint were arguably the most senior figures – was a continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition that developed before World War II by Sandor Ferenczi and the Budapest School. The article argues, however, that there is another meta-theoretical level to the debate between the two: they passionately try to define what psychoanalytic language is, and disagree about its real nature.