“Balint Groups” and the Patient-Doctor Relationship: The Social History of a Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Medical Sciences (360G-Wellcome-200347_Z_15_Z)

The project studies the emergence of "Balint groups", initiated by the medically trained psychoanalyst Michael Balint in the 1950s. In the groups, psychoanalysts encountered medical doctors to discuss the latter’s difficulties with their patients. This encounter has unexplored consequences for the understanding of illness and the formation of medical doctors. I propose a multi-method social history of "Balint groups" and I ask two questions: how can we understand this complex psychoanalysis-medicine conversation and what does this case have to say about what psychoanalysis can offer to medicine, with respect to making sense of illness? The project has four dimensions of research: theoretical, examining Balint’s innovative relational conception of illness; historical, analysing the importance of Balint’s embeddedness in the Budapest School of psychoanalysis; epistemological, looking at the forms of boundary-work between psychoanalysis and medicine that characterised the emergence of Balint groups and reflecting on the collective and transdisciplinary knowledge produced in the groups; ethical, discussing the non-hierarchical modes of relationality in the groups. The project relies on archival research and brings to light the novel material contained in the Balint Archive, held by the British Psychoanalytical Society since 2014. The research will also involve in-depth interviewing of psychoanalysts and medical doctors.