ABSTRACT
Balint's work on brief forms of psychotherapy is still relevant to the ongoing debate today on the subject of the status of psychotherapies. The focal therapy workshop was at once a research-action group that used methods of scientific research, a group in charge of the supervision of clinical cases with reference to psychoanalysis. The purpose of the groups was not to describe patients psychopathologies, but to focus on the technique of the practitioner, and on the interactions between patient and practitioner, and by non-analysts more generally. The approach, which Balint positions explicitly as following on from the focal therapy technique, aims to go further in the use of the object-relationship in transference, and its links with the arrival of a sudden clue to interpretation. On the part of the analyst it requires internal inter-disciplinarity, that is to say sufficient interior availability to understand the other's calling, Balint professional ideals and manners of thinking, but without losing one's own identity.
