ABSTRACT
It is both easy, as well as at the same time extremely difficult, to try to reconstruct the interviews on the history of psychoanalysis that I conducted with Dr. Michael Balint on July 22, 1965 and November 8, 1966. I did keep detailed working notes of the time I spent with Balint, and also certain key aspects of the interviews stand out in my mind independently of any written record that I saved. But although I was proceeding then with the hope that everything I was accumulating about early analysis might one day be publishable, as a scholar I did not keep track of the kind of exact details which are apt to make a written account seem journalistically vivid. Unfortunately, I did not write down physical details connected with the setting of my talking with Balint, although I suspect that such material would be helpful for the purposes I have undertaken now.
