Enid Balint lecture 2021 - Revisiting before I was I

Before I was I, the collection of Enid Balint’s papers edited by Michael Parsons and Juliet Mitchell, was published in 1993. In this year’s Enid Balint Lecture, Michael Parsons will look back at this book and reflect on the experience of rereading it almost 30 years later.

What does it tell us about Enid as a clinician and as a theorist? How individual is she, and how much does she represent an analytic tradition? Looked at from today’s perspective, do her ideas stand the test of time, or have they taken on fresh and deeper meaning than when she wrote her book?

The speaker for the 26th Enid Balint Lecture will be Michael Parsons, a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the French Psychoanalytic Association.

The respondent will be Andrew Balfour, chief executive of Tavistock Relationships, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist trained to work with couples and individuals.

The Enid Balint Lecture will be of interest to individual, group, family and couple psychotherapists and counsellors. It memorialises the celebrated psychoanalyst and founder of the Family Discussion Bureau, which was the first incarnation of the institution now known as Tavistock Relationships and has been one of the highlights of the year at Tavistock Relationships for more than two decades. It will be taking place for the first time this year on Zoom.