It is with great sorrow that we communicate that the Swedish/Danish psychoanalyst Stefan Bálint died on August 25, 2019, after a bicycle accident earlier in the summer. It is a great loss for the Danish Psychoanalytical Society and for the European psychoanalytic community.
Stefan Bálint was of huge importance for the Danish Society and had many former analysands, supervisees and students in the Society. He was the president of the Society in the 1990’s and in the early 2000’s he was part of the Society’s Training Committee. In the 1970’s he was one of the initiators that made it possible for Swedish psychologists and psychiatrists to train as psychoanalyst’s in the Danish Society in Copenhagen. This initiative has since then given the Danish Psychoanalytic Society its special characteristic of being a bi-national Society with members from both Denmark and southern Sweden.
Stefan Bálint lived and worked in Malmo, Sweden, where he was born and grew up. He was also a member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society. Stefan’s engagement in psychoanalysis was great, and since the early 2000’s he was part of the EPF working party on “Listening to listening” where he was a much-appreciated moderator of clinical groups. Besides his psychoanalytic work, Stefan Bálint was also an important figure in the Swedish Bálint-group environment, leading a number of Bálint-groups, training new Bálint-group leaders and being part of a research project for the development of the Bálint-group method.
Stefan Bálint was an exceptionally warm and vital person and he had an outstanding clinical sensitivity, which was a benefit for anyone who had the chance to work with and learn from him. We remember him with gratitude.
Maria Fitger
President of the Danish Psychoanalytical Society