It is with deep sorrow we announce the passing away of Stefan Bálint on 25 August 2019, after a bicycle accident earlier in the summer. It is a great loss for the Danish Psychoanalytical Society and for our European psychoanalytic community at large.
Stefan Bálint was of huge importance to the Danish Society in which he had trained many members as a personal analyst, supervisor or teacher. In the 1990s he was president of the Society and in the early 2000’s a member of its Training Committee. In the 1970s 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 was strongly engaged in developing psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training. Since the early 2000s 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 groups himself, training new 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 with 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.