Balint Group Leadership: Conceptual Foundations and a Framework for Leadership Development?

This is our fourth international conference. We meet together to work and think about the difficult task of leading Balint groups: 58 eight of us, from 19 different countries all with different histories of the way Balint work has developed. Some countries have maintained a strong psychoanalytic input to leadership, whilst in others a greater interest has been shown by psychologists. And in the UK, we were fortunate to have Enid Balint and Michael Courtenay continuing to lead research groups for GPs until 1993 and 2000 respectively. In 2009 IBF began the process of putting these various strands together and now holds an international conference for leaders every 2 years. Following the first in Copenhagen (2011) and then one held in Charleroi (2012), the third conference which was due to be hosted by the Israeli Balint Society in 2014, and sadly, had to be cancelled. Following the cancellation, the leadership task force met in Tel Aviv and at that meeting (held on one of the coldest days ever in Israel) suggested establishing a framework for the development of leadership training, and that this should include the principles and concepts which underlie Balint work.