Hearing Secret Harmonies: Balint and The Re-Imagining of Medicine

Abstract The author uses three poems – all by the same poet who was a respiratory physician – to describe the role the imagination in Balint groups, profoundly psychoanalytic in principle, in re-imagining medicine. He states that doctors emerge from medical school ‘one-eyed’ but can slowly move to restore ‘binocular vision’ through emotional insight and greater awareness of relationships gained through participation in a Balint group. He cites Enid Balint’s concept of ‘imaginative perception’ and describes a case which brings many of the themes of the talk together including unconscious communication and the nature of ‘time’ in the GP’s consulting room.