Enid Flora Albu, psychoanalyst and welfare worker, was born in London. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College before she entered the London School of Economics in , and graduated in In she married Robert N. Eichholtz later Eccles , a philology professor, and became the mother of two daughters. In she participated in founding the Family Discussion Bureau, the later Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, in order to train social workers, who were needed for family counselling.
The same year she started her psychoanalytic training with John Rickman at the Tavistock Clinic. After Rickman died in , she continued training analysis with Donald W. In she was accepted as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society BPAS , and after her presentation of Three phases of a transference neurosis became a full member in She introduced Balint to the casework technique, which she used in training social workers and psychologists.
Between and they developed the concept of the "Balint group", a training method for practitioners. In these groups, doctors discuss under the direction of an analyst case reports from their practice and work through the transference and counter-transference in the doctor-patient relationship.
Even after their divorce Enid and Michael Balint worked closely together and developed the focal psychotherapy and the so-called flash technique for generalists.
Until she was in charge of the training and research course for general practitioners at the Tavistock Clinic, and from till she directed the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. A volume of her papers Before I was I was edited in Above all she was interested in unconscious communication, the understanding of pre-verbal and bodily processes and the interface between the pre-verbal and verbal.
