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We know just how faithful Michael Balint was to Sandor Ferenczi, his psychoanalyst and friend from Budapest. During his exile in Great Britain (in 1939), he did everything he could to promote Ferenczi’s ideas in the hope of rehabilitating him within the analytic community. Balint was not only his ‘go-between’, but also his ‘heir’. He revised a certain number of Ferenczi’s theoretical positions, pointed out his errors, corrected them, and was able to move beyond them. Was his critique of the Freudian concept of primary narcissism, a critique which did not receive much of a following, the reason why he described himself as having a marginal position in the current of the 1960s British Psychoanalytical Society? We argue that, while remaining Freudian and Ferenczian, Balint contributed a number of new concepts to the analytic corpus (‘primary love’, ‘the three zones of the psychic apparatus’, ‘benign and malignant regression’, the ‘basic fault’) which helped enrich and advance psychoanalytic theory and the manner in which treatment is conducted.