Ernst Kris

Ernst Kris, an American psychoanalyst and art historian, was born on April 26, 1900, in Vienna and died on February 27, 1957, in New York. He was the son of Leopold Kris, a Jewish lawyer, and Rosa Schick. During and even before his studies at school, he became interested in art and art history. In 1918 he enrolled in the philosophy department at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1922 with a degree in art history. His dissertation was published in 1926 as Der Stil "Rustique" (Rustic Style). That same year he was appointed curator at the Museum of the History of Art in Vienna. His fiancé, Marianne Rie, introduced him to Freud in 1924 as an expert for his collection of antiquities. The Freud and Rie families were close friends: Oskar Rie, a pediatrician, was one of Freud's tarok partners and also a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

When Marianne Rie, after finishing her medical studies, began training in analysis in Berlin, Freud recommended analysis for Kris too. Kris completed his psychoanalytic training in Vienna with Helene Deutsch as his training analyst. In 1928, a year after their marriage, Ernst and Marianne Kris were made associate members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Aside from his psychoanalytic practice, Kris worked as an art historian and published articles on art history. In 1929 he was appointed chief European expert for cameos and gems at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to help catalog their new collection. As a psychoanalyst, he made important contributions to the psychology of the artist and the psychoanalytic interpretation of works of art and caricature. In the review Imago he published his first psychoanalytic study, "Ein geisteskranker Bildhauer" (A mentally ill sculptor) on Doctor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. In 1932 he became coeditor of the review with Robert Waelder.

In 1933 Kris became an affiliate member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and in 1936 a delegate to the education committee. After the annexation of Austria by Germany, Kris was able to escape to London with his family. There he became a member of and training analyst with the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and he worked with the BBC on the scientific analysis of Nazi propaganda.

After 1940 he continued this propaganda work in Canada and the United States, where he settled in New York. In September 1940 he was appointed professor at the New School for Social Research and began, with Hans Speier, a research program on totalitarian propaganda. In 1943 Kris became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and began teaching at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In his long collaboration with Heinz Hartmann and Rudolph Loewenstein in the United States, he made essential contributions to the development of ego psychology. His longitudinal study on early infancy, done at the Child Study Center of Yale University, has remained famous. In 1945 he cofounded, and became coeditor of, the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and, with Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte, edited the first edition of Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess.

ELKE MLLEITNER

See also: Ego; Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, The; Gesammelte Werke; Kris-Rie, Marianne; Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The; Shakespeare and psychoanalysis; United States; Visual arts and psychoanalysis.