KRIS, ERNST

KRIS, ERNST (1900–1957), art historian and psychoanalyst. Kris was a junior keeper at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in his native Vienna when in 1924 he met freud , who sought his help with his collection of intaglios, and by 1927 had become an associate member of the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis. In 1933, at Freud's request, he gave up his medical studies and assumed the editorship of the journal Imago. In 1929 he wrote the standard work on the art of stone cutting. After the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, Kris and his wife Marianne (née Rie; 1900–1980), also a psychoanalyst, followed Freud to England. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II he organized a government department for the analysis of enemy broadcasts. He was sent to Canada and then to the United States to perform a similar task. In America his interest in psychoanalysis predominated over his profession   of art history which, however, continued to influence his work. Kris's first important analytic writing, "A Psychotic Sculptor of the Eighteenth Century" (1933), was the beginning of a series of papers applying analysis to art. He pioneered group research in psychoanalysis and made many contributions together with heinz hartmann and rudolph loewenstein . The work in which the three men collaborated, which included Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure (1946) and Some Psychoanalytic Comments on Culture and Personality (1951), extended and integrated the newer developments of psychoanalytic theory. In 1950 Kris formulated some of the ideas underlying the interdisciplinary child study project at Yale University in which he participated under the aegis of Milton Senn. In 1952 he collected his papers in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. In these essays he stressed the contribution of the study of the creative process to psychoanalytic psychology, to communication, and to the understanding of the ego development of the child. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Ritvo and L. Ritvo, in: F.G. Alexander et al. (eds.), Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), 484–500; A. Grinstein, Index of Psychoanalytic Writings, 2 (1957), 1130–34. (Louis Miller)