Tribute to Tony Kris

An ancient Chinese proverb states: “Teacher for a day; friend for Life.” That is how I, and many of you, feel about Tony Kris. Tony, you wouldn't have given so much of yourself to us, to this institution, to our clinical practice, if you didn't love us. And since love is not a one-way street, you don't get to give so much of yourself to others without having one day to sit through an afternoon where those people do their best to give it back to you. So, I am both glad and sorry, Tony, that you have to sit through this tender celebration while we do our best to give it back to you. As Freud wrote, psychoanalysis is essentially a cure through love. He also said, “the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” No indifference here.

In May of 2008, BPSI celebrated its 75^th anniversary. Howard Katz, who elegantly organized the event, asked Tony to speak about BPSI's past and asked me to speak about BPSI's future. On that day, Tony and I were like the two parts of a bronze hinge supporting a doorway that needed to swing open to the past as well as the future—a motion sculpture of a divergent conflict with mourning itself lubricating the hinge. Tony spoke of Jock Murray, Ives Hendrick, Elvin Semrad and the 30 years that preceded Tony's 45 years of learning and unlearning psychoanalysis. The struggles to unlearn rigidities were not just about mourning, but also about armed combat, “kicking and screaming” as Judy Kantrowitz describes Tony's entrance into BPSI in the 1960s. Tony's history of BPSI and psychoanalysis continued all the way up to Steven Cooper's “good enough bad object”—emphasizing how essential it is for psychoanalysis to include “loving, hating, greed, compassion and not being perfect,” in a real relationship.

I was a little daunted that day, as perhaps the future can be daunted by the past. I described the battlefield of change that BPSI had been through. We had had to wrest our frozen endowment out of the brick-and-mortar treasury of 15 Commonwealth