Ernst Kris, Ph.D—1900-1957

On the 27th of February, 1957, Ernst Kris died in New York, at the age of fifty-six, of a coronary thrombosis. Although he had suffered a first coronary attack seven years previously, his death came unexpectedly.

He was born in Vienna on April 26, 1900, the younger son of a family where intellectual interests were much valued. His scholarly interests manifested themselves early. So precociously brilliant was his mind that while at the Gymnasium, at fourteen, he was permitted to attend seminars on the history of art at the University of Vienna. He obtained his Ph.D. in History of Art at the age of twenty-two and soon afterwards was appointed a Curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His numerous publications in that field are highly regarded by specialists, and his book The Art of Gem Engraving During the Italian Renaissance remains a standard work on the subject. His reputation was such that in 1929 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City invited him to study the Milton Weil Collection of Postclassical Cameos and to write the catalogue for it, which was published in 1931.

In the mid-twenties he "discovered" psychoanalysis and within a few years, while still engaged in the work of reorganizing collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kris was already working as an analyst and publishing psychoanalytic papers. He soon became an active, enthusiastic, and dedicated member of a small group of young analysts in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society who worked in close personal contact with Freud. This group was impressed by the new vistas appearing in psychoanalysis with the introduction of structural concepts and of ego psychology. Kris was one of those who immediately grasped the far-reaching importance of this new approach for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Since then and until the end of his life, he contributed enormously to the development of these ideas as a brilliant lecturer and author, and as an inspired and inspiring teach