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There are many ways to remember so large and many-faceted a person as Ernst Kris. One could speak of his creative mind and of the energies which produced the steady flow of his contributions to our science—contributions which have enriched the professional life of everyone who was his student and of psychoanalysts everywhere. One should speak of many other aspects of his life and career; but I feel that I can best convey the feeling of great loss his death has evoked by speaking of what Ernst Kris meant to those of us who had the privilege of working with him in an undertaking which was very dear to him. From that vantage point we could see in full view, not only his brilliance, his marvelous integrative powers, and his vast learning, but also his warmth and humor, his enthusiasm for learning, and the devotion to teaching, which gave him the cherished access and link to his younger colleagues.
A meeting at which Ernst Kris presided never lagged. In an unusual way it could approach being painful. Ideas would come from him in such rich profusion that this in turn would elicit contributions from others in the group until the stimulation was so intense as to border on the unbearable. And no matter what the stated subject or topic of a meeting might be, we knew there would always be one or two nice surprises in the form of excursions he would make into the world of seemingly unrelated ideas. It would then often turn out that this particular subject happened to be a hobby of his and, as is likely to be the case with a hobby, which is something one knows about or looks into for fun, he knew quite a bit about it—how the idea had gotten started, what various people knew and thought