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Besides its value for a number of excellent papers, this volume is of particular significance because it contains the proceedings of the Ernst Kris Memorial Meeting and a complete bibliography of Ernst Kris's writings. The papers presented at the Memorial Meeting give a glimpse of Ernst Kris at work: the range and variety of his interests, the research he initiated, the teacher who stimulated both students and colleagues. The first paper, The Family Romance of the Artist by Phyllis Greenacre, is based on Kris's paper, The Image of the Artist, and Greenacre's own previous investigations of creative people. She discusses the family romance in Chatterton, Stanley, Gogol, Rilke, and St. Francis of Assisi and concludes that the heightened sensitivity of specially gifted persons is determined by the particular form of their family romance.
Leo Loomie, Victor Rosen, and Martin Stein present in their paper, Ernst Kris and the Gifted Adolescent Project, a report on the planning and organization of this study, and outline the problem that this project was designed to investigate. They indicate some of the ideas to which the project has given rise, such as a reconsideration of the nature of sublimation in creative persons. Kris was impressed by the closeness to consciousness of the conflict in creativity, and he also suggested that the special gift of the artist may be his capacity to transform with particular speed primary into secondary processes.
Ritvo and Solnit's paper, Influence of Early Mother-Child Interaction on Identification Processes, is based on data from the Longitudinal Study at the Yale Child Study Center. They present Kris's idea that environmental influence may re-enforce the equipment or predisposition of the child or it may act in the opposite direction and they illustrate this with two case reports.
In her Child Observation and Prediction of Development: A Memorial Lecture in Honor of Ernst Kris, Anna Freud selects as her starting point a paper by Ern