Marianne Kris—1900-1980

Marianne Kris died in her eighty-first year in London on November 23, 1980, at the home of Anna Freud. She had been attending the International Forum of the Hampstead Clinic. The circumstances of her death paralleled the lifelong association of her family with the Freud family. Her father, Dr. Oskar Rie, had been an associate and collaborator of Freud in a child neurology clinic and had been pediatrician to the Freud children.

Dr. Kris was born in Vienna on May 27, 1900. She was graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1925. After two years of psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in Berlin, she returned to Vienna and married Ernst Kris. In the Vienna Institute she was active from the beginning in Anna Freud's seminar on child analysis. When the Nazis took over in Austria in 1938, she and her family moved to London and then came to New York in 1940.

Marianne Kris combined rare personal qualities with superb understanding and skill as a psychoanalyst to make invaluable contributions to the educational and scientific life of the psychoanalytic and child development community wherever she was—the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Yale University Child Study Center, the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the Columbia University Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her warmth, her interest in students, and her ability to adhere to standards of excellence while appreciating where younger colleagues were in their own development made her an incomparable teacher and supervisor.

In 1950 she joined Dr. Milton Senn and her husband at the Yale University Child Study Center where they were initiating a longitudinal study in child development. This was primarily an action research in which the clinician providing a service was the observer who at the same time influenced the field of observation. Marianne Kris's sensitivity and perceptiveness, sharpened