Obituary: Anton O. Kris (1934–2021)

Anton Oscar Kris was known by his many friends and colleagues simply as “Tony,” and that is the way I will refer to him here. I cannot describe him with the admiration and love that I and so many others have felt for him without referring to him as Tony.

Tony was born in Vienna in 1934, escaped with his family from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, and lived in England for two years. In 1938, Tony’s parents and Anna Freud were instrumental in helping Sigmund Freud escape from Vienna. In 1940, Ernst and Marianne Kris and their children, Anna and Anton, moved to New York, where they made their permanent home.

In many ways, the early history of psychoanalysis was intertwined with that of Tony’s family. His parents, psychoanalysts Marianne and Ernst Kris, were close friends of the Freud family. A psychiatrist known as an extraordinarily talented clinician, Marianne was a patient of Freud’s and was pregnant with Tony during her analysis; hence Tony liked to say that he had been on Freud’s couch from the beginning.

Tony’s father, Ernst, was an art historian before becoming a psychoanalyst and authored a well-respected classic in which he explored art history from a psychoanalytic viewpoint (E. Kris 1952). His professional collaboration with Heinz Hartmann and Rudolph Loewenstein solidified their importance in the development of ego psychology in the United States. Despite having two very famous parents in the field, Tony nonetheless forged a unique path as one of our most significant contributors to modern conflict theory.

Initially, Tony was only “provisionally” accepted for training at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI). He was told there were concerns that his reputation as a highly talented psychotherapist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center might limit his ability to become a good psychoanalyst. The concern as he understood it was that he was quite active as a therapist and that this might interfere with his ability to do good analytic work, but he