Child Observation and Prediction of Development—A Memorial Lecture in Honor of Ernst Kris1

I am grateful to my American friends and colleagues for inviting me to join this Memorial Meeting held in honor of Ernst Kris and for letting me share the feelings of appreciation, of indebtedness, and of loss which move us all, thinking of his death.

I welcome the decision that this commemoration should take the form of a symposium, dealing with all the ramifications and implications of Ernst Kris's work. This offers the opportunity to each contributor in turn to select what seems to him personally the most important and intriguing aspect of his activities and to argue the principal points, as it were, still in discussion with him.

I. ERNST KRIS'S "NOTES ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND SOME CURRENT PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC CHILD PSYCHOLOGY"

In this spirit I select as my starting point a paper written by Ernst Kris as his contribution to a Panel discussion on "psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology" and published under the indifferent title of "Notes on the Development and Some Current Problems of Psychoanalytic Child Psychology" (1950a). This was the period when Ernst Kris began to be involved in the methods of direct