Biographical Note: Ernst Kris was born on April 26, 1900 in Vienna, Austria. In 1918 he went to the University of Vienna to study art history, archaeology, and psychology. Four years later, he completed his PhD in Art History and was appointed assistant curator of the Department for Sculpture and Applied Art at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. In 1927, Ernst married Marianne Rie, a psychoanalyst, whose father Oscar Rie was a pediatrician of the Freud children. In 1927 he became a member of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Between 1930 and 1938, Ernst Kris published papers on applied psychoanalysis, taught at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, analyzed patients, and continued working as an assistant curator on the Museum collection. When Hitler occupied Austria, the Krises and their two children had to escape to England. From 1939 to 1940 he worked in the BBC analyzing Nazi radio broadcasts, and later was transferred to Canada and the United States. In 1941 he and Hans Speier led the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication. By the 1943, Ernst Kris was teaching at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the College of the City of New York. He founded three research groups, including the Child Center at Yale University Medical School, which he started with his wife Marianne. He was also one of the founders of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child journal and served on the editorial board of the Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association. Ernst Kris died on February 27, 1957, at the age of fifty six.
Summary: the collection comprises 9 boxes of pamphlets and reprints arranged alphabetically by author. Most of the publications are in German. BPSI Archives also holds an interview with Dr. Marianne Kris recorded in 1979 (see Audiovisual Materials, audio cassette 403), the typescripts of The significance of Freud’s earliest discoveries for the history of psychoanalysis (1949) by Ernst Kris (see Scientific Meetings), and the photographs depicting Dr. Ernst Kris (see Bibring Photograph Collection).
Finding Aid for this collection is available here (viewing it requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Related BPSI Collections
Audiovisual Materials
Bibring Photograph Collection
BPSI History Collections: Scientific Meetings
Related Archives
Papers of Ernst Kris at Library of Congress (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Hans Speier’s Papers at University at Albany (contains articles co-authored with Ernst Kris)
Related Sites
Ernst Kris (from Dictionary of Art Historians)
Ernst Kris: an annotated bibliography by Joan M. Wolk
