Love Is the Great Educator: Response to Richard Frank and Mel Bornstein

by Anton O. Kris, MD

Abstract

The author reviews several of the elements of the reported treatment, starting with the difficult beginning of both participants with their mothers. In attempting to respond to the question, “is this analysis?”, he places the described account in the realm of pleasurable play between mother and child, with significant and forceful interpretations to promote completion of mourning. This qualifies as psychoanalysis under special circumstances.

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 41(4-5): 289-291, May 2021.

Link to Online Publication [fulltext can be requested from the library].

This article is a discussion of the following publications in Psychoanalytic Inquiry Spring 2021 issue “Is This Analysis?” dedicated to Anton Kris:

About the Author

Photograph by Allen Palmer, MD

Anton O. Kris, MD (1934-2021) was a gifted psychoanalyst, an accomplished clinician, and an internationally acclaimed psychoanalytic scholar, known for his masterful clinical teaching. A psychiatrist for more than fifty-five years, a psychoanalyst for over fifty years, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute for over forty years, he served on the editorial boards of several of the major psychoanalytic journals and was the Chair of the Monitoring and Advisory Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He also served on the board of trustees of The Anna Freud Centre, The Anna Freud Foundation, and was the Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society (2015) and the Sigourney Award (2020). He is the author of Free Association: Method and Process (1982) along with numerous psychoanalytic papers, including his last contribution featured above.

The Kris family and friends are honoring Tony by establishment of the Anton O. Kris Visiting Scholar Program at BPSI. Click here for more information.

Previous Posts:

Alex Hoffer, MD (2020). Psychoanalysis as a Two-Person Meditation: Free Association, Meditation, and Bion. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80(3): 331–341.

Nancy J. Chodorow, PhD. (2021). Women Mothers Daughters: The Reproduction of Mothering After Forty Years. In Bueskens, P., ed. Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering: Forty Years On. Palgrave, pp. 49-80.

Anthony D. Bram, PhD. (2021). Introduction – In-Session Use of Digital Material in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 74(1): 304-307.

Steven H. Cooper, PhD. (2021). Toward an Ethic of Play in Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 90:3, 373-397.

Diane O’Donoghue, PhD. (2021). Amnesias of a Freudian Kind. Part One. American Imago 78(1), 55-77.

Charles Levin, PhD and Dawn Skorczewski, PhD. (2020).The Poetics of Boundary Violation: Anne Sexton and Her Psychiatrist. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30(2), 206-221.

Andrea Celenza, PhD (2020). Embodiment and the Perversion of Desire. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89(3), 369-398.

Steven H. Cooper, PhD (2021). Donald Winnicott and Stephen Mitchell’s Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 31(3), 355-370.

Elsa Ronningstam, PhD (2021). Cultural Function and Psychological Transformation of Silence in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. In Dimitrijevic, A. and Buchholz, M.B., eds. (2021). Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis: Cultural, Clinical, and Research Perspectives. Routledge, pp. 105-127.

Paola M. Contreras, PsyD (2021). The Magical and the My-Person in Psychoanalysis During the Covid Pandemic. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 68(6): 1113-1126. Open Access, DOI: 10.1177/0003065120981733

Don R. Lipsitt, MD (2020). In Freud’s Pocket: A Totem of Medical Ambivalence? American Imago, 77(4): 738-751.

Rachel Brier, EdD and Anna Ornstein, MD (2020). Tracking Changes in the Disruption/Repair Sequences: Important Aspects of Clinical Work. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.

Rodrigo Barahona, PsyaD (2020). Living the Non-Dream: An Examination of the Links Between Dreaming, Enactment, and Transformations in hallucinosis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89:4, 689-714.

Sarah Ackerman, PhD (2020). A Diagnosis for Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Freud as Medicine. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89:4, 667-688.

Lora Tessman, PhD (2020). Review of Ghost in the Human Psyche: The Story of a ‘Muslim Armenian’ , by Vamik D. Volkan. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56(2-3):457-464.

Click here to see a full archive of featured papers. All articles can be requested from the library.