Ernst Kris in America : Nellie Thompson

5 Jun 2014

Overview

Ernst Kris enjoyed a distinguished career first as an art historian and then a psychoanalyst. Kris and his wife Marianne were close friends and associates of Sigmund and Anna Freud in Vienna. Fleeing from the Nazis to England, Kris helped arrange Freud’s antiquities at Maresfield Gardens. Fearing for their safety, the Kris family left for America in late 1940. After his arrival there Kris’s work as a psychoanalyst took new dimensions that embraced a myriad of activities whose aim was to learn as much as possible about young children. The paper explores these activities, including Kris's editorship of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, his papers on young children and his influence on postwar psychoanalysis in America. Nellie Thompson, PhD, is an historian and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her research interests include the role of women in the psychoanalytic movement and the contributions of émigré analysts to psychoanalysis in America. She is a member of the Board of the Sigmund Freud Archives and the editorial board of American Imago.