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 protested the notion that being active was at odds with being a thoughtful and creative analyst. He often brought up this theme with his students and in administrative meetings, emphasizing that helping patients must be central to our psychoanalytic educational project. He was helped a great deal in an analysis with “Jock” Murray, undertaken after he completed his training; Tony felt that Jock had found him. He described Jock as both caring and confrontational. He frequently said to me about his experience in analysis with Jock: “Someone finally laid a glove on me.”

Over the decades, Tony became a lynchpin at BPSI—not only completing his training with distinction, but also becoming one of its most highly respected and sought-after Training and Supervising Analysts. I think that many would say that Tony was the soul of the organization. He analyzed and supervised many of those who went on to teach and analyze others. A few decades ago, Tony rewrote BPSI’s entire bylaws. Together with a group of younger collaborators, he invented BPSI’s Curriculum Committee, thereby creating a way to productively separate the institute’s academic/teaching functions from the exclusive leadership of Supervising and Training analysts. In this way Tony continued to play a significant role in helping BPSI thrive.

Tony was a champion of helping students and colleagues overcome the obstacles they faced. He spoke frequently of his early, fraught experience of becoming a psychoanalyst. I think he liked to tell his students about his beginning years in order to inspire them not to be too critical of their own work.

Tony was someone to whom people very often turned for help. Many of my colleagues went to him for a second analysis. Widely regarded as a master clinician, he was sought after as a consultant on complex situations by colleagues dispersed across the United States and all over the world.

I will briefly take up four areas of Tony’s clinical and theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis over the last fifty years. These are his focus on free association, his delineation of two types of conflict—convergent and divergent, his description of functional neutrality, and finally, his emphasis on analyzing the importance of unconscious self-criticism in clinical analysis and the free-associative process.

One of the most interesting and rich aspects of Tony’s body of work is that his focus on free association not only provided analysts with an essential methodological focus—a technical contribution in its own right—but also led him to elaborate many of his theoretical contributions to conflict theory. In his seminal book, Free Association (1982), he clarifies that the goal of the two participants in psychoanalysis is to enable the patient to obtain freedom of association. This means freedom to think, to connect, and to “attempt to abolish unconscious restrictions (resistances)” (p. 9). Thus, Tony came to distinguish two forms of opposition to free association: reluctance and resistance. The latter refers to the presence of unconscious obstacles to free association, while reluctance applies to any conscious attitude of “disinclination to participate in the free association method or in analysis” (A. Kris 1982, p. 31). In listening to his patients’ words and especially to disruptions of the flow of associations, he realized, for example, that “both loving and hostile transferences can lead to negative attitudes in analysis” (p. 37), a loss of satisfaction in free association, and a reluctance to go forward. In other words, negative attitudes need not reflect the so-called negative transference.

In the words of Shelley Orgel (2005): “His reach toward synthesis of the traditional and the innovative and a capacity for an abiding tension between these polarities characterize Tony’s work.” For example, Tony writes: “It is the aim of free association”—the hallmark of psychoanalysis—

...to make conscious what is unconscious, to recall what is forgotten, to regain lost experience, to complete mourning, to elucidate inner conflict, to expand what is condensed, to clarify confusion, and to reverse disorientation. Any one of these and many more may serve as the organizing principle for classifying the free associations. [1982, p. 15]

Using the analysis of free association, Tony extensively explored and detailed distinctions between two paradigms of conflict encountered in the analytic situation. He originally designated these conflicts of defense and conflicts of ambivalence. Conflicts of defense were described as the classical intrapsychic conflicts familiar to all analysts. Their prototype is repression, whose elements tend toward compromise formations and so are convergent. The resolution of conflicts of defense requires working through and mourning.

In contrast, conflicts of ambivalence are manifested by two forms of wishes, which alternate in their expression; their prototypes are progression/regression (A. Kris 1984). The recognition, handling, and elaboration of conflicts of ambivalence constitute, I think, a major conceptual addition to clinical psychoanalysis and to modern conflict theory. In conflicts of ambivalence, Tony writes, there is a fear of one wish being expressed without the other. The two types of wishes seem incompatible and are not amenable to compromise (hence they are labeled divergent). A “persistent childhood attitude of ‘either-or’” makes such conflicts “appear to the patient to be insoluble because of the threat of loss, no matter what solution he attempts” (A. Kris 1982, p. 56). It is the expected unbearable loss resulting from the activity of free association—not anxiety about the unconscious content or meaning it reveals—that creates reluctance in the patient.

In adolescence, divergent conflicts are quite conspicuous. Among the many opposing trends, states, and wishes that require painful choices, analysts of adolescents often recognize, for example, “activity and passivity, homosexual and heterosexual desires, pre-genital and genital sexuality, old objects and new ones, independence and dependence, autonomy and loss of self, self-control and dissipation, altruism and egotism, spontaneity and regulation, mind and body, fantasy and reality” (A. Kris 1985, pp. 540-541). Understanding the particular nature of divergent conflicts in these terms makes possible significant advances in the analyst’s ways of working. This perspective tends to curb authoritarian and critical attitudes, enabling the analyst to remain closer to neutrality in the sense of equidistance from the ego, id, and superego. Much later, Tony applied his understanding of divergent conflicts to the problem of hypocrisy (A. Kris 2005).

Tony demonstrated with abundant clinical evidence that the renunciation of past fantasies of satisfaction bring mourning for the road not taken. The analyst helps the patient tolerate and express both sides of the ambivalence in his or her associations, an effort that enables working through—a form of mourning—to proceed. In contrast, Tony noted that reducing classic conflicts of defense requires analyzing obstacles to remembering. He observed that with a reduction of conflicts of ambivalence, the analysis of defense in each of the separated components of the divergent conflict can then come to the fore, and that interaction between convergent conflicts and divergent conflicts seems to occur as a continuous series of alternatives.

Tony’s concept of divergent conflict embraces the idea held by many of us that we actually have a number of persons inside us. We might wish to be both a man and a woman, for example, or to be a world-renowned mathematician and a famous pianist at the same time—and perhaps most ubiquitously, to be human but never to die. These divergent, conflicted wishes illustrate the fact that we often wish to be in two different places simultaneously.

Another of Tony’s significant contributions was his concept of functional neutrality, a construct that was a frequent topic of discussion during the period when he was developing his ideas on the subject. While earlier definitions of neutrality had been helpful—such as Anna Freud’s (1936) notion that neutrality lies in the equidistant position between the id, superego, and ego—Tony concluded, based on his work with excessively self-critical patients, that standard stances of neutrality were likely to be experienced by patients as reflecting the analyst’s disapproval. For a patient with massive self-loathing, the analyst’s reserve might be singularly experienced as criticism or dislike for the patient. Thus, Tony was expanding the notion that neutrality is not static but instead requires of the analyst a level of self-reflection about assessing what types of neutrality will best promote the free-associative process.¹ For Tony, functional neutrality involved finding the clinical pivot point that would best promote our patients’ free-associative process.

Finally, one of Tony’s most significant clinical contributions lay in his deep understanding of the ubiquity of self-criticism (A. Kris 1990). Tony alerted analysts to the ways in which stops and starts in free association are often the result of unconscious self-criticism and serve as points of resistance to change. His writing is filled with examples of the myriad ways that forms of self-criticism manifest in the free-associative process.

Tony’s work occurred coterminous with the burgeoning literature on trauma, self-states, and dissociation, but rather than exploring these trends, in his own way, he was trying to expand conflict theory to shed light on commonly observed clinical phenomena that had not been encompassed by previous conflict theory. In my view, Tony’s work on conflict theory took that paradigm to the furthest reaches of the conflict construct itself. His work evolved in such a way that, without explicitly describing his integration of intersubjectivity into his theoretical thinking, he was actually incorporating an intersubjective view by elaborating the shifts he had learned to make in response to his patients. To put it another way, he was simply enormously talented.

Beyond Tony’s major theoretical, didactic, and clinical contributions, he worked tirelessly and passionately as a Board of Directors member on the Sigmund Freud Archives, beginning in 1982. In 2014, he served as Executive Director, and in this capacity he successfully raised money through the Polonski Fund to extricate Freud’s letters from copyright protection, thereby enabling their online presentation and digitization. Through this monumental achievement, Tony provided the mechanism for analysts and historians to gain easy access to Freud’s letters and personal writing, opening a unique portal to the history of psychoanalysis.

Tony served on the editorial boards of most of the major psychoanalytic journals, including The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (for repeated terms), International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and Psychological Issues. Some of the editors-in-chief of these journals relied on his guidance at times, just as so many of us who have chaired local and national committees have also called on Tony for help and advice.

As a Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School, Tony taught many generations of young psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers in training. He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and a Master Teacher Award from the Candidates Council of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In 2019, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute held a widely attended festschrift in honor of Tony. Speakers at this event who lauded Tony and his work included Judith Kantrowitz—Tony’s former classmate at BPSI and a close friend—as well as three other close friends and former students of Tony’s: James Frosch, Randall Paulsen, and me. Many others also spoke of how they had been deeply touched by Tony, both in their analytic work and in their personal lives.

Those of us who had the opportunity to work with Tony as students and patients awarded him our loyal esteem long ago for his excellence in clinical sensibility, theoretical contributions, administrative savvy, and general mentorship. In 2020, Tony was officially awarded what is often regarded as the most prestigious honor in psychoanalysis, the Sigourney Award, which deeply moved him.

Tony was a devoted husband, father, stepfather, and grandfather. He courageously faced the deep loss of not just one, but of both his successive wives, Catherine and Deborah. In speaking of having been twice widowed, he sometimes said how much he had been forced to learn about mourning.

Tony supervised one of my control cases during my psychoanalytic training. I learned a great deal from him in supervision, and we enjoyed working and talking together. We began a long and close friendship that incorporated lunches, dinners, Red Sox games, concerts, and collaboration on a jointly written paper. Over the years, we read almost all of each other’s work and offered each other suggestions.

In short, Tony and I learned much from each other. His capacity to learn from his students was a wonderful complement to his ability to impart his considerable clinical wisdom and acumen. He made fun of me for my “catholic” tastes in psychoanalytic theory, and I made fun of him for being a magnificently creative and playful analyst housed within the architecture of ego psychology. As much as he gave to psychoanalysis, for those of us fortunate to have been his friends, students, and patients, he gave even more—an inestimable gift.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven H. Cooper

Steven H. Cooper is a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Clinical Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School.

Notes

1 In parallel, both Greenberg (1986), with his notion of an intersubjective definition of neutrality, and Steiner (1994), in his work on patient-centered versus analyst-centered interpretation, were exploring similar terrain.