Anton O. Kris 1934 - 2021

We mourn the loss of Anton O. Kris, who passed away on March 11, 2021. Born in Vienna in 1934 to Ernst and Marianne Kris (née Rie), the then four-year-old, together with his parents and sister Anna, escaped the terrorist regime of national socialism in 1938 and spent his teenage years in New York. Anton O. Kris studied psychiatry at Yale University and Harvard Medical School. He trained as a psychoanalyst in Boston (Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute), where he lived with his family and became a highly respected and ambitious advocate for psychoanalysis in numerous institutions, both in theory and practice, as well as for his patients. In 1982 he published Free Association: Method and Process (Yale University Press); he also served on the editorial boards of several psychoanalytic journals, on the board of trustees of the Anna Freud Foundation, and as executive director of the Freud Archives.

He was closely associated with the Freud family, and especially with Anna Freud, both amicably and professionally. He also supported the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna in many ways over the years. The Sigmund Freud Museum received a special copy of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield from him: in 1882 Sigmund Freud gave this book to his fiancée and later wife Martha Bernays, who gave it to the young Anton Kris decades later. Together with Anna Freud, Anton Kris decided to donate the book to the Sigmund Freud Museum and thus make it accessible to the general public in 1977. Today, this precious publication is prominently displayed in the new permanent exhibition on the life and work of Sigmund and Anna Freud in the former private apartment of the Freud family.

In grateful remembrance of his generous and humorous nature, our thoughts are with his family.

(Obituary by Boston Globe: https://legcy.co/3eC4YAW)