The Contributions of Tony Kris

It is on my mind today and since Tony's death that in many ways the central organizing theme of his work was mourning. How to help others mourn who they have lost; how to mourn who we wish we could have been and, when things go well, how to live creatively with who we are. Tony found so many ways to live creatively even in the face of sometimes staggering loss. So today, we mourn a man so interested in mourning and so capable of offering us creative ways to live life.

I met Tony when I was in training to become a psychoanalyst, and he supervised me during training. I met him at a vulnerable time in my late twenties when my father had just died precipitously at a very young age. We realized early on in meeting that we had both lost our much-admired fathers far too early, each at age 56. And we both commiserated with humor that we felt our academic fathers were far smarter than we were. It was a deep connection. I met Tony before I became a father, and it was a great pleasure for me to hear of his love for David and Michael and of course Kitty. I learned so much from him in supervision, and afterward we began a long friendship of lunches, dinner, Red Sox games, concerts, collaboration on a few writing projects, and teaching together. Over the years, we always read and critiqued each other's work. We co-taught a seminar together for many years, which was enormous fun. His willingness and capacity to learn from his students and enjoy his students' learning was a wonderful complement to the vast clinical wisdom he gave us.

I admired so many things about Tony. When Tony took someone on for therapy or analysis or for supervision, he was all in. He was devoted and stubborn in his dedication to their growth. He had a unique capacity to support and confront. He never shied away from what needed to be said and he often made the unsayable able to be spoken. In this way, he was never patronizing. He dignified us all with the belief that we could try to learn, get better, and work things out with our patients, with our training, and with ourselves.

Tony encouraged each of us who were interested in writing to write. He pushed in a way that made us feel like he could anticipate where we might be able to go. Despite his considerable investment in his own writing, I actually think it was more gratifying for him to help others with theirs.

I have never had more fun disagreeing with someone as I did with Tony. Whether when we were co-teaching as we did for many years or in reading each other's work, it was fun to be similar and different. Tony was deeply persuasive but never coercive. It was fun to watch him seduce to make a point (often he would do this in administrative meetings) and sometimes it was like a magic trick occurring right in front of our eyes. Tony would often wait until everyone else had spoken on the matter so that he could tactically bring as much to bear as possible for his argument.

It is challenging to describe in laymen's terms what Tony's contributions to psychoanalysis were about, but I want to try because it gets to some important things about him as a person. At a time when Tony began his training, in which psychoanalysis in the United States had become too stiff and aseptic, losing some of its original, fundamental human core, Tony's warmth and playfulness injected a much-needed soulfulness into his own work and that of his students. He encouraged all of us to be involved with our patients in a deep and caring way. He offered tremendous support along with his dynamic vision of the complexity of the unconscious mind.

Tony was always fascinated by the impossible parts of our profession. Most of this hinged on understanding the impossible parts of being a...