Kris-Rie, Marianne (1900-1980)

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KRIS-RIE, MARIANNE (1900-1980)

Marianne Kris-Rie, the Austrian physician and psychoanalyst, was born in Vienna on May 27, 1900, and died in London on November 23, 1980.

Marianne Kris was the daughter of Oskar Rie and Melanie Bondy. Oskar Rie was a highly reputed pediatrician and a friend of Freud, with whom he published Klinische Studie über die halbseitige Cerebrallähmung der Kinder (Clinical Study of Cerebral Hemiplegia in Children, 1891a). Marianne's mother was Wilhelm Fliess's sister-in-law, her older sister, Margarete, being married to Herman Nunberg.

Already a physician, Marianne Kris married Ernst Kris in 1927, and one year later they both became members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She worked in close collaboration with Anna Freud, who was also her friend. From 1925 to 1927, she did her psychoanalytic training in Berlin with Franz Alexander. She was analyzed by Freud.

Obliged to leave Vienna in 1938, after the Anschluss, she moved first in London, where she was a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, then to the United States, where she settled in New York in 1940, becomong a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1944. She worked mainly in child psychoanalysis and helped train child analysts. She collaborated with social workers and teachers in different social sectors and played an active role in training non-physician psychotherapists.

She became a member of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and, in 1965, she and other child analysts contributed to creating the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, becoming its first president in the same year. She established the practice of working with the family when treating children and in 1972 she delivered a paper in New York on "The Psychoanalytic Study of the Family." She was also chief editor of the review The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. She worked hard to have non-physicians admitted to psychoanalytic societies. She had two sons, and lost her husband in 1957. Marianne Kris died on November 23, 1980, in Anna Freud's house, having gone to Great Britain to take part in the second International Seminar of the Hampstead Clinic.

Ernst Federn

See also: Freud, the Secret Passion ; Kris, Ernst; Lehrinstitut der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Rie, Oskar.