Ernst Kris: The Objects of Memory

In 1956, the year before his death, Ernst Kris published a trilogy of papers on memory—”The Personal Myth,” “On Some Vicissitudes of Insight in Psychoanalysis,” and “The Recovery of Childhood Memories”—and was planning to publish a monograph on the subject. In his papers on memory, by juxtaposing his clinical work with adult patients and his research on very young children, Kris sketched a trajectory of the dynamic relationship between preoedipal ego development and object relations, against the backdrop of psychosexual stages and the defenses that mediate memory. Kris was firmly committed to the premise that “the development of ego functions and object relations . . . are of equal and intrinsic importance.” This paper explores how Kris’s papers on memory may also be read as delineating his thinking on the role of object relations in infants and young children. In his last paper, the posthumously published “Decline and Recovery in the Life of a Three-Year-Old” (1962), his interest in ego development and object relations shifts to object relations, but the role of memory remains crucial. The paper concludes with some observations about the omissions and distortions that characterize how the history of psychoanalysis is recalled, orally transmitted, and written.