Ernst Kris was an employee of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna when he met S. Freud who asked him for help on some subject (1924). After three years E. Kris became associate member of the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis. At that time he was still an art historian and wrote an important work on the history of stone-cutting (1929). On Freud’s request he stopped medical studies to resume the task of editor for the Journal Imago (1933). The same year he published his first important analytical work A Psychotic Sculptor of the Eighteenth Century. He wrote series of books aplying psychoanalysis to art. After the Anschluss (1938) E. Kris and his wife, also an psychoanalyst, left for England together with S. Freud. When the WWII started Kris established a government department for analysing the enemy broadcats and later he did the same in Canada and USA.
While in America his main interest wondered towards psychoanalysis, although he was still interested in art history. Kris was one of the first to conduct group research in psychoanalysis, and wrote many papers together with Heinz, Hartmann and Rudolph Loewenstein. His publications include Comments on formation of Psychic Structure (1946). He later integrated newer developments of psychoanalytical theory in his writings. Kris was in a team who formulated ideas underlying the interdisciplinary child study project at Yale University (1950).