Robert C. Bak

Robert C. Bak (1908-1974) was a Hungarian-born psychoanalyst who moved to the States in 1941, and eventually became President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

Training and career

Bak underwent a training analysis with Imre Hermann and joined the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society in 1938, only to be forced to flee to the States a few years later, where he became a training analyst in 1947, and president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1957.[1]

He published some 25 articles in Hungarian, German, and English. From the start, Bak was concerned to chart early object relations, and their distortions:[2] he saw the sexual perversions as attempts to undo object separation,[3] and also charted the emergence of grandiosity in ego-regression.[4]

Bak also reiterated the importance of the idea of the phallic mother in the perverse denial of catration.[5]

Characteristics

A flamboyant and witty lover of the good life,[6] Bak had a troubled marital relationship, and no children.[7]

When asked whether or not he would describe as transference a relationship in which each party saw the other through a veil of unconscious fantasy, instead of as they were, he is said to have replied ironically, "I'd call that life".[8]

Selected Writings

See also

References

  1. ↑ J. Meszaros, Ferenczi and Beyond (2014) p. 162-4
  2. ↑ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 437 and 595
  3. ↑ S. Taylor, Hans Bellmer (2002) p. 187
  4. ↑ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 421 and 595
  5. ↑ E. Becker, The Denial of Death (2007) p. 224
  6. ↑ W. S. Poland, Meeting the Darkness (1996) p. 176
  7. ↑ J. Meszaros, Ferenczi and Beyond (2014) p. 20
  8. ↑ Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1988) p. 76

External links

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