Robert C. Bak (1908–1974) was a Hungarian-born psychoanalyst who moved to the United States in 1941, and eventually became President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.
Training and career
editBak underwent a training analysis with Imre Hermann and joined the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society in 1938, only to be forced to flee to the United 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 castration.[5]
Characteristics
editA 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
edit- ___'Dissolution of the Ego, Mannerism and Delusion of Grandeur' Journal of Nervous and Medical Disease XCVIII (1943)
- ___'The Phallic Woman' Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 23 (1968)
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ J. Meszaros, Ferenczi and Beyond (2014) p. 162–164
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 437 and 595
- ^ S. Taylor, Hans Bellmer (2002) p. 187
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 421 and 595
- ^ E. Becker, The Denial of Death (2007) p. 224
- ^ W. S. Poland, Meeting the Darkness (1996) p. 176
- ^ J. Meszaros, Ferenczi and Beyond (2014) p. 20
- ^ Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1988) p. 76