Robert C. Bak (born Bak Róbert; 14 October 1908,
Budapest
Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...
– 15 September 1974, New York City) was a Hungarian-born
psychoanalyst
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk th ...
who moved to the United States in 1941, and eventually became President of the
New York Psychoanalytic Society.
Training and career
Bak underwent a training analysis with
Imre Hermann
Imre () is a Hungarian masculine first name, which is also in Estonian use, where the corresponding name day is 10 April. It has been suggested that it relates to the name Emeric, Emmerich or Heinrich. Its English equivalents are Emery and He ...
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.
He published some 25 articles in Hungarian, German, and English. From the start, Bak was concerned to chart early object relations, and their distortions: he saw the sexual
perversions as attempts to undo object separation, and also charted the emergence of
grandiosity
In psychology, grandiosity is a sense of superiority, uniqueness, or invulnerability that is unrealistic and not based on personal capability. It may be expressed by exaggerated beliefs regarding one's abilities, the belief that few other peopl ...
in ego-regression.
Bak also reiterated the importance of the idea of the
phallic mother in the perverse denial of castration.
Characteristics
A flamboyant and witty lover of the good life, Bak had a troubled marital relationship, and no children.
When asked whether or not he would describe as
transference
Transference () is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely co ...
a relationship in which each party saw the other through a veil of unconscious
fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical elements, often including Fictional universe, imaginary places and Legendary creature, creatures.
The genre's roots lie in oral traditions, ...
, instead of as they were, he is said to have replied ironically, "I'd call that life".
Janet Malcolm
Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová; July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, staff journalist at ''The New Yorker'' magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague. She was the author ...
, ''Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession'' (1988) p. 76
Selected writings
*'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
References
External links
Bak, Robert C. on encyclopedia.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bak, Robert C.
American psychoanalysts
Jewish psychoanalysts
1908 births
1974 deaths
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
20th-century American psychologists