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
The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute — founded in 1911 by Dr. Abraham A. Brill — is the oldest psychoanalytic organization in the United States.
The charter members were: Louis Edward Bisch, Brill, Horace Westlake Frink, Frede ...
.
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 Henry. ...
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
Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term ''perversion'' can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are con ...
as attempts to undo object separation, and also charted the emergence of
grandiosity
In the field of psychology, the term grandiosity refers to an unrealistic sense of superiority, characterized by a sustained view of one's self as better than others, which is expressed by disdainfully criticising them (contempt), overinflating ...
in ego-regression.
Bak also reiterated the importance of the idea of the
phallic mother
In psychoanalysis, phallic woman is a concept to describe a woman with the symbolic attributes of the phallus. More generally, it describes any woman possessing traditionally masculine characteristics.
Phallic mother
Freud considered that at th ...
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 (german: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the "feelings, attitudes, or desires" a person had about one thing are subconsciously projected onto the here-and-now Other. It usually concerns feelings from a ...
a relationship in which each party saw the other through a veil of unconscious
fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving Magic (supernatural), magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore. Its roots are in oral traditions, which then became fantasy ...
, instead of as they were, he is said to have replied ironically, "I'd call that life".
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
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bak, Robert C.
American psychoanalysts
Jewish psychoanalysts
1908 births
1974 deaths
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
20th-century American psychologists