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Ilse Grubrich-Simitis is one of the finest readers and interpreters of Freud's texts. She combines a number of virtues that are all too rare. As an editor at S. Fischer Verlag, the German publisher of Freud, she worked closely on the publication of Freud's texts. She has in addition made a thorough study of Freud's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. A practicing psychoanalyst with an ear and an eye for the nuanced meanings of slight variations, she is also a sharp critic of the Freud-bashing that has become an international sport. In her Back to Freud's Texts (Grubrichs-Simitis 1996), which bears the subtitle Making Silent Documents Speak, she has already demonstrated how paying meticulous attention to Freud's unpublished drafts and manuscripts deepens and enriches our understanding of his texts. This is a matter not of idle pedantry, but rather of showing in detail how a subtle appreciation of context, as well as of Freud's working habits, enables us to make his texts speak in new and fresh ways.
The present book consists of an introduction and two previously published essays. In the introduction she forcefully responds to the virulent attacks on psychoanalysis that have become so popular. She is most irritated and offended by the tendency to make all sorts of outrageous claims about what Freud presumably said and did that are clearly refuted by turning to his texts. Her two essays are intended to illustrate what we can learn when we adopt the attitude of “evenly suspended attention” that the psychoanalyst adopts in respect to an analysand. The first essay deals with Studies on Hysteria, coauthored with Breuer, the second with Moses and Monotheism, written some forty years later—the last book Freud published in his lifetime. It might seem odd to bring these two essays together in a single book. Elizabeth Bott