Edward Bibring1

You may wonder why I should be the one to try to conjure up a picture of what was enduring in Edward Bibring, before you who have seen so much more of him during these last eighteen years. The reason for this assignment lies in the more distant past. Our lives—his and mine—have run a parallel course during a crucial period, the years of our early adulthood which were also our formative years as psychoanalysts. We were then members of a small, closely knit group of enthusiastic young men and women who were very close to each other in personal loyalty and in the constant exchange of ideas on anything that came within the reach of our insatiable eyes. There developed between us in these years a degree of mutual understanding that made it unnecessary to use many words for the expression of our feelings or ideas; a hint, an unfinished sentence, was sufficient and the other could correctly guess the rest. This kind of almost tacit understanding has survived twenty years of physical separation.

Let me speak to you first of Bibring's scientific work. His written contributions to our science are few in number but high in quality. Among them there are important papers on paranoia, on types of psychopathic personality, and on repetition compulsion. There is a penetrating study of the Kleinian school of thought in psychoanalysis. There are his contributions to the understanding of depression; the latter were written at a time when he braced himself for his long and final ordeal, and they therefore have, in addition to their scientific value, much of autobiographic interest. There are, above all, his three monographs: on the theory of instincts, on the theory of psychoanalytic therapy, and on the tools of psychotherapy in general. All three deal with fundamental problems of our field, and all three belong to the classics of psychoanalytic literature. Their merits lie not in spectacular new discoveries but in the comprehensive way in which a large and complicated terr