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This is a major work - the most important contribution to Freud scholarship since The Origins of Psychoanalysis was published in the early 1950s. The book is divided into three parts, the second of which is the main source of interest. The first part consists in an essay on the history of German-language editions of Freud. This is a comprehensive account, which reveals the complexity of internal and external factors that influenced not only the publication but sometimes also the content of Freud's works. One is struck by the amount of time and energy that Freud and his early followers devoted to the practical task of disseminating his ideas.
The second part of the book reports on preliminary research, conducted at the Freud Archive in Washington, in preparation for a proposed new German edition of Freud's collected writings. It has long been recognized that the existing German editions are - to say the least - ‘unsatisfactory’ (Strachey, in Standard Edition 1, p. xv). Grubrich-Simitis wants to establish the new edition on exacting historical-critical principles. She therefore considers the original handwritten manuscripts upon which the existing printed texts were based. Her description and analysis of these documents fill eight chapters.
The first of these chapters describes Freud's approach to the act of writing itself, based on a brief survey of his own comments in this regard. We learn that the widespread belief that writing came easily to Freud - that masterful lectures, articles and books simply flowed fully formed from his pen - is an idealization. Grubrich-Simitis describes the exacting internal and external conditions Freud required in order to be able to write. Of particular interest is her discussion of the depressive and maternal aspects of his creativity. However, she repeatedly emphasizes that it is not her intention to study Freud's personality. In an age when Freud scholarship increasingly threatens to degenerate into investigative journalism, her inte