Grete Lehner Bibring—(1899–1977)

With the passing of Grete Lehner Bibring we come almost to the close of a psychoanalytic era. Grete Bibring and her husband, Edward, who died in 1959, were part of that second generation of psychoanalysts who had grown up professionally and made their careers around Freud. There are only a very few of this group left and the Bibrings were amongst the most outstanding of them.

Born in Vienna a year before the turn of the century, the youngest of an upper middle class, non-conformist Jewish family, Grete spent half of her life there, absorbing and contributing to the fullness of its intellectual, aesthetic and scientific tradition. There she remained until the political instability and rise of Nazism drove her and the entire psychoanalytic movement out of Austria. Like others of their analytic colleagues, the Bibrings refused to emigrate, partly because Freud was unwilling to leave and partly because of the prevailing belief that 'It can't happen here.' However, with the anschluss in 1938, the Bibrings left for England on a group visa with Freud and his family and other editors of the psychoanalytic press, since Edward Bibring was a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse at that time.

Grete Bibring was introduced to psychoanalysis during the last year of the First World War, while she was still a student in the classical Humanistic Gymnasium for Girls. She had heard about Freud in psychology class and bought two of his books which added to her curiosity. Her interest deepened once she became a medical student at the University of Vienna and before long she, together with several fellow medical students, Edward Bibring, Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich, originated an informal group to study psychoanalysis. They visited Freud during his office hours, seeking explanations for some of his assertions, and soon he invited them to attend the weekly meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This led Grete to begin her own psychoanaly