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Ilse Grubrich-Simitis – training and supervising analyst in the German Psychoanalytic Association – was the preeminent Freud scholar of her generation, second only to James Strachey in the history of Freud scholarship. Her enormous contribution was formally acknowledged when the Sigourney Award was bestowed upon her in 1998 – and in the same year, when she won the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose from the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
Despite her considerable accomplishments, she avoided the limelight, and seldom spoke about herself. Some of the details I will convey here are, therefore, probably unknown to most of her colleagues. They draw mainly from a public interview which was conducted by her close friend Hermann Schultz, in the form of a “Meet the Analyst” session at the Chicago congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 2009. In many places I will parapharase what Ilse herself told Hermann Schultz about her fascinating life and work.
She was a “lay” analyst, deeply steeped in the humanities. She was imbued with historical methods and with texts, images and symbolic systems. This, rather than medicine or natural science, was her point of contact with psychoanalysis. She made fundamental contributions to the scholarly study and publication of Freud’s writings, helping to reintroduce his ideas to the German-speaking world after the major breach caused by the Nazi regime.
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis graduated from the “Hochschule für Gestaltung” in Ulm (where she was born): a then newly founded academy of design, visual communication and information science. This academy no longer exists, but it became legendary. She studied there from 1955 to 1959, at a time when the German nation was just beginning to confront the full extent of the horrors that were perpetrated in its name during the Nazi era. The founder of the Hochschule in Ulm was Inge Aicher-Scholl, whose two siblings were executed in 1943 by the Nazis, due to their participat