Obituary Notice: Hilde Kirsch

Hilde Kirsch died just before Christmas, 1978. She will be an irreplaceable presence, especially for the Los Angeles Jungians. Together with her husband James, and Max Zeller—also lost to us—she was a principal founding member of the Los Angeles Society and the training analyst for many of its members. She gave many seminars to generations of candidates, and served repeatedly on admission, promotion and certifying boards. But interpenetrating all these activities was her presence. A deeply introverted woman, she none the less energised the Jungian community in Los Angeles. She activated the growing edge of all those that she touched, and they were many.

Despite her communal family, she was passionately devoted to her own, as her sons Jerry and Jimmy Silber and Tom Kirsch can testify. When she told me of Tom's gestation and birth in London in 1936 it moved me to tears. She lived in a world of introverted feeling, intense, warm and nourishing. Her compilation and publication of The well-tended tree—a Festschrift for James's seventieth birthday—was a tangible, sensation demonstration of these qualities. For this tribute she had the help and support of her friends Gilda Frantz and Lore Zeller.

Her own Festschrift for her seventy-fifth birthday is a joy to behold and to read. The cover is an explosion of colour by the painter, Sam Francis. Inside are letters of love, poems, paintings—a profusion of the variations of Eros that she engendered. My own offering was a pair of scallop shells—the Coquille St. Jacques that pilgrims of the Middle Ages wore when they made the long trek to Santiago de Compostella. I quote: ‘In 1933 the Kirschs were forced to flee Germany. But they had no outer goal to sustain them—only the inner experience of the self and its promise of fulfilment. First they went to Palestine, and then came to London, where Tom was born—a love child if ever there was one. Then they went to New York and finally to Los Angeles, where they sired the Society of Jungian