Obituary Notice

James Kirsch, one of the remaining few of a rapidly vanishing group who worked with Jung himself, died on March 17, 1989, at his home after a brief illness. Although he had become physically weaker over the years, his mind was alert until a day before his death. He is survived by four sons, Michael, Thomas, James Silber and Gerald Silber, and one daughter, Ruth Kirsch.

James Kirsch was born on July 21, 1901 in Guatemala City, Guatemala, the second youngest of seven children in a German Jewish business family. When he was seven the family moved back to Berlin, where James did all his schooling. His father remained in Guatemala in business, returning to Germany biennially. With the advent of World War I there was a period of nine years when he did not see his father.

Instead of going into the family business he chose medicine, studying at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg and receiving his medical degree from Heidelberg in 1924. In 1926 he began practising psychiatry in Berlin and became staff psychiatrist at the Psychiatric Sanatorium in Berlin-Lankwitz. He then undertook a psychoanalysis which eventually led him to seek out Jung in Zürich in 1929. He began an analysis with Jung and also with Frau Sussman in Berlin, and later became a founder member of the first Jungian group in Berlin.

The day after Hitler came to power in 1933 James applied for emigration papers and left for Palestine, encouraging all those around him to leave as well. He practised there for two years but missed Europe, and when the Home Office in England offered him a chance to practise in London he took it. By this time he had married Hilde Kirschstein Silber, who was also to become an analyst. In England he became one of the founder members of the London Analytical Psychology Club, and practised until September 1940 in London. His lecture, ‘Religious factors in the unconscious’, was the first to be published by the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in their pamphlet series.

During the Battle of Bri