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The long-established editor of the Freud editions published by S. Fischer Verlag, of Frankfurt am Main, has here produced an astonishing
and admirable book, the fruit of labors extending over three decades. Responding to criticism of Strachey's English translation of Freud and also of the German language editions, about whose “unsatisfactory nature” Strachey himself had complained, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has turned her attention to the original Freud manuscripts kept in the Sigmund Freud Archives to examine the creative process lying concealed in the manuscripts, to throw light on Freud's method of working, this being “the only Freud disclosure that is a fitting object of our curiosity” (p. 24). Grubrich-Simitis sees her project of going “back to Freud's texts” as a form of opposition to the overemphasis on the person of Freud and as a “sublimatory injunction to psychoanalysts” to identify “with the radical method of psychoanalysis, which is so difficult to learn and so deserving and needful of protection, as still the most effective instrument for the exploration of human subjectivity” (p. 23).
In the first chapter, the author reconstructs the “history of the editions,” in Vienna until 1938, London from 1938 to 1960, and Frankfurt from 1960 to the present. Freud appears in the twofold role of creator and promoter of his work, who had to form an institution for himself; and since a word-based image of man lay at the heart of that institution, it needed a publishing house to convey his works and those of other psychoanalytic authors to a reading public. The description of Freud's deliberate control of publication policy exemplifies the author's immense knowledge of her subject. Freud's reluctant dependence on the publishers Franz Deuticke and Hugo Heller in Vienna came to an end with the establishment, in 1919, of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, with resources from a foundation set up by the Hungarian indust