Zurück Zu Freuds Texten: Stumme Dokumente Sprechen Machen by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis Frankfurt:  S. Fischer, 1993,  399 pp.

Back to Freud's Texts is the most important book ever written about Freud as an author, and I hope that it will be translated into English soon. In a short review I can only call attention to some of the riches Grubrich-Simitis offers—riches which result from preliminary investigations into Freud's manuscripts. Much work remains to be done, and her investigations suggest that it should be very rewarding indeed.

After an introduction explaining how she came to explore the manuscripts, Grubrich-Simitis divides her book into three parts: 1) a history of the German editions of Freud's writings; 2) a tour through the manuscripts, generously illustrated with facsimiles and transcriptions; 3) a sketch of what a historical-critical edition of Freud might look like. She rightly calls the second (and longest) part the heart of the book, but the first and third are important, too. Part I traces the publishing history of Freud's works from Vienna (from the first articles in technical journals to the effective closure of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag by the Gestapo in 1938) to London (the Imago Publishing Company, 1938-1960) and finally to Frankfurt (S. Fischer Verlag, 1960 to the present). One knew that Freud took a strong interest in publishing, but Grubrich-Simitis makes it clearer than ever before just how concerned he was with the publication of his works and with the International Psychoanalytic Press. The section on Frankfurt, however, is the most interesting and revealing. Grubrich-Simitis is too modest to say so, but since 1963 she has been, while an editor at Fischer and since her departure from the press, the moving force behind the yet to be realized historical-critical edition of Freud's Complete Works. She has played a major role in many of the achievements of the Frankfurt years—the index and supplemental volume to the Gesammelte Werke, the Studienausgabe, editions of