With the death of Dr. Grete Bibring we reach another landmark in the passing of a generation. She was a distinguished figure among that migration of intellectuals that fled from Nazi persecution, and whose presence has enlivened our cultural life for the past forty years. Long accustomed to their contributions in the arts, sciences and scholarship, we are reminded by her death of how few remain and how irreplaceable they are.
Born just within the nineteenth century, Grete Bibring and her husband Edward belonged to the second generation of Freud's followers, flourishing in Vienna during the 1920s, which seemed to include many brilliant analytic couples: the Deutsches, Waelders, Krises and Hartmanns. As experienced analysts, some already eminent, these European émigrés transformed the American psychoanalytic scene from its pioneer beginnings to its fullest flowering, during and after the second World War. Like some of her European colleagues, Dr. Bibring seemed to acquire renewed vigor in her new surroundings, partly in response to a favorable climate in American post-war psychiatry and partly through her selective but enthusiastic appreciation of our local traditions. Unlike other émigrés, who remained full-time analysts in the European style, Dr. Bibring soon joined the staff of the Beth Israel Hospital and established one of the first psychiatric teaching departments in 1946. She became the first woman professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961; women medical students had been admitted only since 1945. After she became emerita in 1965, Dr. Bibring continued to teach a special seminar at the Radcliffe Institute on the development of professional women.
Despite her duties as chief of an expanding department, Dr. Bibring never ceased to be an analyst. Like her husband, she devoted long hours to treating patients, supervising candidates in their “control” analyses, and teaching seminars; her remaining evenings were given over to the committee work of the Institute. She held many offices at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, including the presidency from 1955 to 1958, and she was elected president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1962.
Although she adhered to the classical concepts of analysis she had learned from Freud and his immediate circle, she applied analytic theory to the study of pregnancy as a “normal maturational crisis” in the life of the average woman. With a succession of gifted collaborators, her interest in normal pregnancy became a major research project at the Beth Israel, and its results are still in the process of publication.
Between 1928 and 1976, Dr. Bibring published over thirty papers, in both medical and psychoanalytic journals, and as chapters in books edited by others. She was the co-author, with Dr. Ralph M. Kahana, of Lectures in Medical Psychiatry (1969) and editor of The Teaching of Dynamic Psychiatry (1968). Of these, her first four papers were published in Europe and the last ten have appeared since her retirement in 1965; she also participated in a documentary television program with Dr. Oliver Cope and gave a major address at MIT on “Freud and the Understanding of Human Nature.” Perhaps this pattern reflected Dr. Bibring's creative response to her new life in America, which exemplified a synthesis of the best in European analytic traditions and the Boston medical scene.
The first sign of Dr. Bibring's progressive osteoporosis occurred with the fracture of a lumbar vertebrae in 1963 at an international psychoanalytic congress in Stockholm. Other fractures followed at intervals and gradually made travel impossible. In dealing with her complex illnesses, Dr. Bibring showed her characteristic reasonableness, and her capacity for detached, humorous self-observation. Her intense attachments to family and friends never changed, nor did she ever lose her interest in their lives and troubles, or her avid curiosity about events in the world, in the arts, and in the local scientific scene. She continued to see patients until a few weeks before her death of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 10, 1977.
Sanford Gifford
This obituary was excerpted from an article in the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin, November-December 1977.