Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
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Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (22 February 1936 – 8 August 2024) was a German psychoanalyst. She worked in private practice and as a training analyst at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytical Institute.[1] She is best known for her research on the original manuscripts of Sigmund Freud, for which she won several awards, and much of which was incorporated into the Revised Standard Edition of Freud's work.[2][3][4] Her familiarity with Freud's manuscripts led her to be considered the true successor to James Strachey, the original editor and translator of the Standard Edition.[4]
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis was born on 22 February 1936.[1] She attended university from 1955 to 1959 at Ulm School of Design.[1][5] After completing her studies, she became an editor at S. Fischer Verlag, where she contributed to the publication of Sigmund Freud's works from the 1960s onwards. She eventually underwent psychoanalytic training between 1972 and 1978 at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt (then directed by Alexander Mitscherlich) to become a psychoanalyst herself.[1] She married the lawyer and data-protection expert Spiros Simitis on 3 August 1963. Grubrich-Simitis died on 8 August 2024, at the age of 88.[6]
Freud
Grubrich-Simitis worked for several decades as an academic researcher on the work Sigmund Freud on whom she published several substantial volumes, contributing to a greater appreciation of Freud's handwritten work and composition process. One of her major contributions to Freud scholarship was her discovery of the manuscript of one of Freud's unpublished metapsychological papers, which until then were thought to have all been lost or destroyed by Freud.[7][8] In addition, she also published on the impact of the Holocaust on the descendants of the survivors.[9]
Since the 1960s she worked for S. Fischer Verlag, initially as a publishing-editor, but eventually assumed greater editorial responsibility as the scope of the projects and their level of required expertise grew.[10] Some of the major projects she was involved with at S. Fischer include the 11-volume Studienausgabe (the German adaptation of the Standard Edition), the regular paperback editions of Freud's work (Werke im Taschenbuch), and the five-volume Freud-Martha Bernays correspondence (Die Brautbriefe).[10][1][6] Recently she was also a co-editor of the publisher's Yearbook of Psychoanalysis.[3][11]
