Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (german: Edith Jacobssohn; September 10, 1897 – December 8, 1978) was a German psychoanalyst. Her major contributions to psychoanalytic thinking dealt with the development of the sense of identity and self-esteem and with an understanding of depression and psychosis. She was able to integrate the tripartite structural model of classic psychoanalysis with the theory of object relations into a revised drive theory. Thereby, she increased the treatment possibilities of the more disturbed pre-oedipal patients.

Biography

Born into a Jewish family to a physician father and musician mother, Edith Jacobson was a physician and later she became also a psychoanalyst. In 1922 she received her medical degree, after she attended medical school at Jena, Heidelberg, and at Munich. From 1922 until 1925 she did her pediatric internship at the University Hospital in Heidelberg. She develops interest in psychoanalysis during that period. In her internship she observed instances of childhood sexuality. She began training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1925 and her analyst was Otto Fenichel.Edith Jacobson at answers.com
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In 1930, she became a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and was soon presenting papers that dealt with her interest in the problems of the superego and its development.Edith Jacobson at Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing
/ref> In 1934 she became a training analyst at the Berlin Institute.

In 1935, the Nazis imprisoned Jacobson because she refused to divulge information about a patient. In 1938, she became ill with Graves' disease and diabetes; while hospitalised in Leipzig, she escaped to Czechoslovakia. Shortly after her escape, she emigrated to the U.S., where she soon became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In the U.S., she became a training analyst and a teacher.

Jacobson's theoretical and clinical work was about ego and superego functioning, the processes of identification underlying the development of ego and superego, and the role of the ego and superego in depression. In her writings, she tries to construct an overarching developmental perspective. This perspective would do justice to drives and to real objects and their representations in building up the ego and superego. Jacobson was interested in the fate of self-representations in depressive and psychotic patients. She introduced the concept of self-representation with Heinz Hartmann. In 1964's ''The Self and the Object World'', she presented a revised drive theory.

Revised drive theory

Jacobson was the first theorist to attempt to integrate drive theory with structural and object relations theory in a comprehensive, developmental synthesis, and her influence on subsequent work in this area has been profound. She built on the contributions of Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, René Spitz, and Margaret Mahler. In 1964, she wrote ''The Self and the Object World'', in which she revised Sigmund Freud's theory about the psychosexual phases in the development, and his conceptualizations of id, ego, and superego.

General concepts of the revised drive theory

In Freud's point of view, drives were innate