Jolande Jacobi (25 March 1890 – 1 April 1973) was a Swiss psychologist, best remembered for her work with

Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

, and for her writings on

Jungian psychology Analytical psychology ( de , Analytische Psychologie, sometimes translated as analytic psychology and referred to as Jungian analysis) is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" ...

Life and career

Born in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

(then under

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

) as Jolande Szekacs, she became known as Jolande Jacobi after her marriage at the age of nineteen to Andor Jacobi. She spent part of her life in Budapest (until 1919), part in Vienna (until 1938) and part in Zurich. Her parents were

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

, but Jacobi converted first to the Reformed faith (in 1911), later in life to

Roman Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...

(in 1934). Jacobi met Jung in 1927, and later was influential in the establishment of the C.G. Jung Institute for Analytical Psychology in Zurich in 1948, where she was nicknamed 'The Locomotive' for her extraversion and administrative drive. Her students at the C.G. Jung Institute included

Wallace Clift Wallace Bruce Clift, Jr. (March 27, 1926 – February 5, 2018) was an American priest and academic. He was the author of several books and articles in the field of the psychology of religion and a professor emeritus at the University of Denver, wh ...

. She died in Zurich, leaving one new book (entitled: "The tree as a symbol") uncompleted.

Writing

Jacobi's first publication was an outline of Jung's psychology in its classical form, expressing his ideas clearly and simply, an outline which was to be translated into fifteen languages and go through many successful editions. Jung himself would call her writings "a ''very'' good presentation of my concepts". Her subsequent books continued to offer clear expositions of central, classic Jungian themes.

Controversy

In the sixties, Jacobi was involved in a controversy at the Zurich Institute involving the question of

boundary Boundary or Boundaries may refer to: * Border, in political geography Entertainment * ''Boundaries'' (2016 film), a 2016 Canadian film * ''Boundaries'' (2018 film), a 2018 American-Canadian road trip film *Boundary (cricket), the edge of the pla ...

violations with a patient on the part of the analyst

James Hillman James Hillman (April 12, 1926 – October 27, 2011) was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practi ...

, something to which Jacobi took strong exception. The result was a firmer policy on, and greater explication of the need to avoid such violations at the Institute.

Criticism

Jacobi's exposition of Jungianism is open to criticism for over-simplification and reification of Jung's more amorphous concepts of the unconscious. Her belief that “The course of individuation exhibits a certain formal regularity...this absolute order of the unconscious” laid her open to the charge of an over-literal interpretation of Jung; while her diagrams of the psyche – one with the ego at the centre, one with it at the periphery – inevitably provided only one-dimensional snapshots of the richness of psychic experience.Andrew Samuels, ''Jung and the Post-Jungians'' (1986) p. 32 and p. 8

Works include

* Jacobi, J. 'The Process of Individuation' ''Journal of Analytical Psychology'' 111 (1958) * Jacobi, J. 'Symbols in an Individual Analysis', in C. G. Jung ed, ''Man and his Symbols'' (1978 964 Part 5 * Jacobi, J. (1942) ''The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction'' * Jacobi, J. (1959) ''Complex, archetype and symbol in the psychology of C.G. Jung'' (translated by R. Mannheim). New York: Princeton. * Jacobi, J., ''Masks of the Soul'' Translated by Ean Begg, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobi, Jolande Jungian psychologists 1890 births 1973 deaths Hungarian Jews Converts to Roman Catholicism from Calvinism Hungarian emigrants to Switzerland Hungarian Roman Catholics Swiss Roman Catholics People from Budapest Swiss women psychologists 20th-century psychologists