Edith Jacobson

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Edith Jacobson (née Jacobssohn , born September 10, 1897 in Haynau ; † December 8, 1978 in Rochester ( New York )) was a German doctor and psychoanalyst who was arrested in 1935 for supporting the resistance against National Socialism , but was able to flee in 1938 . From 1954 to 1956 she was chair of the New York Psychoanalytic Society . Today she is regarded as the leading theorist and clinician of post-Freudian American psychoanalysis and as "one of the most important representatives of the theory of object relations and ego psychology ".

Life and work in Germany

Edith Jacobssohn came from a Jewish family of doctors, her father Jacques Jacobssohn was a doctor , her mother Pelagia, nee. Pulvermann, was a musician . She studied medicine in Jena , Heidelberg (where she took part in exercises on Freud's psychoanalysis by Hans W. Gruhle in 1919/1920 and in a course with Viktor von Weizsäcker on the basic problems of natural philosophy ) and Munich , where she took her state examination in 1922. She then completed part of her internship at the Children's Clinic of the University Clinic in Heidelberg , where she received her doctorate in 1923 , and the rest at the Internal Clinic of the University Clinic in Munich. Here she met the psychosomaticist Gustav Richard Heyer , from whom she not only learned the method of hypnosis , but also became more and more familiar with psychoanalysis . In 1925 she therefore went to Berlin , where she worked at Hermann Oppenheim 's private clinic and immediately began her analytical training, initially with Arthur Kronfeld at the Institute for Sexology (who from 1928 onwards also supported her in setting up her practice by referring mainly well-off patients) from 1926 at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute , where she four years at Otto Fenichel in training analysis went. In 1930 she was therefore an ao. Elected member of the German Psychoanalytical Society (election on January 18, 1930 after her admission lecture contribution to anti-social character formation on December 10, 1929), in 1931 full member. From 1933 she was a member of the teaching committee and in 1934 she became a training analyst for the DPG.

Edith Jacobssohn was involved in Fenichel's so-called “children's seminar” , was one of the recipients of Fenichel's circulars, and from 1932 worked in Wilhelm Reich's Marxist study group , with whom she also worked at a sexual counseling center for young people in Berlin-Charlottenburg . At the end of the 1920s, she gave lectures to the “ Unified Association for Proletarian Sexual Reform and Maternity Protection ”, which was founded by Reich and is closely related to the KPD . She took part in the "interdenominational working group" of Walter Schindler , which, after Werner Kemper's memory, was inspired by Arthur Kronfeld , and in which well-known psychotherapists such as Johannes Heinrich Schultz , Alexander Herzberg , Manès Sperber , Fritz Künkel , Karen Horney and Harald Schultz -Hencke u. a. participated.

Although she was aware of her endangerment, she decided - as one of the few Jewish analysts - in 1933 not to emigrate . She joined the Marxist-oriented resistance group New Beginning and treated other members of the group, although the DPG had prescribed political abstinence from its members . She organized reading groups and sent reports on the situation in Nazi Germany to Otto Fenichel, who was living in exile in Prague, who passed this information on from there. On October 24, 1935, she was arrested by the Gestapo in her apartment in Berlin-Wilmersdorf for refusing to disclose information about a patient. In a political trial she was sentenced to two and a quarter years in prison for high treason . Immediately after her imprisonment, she began to write personal notes about her existence-threatening life situation; She also wrote poems and a psychoanalytic study (later published as “Considerations on physical and psychological imprisonment”). These records went undetected for several decades and appeared 80 years later, in 2015, under the title Prison Records . A work on the female superego was written in prison, smuggled out and read - anonymously - at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Marienbad in 1936 . In this text she criticized Sigmund Freud's theory of femininity. In her view, in order to develop a stable ego and independent super-ego , instead of taking over the man's super-ego , a woman must learn to accept her female genital as valuable and find a way back to maternal ego and super-ego identifications Find. A second work on the period of imprisonment deals with the “psychological effects of the prison stay on female political prisoners”.

In prison, Jacobssohn developed diabetes and Graves' disease . She was given prison leave because of it. From the hospital in Leipzig, she managed to escape to Czechoslovakia in early 1938 . From there it made its way to the United States , where it quickly established itself. After emigrating, she consistently called herself Jacobson .

Forty years in America

Jacobson arrived in New York on October 9, 1938. In 1939 she passed a language test and the American State Board Examination. In the same year she opened a private practice in New York. Given the hostility of American analysts to so-called lay analysis , the fact that she was a doctor facilitated her establishment as an analyst.

In 1941 she became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute , worked in this institution from 1942 as a training analyst and was president of the association from 1954 to 1956. She was also visiting professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Montefiore Hospital . Her main works were written in the United States, through which she became internationally known. In her work, the focus is not on the instinctual fate but on the intrapsychic structures. Edith Jacobson was inspired by Sándor Radó's distinction between “good” and “bad” objects and Heinz Hartmann 's ego psychology .

In 1964 her book The Self and the Object World was published , in which she tries to integrate drive theory and object relationship theory . It is considered to be one of the most important works of psychoanalysis. Using case histories, she describes how regression processes in depressive and borderline patients lead to severe impairment of object relationships and the ego and superego functions, accompanied by the dissolution of identity-forming identifications. According to Jacobson, these processes also provide information about the normal development of identity. Starting from an investigation of the infant's instinctual manifestations at the level of a still undifferentiated psychosomatic ego-id matrix, the “earliest psychophysical self”, Edith Jacobson showed how the child's self and object representations are established and what role they play in the development of object relationships and play in creating an identity.

Edith Jacobson's work on depression is also referred to as a “classic of psychoanalysis” . According to her, all depressive states lies a through frustrations triggered narcissistic conflict between the desire certain self Imago and Imago a failing, devalued self based. The severity of a depression depends on the one hand on the degree of frustration and on the other hand on the type and intensity of the instincts involved. She also suspected neurophysiological disorders in psychotic depression.

Although her professional work was recognized in the USA, she mainly socialized with other exiles in her private life.

Jacobson was no longer politically active in the USA. Something of her social attitude was still expressed in the low fees she was charging in New York.

Edith Jacobson remained unmarried and childless. She died on December 8, 1978 in Rochester , New York .

Memorial plaque for Edith Jacobson in Emser Strasse 39d in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, from the series Mit Freud in Berlin

A glass panel in Berlin

With Freud in Berlin is the name of a project of 16 glass panels in Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg, which was financed through the city tours "... on the trail of psychoanalysis". A plaque was unveiled on every city tour, which normally took place as an accompanying program to a psychoanalytic congress. The sponsors were passengers, institutions or congress participants. The panels are - with one exception - made of glass and allow a reflection or a shadow on the wall depending on the incidence of light. Each time a plaque was unveiled, a poster was also created with the most important dates of the honored person and pictures. On April 30, 2005, the memorial plaque for Edith Jacobson was unveiled at Emser Straße 39d, sponsors were Thekla Nordwind , Ulrike May and analytical child and adolescent psychotherapists . The occasion was the 52nd annual conference of the Association of Analytical Psychotherapists for Children and Adolescents (VAKJP). The conference was entitled: The body as a vessel. From the psyche to the body, from the body to the psyche.

Publications

In German language

  • Contribution to anti-social character formation, in International Journal for Psychoanalysis, Ed. Sigmund Freud, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1930, Vol. 16, pp. 210–235 online (click to turn the pages)
    • also abridged in: Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, Verlag wie vor, 1930, no. 4, pp. 291–298 udT: A womanish boy and his healing. Character disorders and perverse traits as a result of inconsistent upbringing.
  • with Arthur Kronfeld : Psychoanalysis. In: Georg and Felix Klemperer (eds.): New German Clinic. Vol. 9. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin 1932, pp. 274-318.
  • Ways of the female superego education, in: International journal for psychoanalysis, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 23, 1937, pp. 402-412 online
  • Psychotic conflict and reality. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1972
  • The self and the world of objects. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1973
  • Depression. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1983
  • Prison records. Ed. Judith Kessler, Roland Kaufhold . Psychosocial, Giessen 2015

In English

  • Depression: The Oedipus complex in the development of the depressive mechanisms. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943): 541-560
  • The effect of disappointment on ego and superego formation in normal and depressive development. Psychoanalytic Review 33 (1946): 129-147
  • Observations of the psychological effect of the imprisonment on femal political prisoners. In: KR Eissler (Ed.): Searchlights on delinquancy. International Universities Press, New York 1949, 341-368
  • Adolescent moods and the remodeling of psychic structures in adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 16 (1961): 164-183
  • The Self and the Object World. Int 'University Press, New York 1964
  • Psychotic Conflict and Reality. Int 'University Press, New York 1967, Hogarth Press, London 1964
  • Depression: Comparative studies of normal, neurotic and psychotic conditions. Int 'University Press, New York 1971

About Edith Jacobson

  • Werner F. Bonin: The great psychologists. Econ, Düsseldorf 1983
  • Karen Brecht: The "Edith Jacobson Case." Political Resistance, a Dilemma for the IPA. Psa info no. 28 (1987) 3-8
  • Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger M. Hermanns, Isidor J. Kaminer and Dierk H. Juelich (eds.): "Here life goes on in a very strange way ..." On the history of psychoanalysis in Germany. Kellner, Hamburg 1985
  • Otto Fenichel: 119 circular letters. B. 1: Europe (1934-1938). Ed. by Elke Mühlleitner and Johannes Reichmayr. Stroemfeld, Basel 1998
  • Otto F. Kernberg : The contribution of Edith Jacobson: An overview. J Am Psychoanal Ass 1979: 27, 793-819
  • Edward Kronold : Edith Jacobson 1897–1978. Psa Quart 49 (1980): 505-507
  • Regine Lockot: The Purification of Psychoanalysis. Tubingen 1994
  • Ulrike May and Elke Mühlleitner (eds.): Edith Jacobson. You and your objects. Life, work, memories. Psychosocial, Gießen 2005 (Review by Roland Kaufhold in: Psyche 6/2007: 632–634)
  • David Milrod: Interviews with Edith Jacobson. Abraham A. Brill Library, New York Psychoanalytic Institute 1971
  • Elke Mühlleitner: Edith Jacobson. In: Gerhard Stumm , Alfred Pritz , Paul Gumhalter u. a. (Ed.): Personal dictionary of psychotherapy. Springer, Vienna 2005, p. 226f ISBN 3-211-83818-X
  • Christiana Puschak: "... until people have matured into love." Edith Jacobson 1897 - 1978, in: "Zwischenwelt. Literature, Resistance, Exile." Ed. Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft , vol. 33, no . 1–2, Vienna 2016 ISSN  1606-4321 p. 9f.
  • Michael Schröter , Elke Mühlleitner and Ulrike May: Edith Jacobssohn: Your years in Germany (1897–1938). Psyche 58, 2004, 544-560
  • S. Tuttman: Edith Jacobson's major contributions to psychoanalytic theory of development . The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 45 (1985): 135-147
  • S. Tuttman, C. Kayne & M. Zimmermann (Eds.): Object and self. A developmental approach. Essays in honor of Edith Jacobson. Int. University Press, New Yorek 1981

Web links

Commons : Edith Jacobson  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

proof

  1. ↑ "With Freud in Berlin" 16 panels, financed by the city tours "... on the trail of psychoanalysis" ( Memento from June 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Psychoanalysts in Europe. Biographical lexicon
  3. ↑ Matthias Reichelt, The black notebook. The prison records of the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobsons are a touching contemporary document, in: Junge Welt, February 18, 2016.
  4. ↑ Source for this and previous information: Michael Schröter Becoming a Psychoanalyst: Family, Education and Employment of Edith Jacobssohn until the end of 1932. In: May / Mühlleitner (Ed.): Edith Jacobson. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2005, pp. 19–48.
  5. ↑ Matthias Reichelt, The black notebook. The prison records of the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobsons are a touching contemporary document, in: Junge Welt , February 18, 2016.
  6. ↑ Matthias Reichelt, The black notebook. The prison records of the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobsons are a touching contemporary document, in: Junge Welt, February 18, 2016.
  7. ↑ Matthias Reichelt, The black notebook. The prison records of the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobsons are a touching contemporary document, in: Junge Welt, February 18, 2016.
  8. Jump up ↑ Ms. Jacobson's intrusive notes , haGalil.com , July 7, 2015, accessed July 7, 2015.
  9. ↑ Edith Jacobson at Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing ( Memento from September 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Psychoanalysts in Europe. Biographical lexicon
  11. ↑ under her maiden name Jacobssohn she presents on pp. 274-302 the “ development and system of psychoanalytic research and teaching ”, while Kronfeld in the rest of the article describes a critical “ epicrisis of psychoanalysis ” especially with regard to her “ ideological and scientific approach Claim "contributes; In his textbook on character studies (Springer, Berlin 1932), published in the same year, he thanks in a note on p. 417 " Edith Jacobssohn ... for a large series of formulations shaped by her special expertise " in his description of the " character studies approaches in of Freud's psychoanalysis ”(on pp. 417-431).
personal data
SURNAME Jacobson, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jacobssohn, Edith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Haynau
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1978
Place of death new York