Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (; 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 developed 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.

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. 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. In the U.S., she became a training analyst and a teacher.

In accordance with Hartmann, Jacobson proposed that the instinctual drives are not innate ‘givens’, but biological predisposed, innate potentials. These potentials get their distinctive features in the context of the early experiences of the child. From birth on, experiences will be registered as pleasurable (‘feeling good’) or unpleasurable (‘feeling bad’).

A balance in subjective feeling states in the early experiences of the child will contribute to the harmonious development of the libido and aggressive drive. The libido will emerge from experiences of feeling good and normally there will be less aggression. However, if early experiences are particularly frustrating, the aggressive drive might disturb the normal development. The libido helps integrating images of good and bad objects and good and bad self. Aggression, on the other hand, facilitates separation and establishing different images of self and others. Libido and aggression cannot function without each other. Libido promotes pulling together, and aggression moving out. Libido and aggression are necessary to build a stable identity by integrating experiences from the environment.

Jacobson articulated that experiences are subjective, which means that there is no good mothering, but only mothering that feels good to a particular baby. It is all about ‘affective matching’ between mother and child, in which factors like baby's temperament, fit or misfit between baby and mother and the mother's capacity to respond adequately to the baby's needs, play an important role. As a newborn child cannot differentiate between self and others, the earliest images are fused and confused. Jacobson proposed – in agreement with René Spitz – that experiences, whether they are good or bad, will accumulate in a child's psyche. These earliest images form the groundwork for later subjective feelings of self and others and will serve as a filter through which one will interpret new experiences. In the second year, there is a gradual transition to individuation and ego autonomy, in which the representations of the child become more realistic. The child discovers its own identity and learns to differentiate wishful from realistic self and object images. The Superego develops over a long time and becomes consolidated during adolescence.

In normal development, there is a balance between libido and aggression, which lead to a mature differentiation between self and other. However, a lack of balance between libido and aggression could lead to weak boundaries between self and other, which can be observed in psychotic patients.

With regard to the development of the Ego and Superego Jacobson stressed the role of parental influence as crucial. Parental love is the best guarantee for a normal ego and superego development, but also frustrations and parental demands make a significant contribution to the development of an effective, independently functioning and self-reliant Ego.