Person
Edith Jacobson
German-born psychoanalyst who trained in Berlin, was imprisoned by the Nazis for her resistance work, and settled in New York in 1938. Working within ego psychology, she joined Freud's structural model to an account of how images of the self and of others are built up in early development, and wrote on identity, self-esteem and depression, above all in The Self and the Object World (1964). Her developmental scheme became a foundation for later object-relations thinkers, Otto Kernberg among them.
Read more- Born
- 1897
- Died
- 1978
- Known for
- Self-representation
- Influenced
influenced by
- Heinz Hartmann 1964 Jacobson's "The Self and the Object World" (1964) builds on Hartmann's distinction between the ego and the self and on his term self-representation, tracing how self- and object representations form in early development.
developed
- Self-representation 1964 In "The Self and the Object World" (1964) Jacobson made the formation and differentiation of self- and object representations the core of her account of early development, identification and depression.
influenced
- Otto F. Kernberg Kernberg took from Jacobson the idea that self-images and object-images, first fused and later told apart, are laid down in early relationships and form the ground of ego and superego; it became the core of his own object-relations theory.