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.
Ideas
- 1964 developed Self-representation
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.
Influence
Affinity
- 1964 influenced by Heinz Hartmann
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.
- 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.
Lineage
- analysed Margaret Mahler
Mahler had a further analysis with Jacobson in New York. The sources disagree on when it began: the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis says 1945, the German lexicon 1948.
Works
References
- Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis1976Evidence for a relation
- The Self and the Object World1964Evidence for a relation