Rezension zu Edith Jacobson
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Rezension von Rachel M. Baker
This interesting volume about Edith Jacobson is available to the
Germanspeaking public. Its subtitle translates thus: »She herself
and the world of her objects, life, work, and reminiscences.« A
collection of essays about Jacobson and her thinking by several
contributors, it also includes autobiographical and theoretical
writings by Jacobson herself. The book is divided into three parts:
Edith Jacobssohn in Germany; Between the Continents; and Edith
Jacobson in America (note the changed spelling of her name). One
needs to read the whole book to obtain a coherent image of
Jacobsons persona and the importance of her work.
Known to us in North America primarily for such works as The Self
and the Object World (1964), integrating object relations and
structural theory, and Depression: Comparative Studies of Normal,
Neurotic, and Psychotic Conditions (1971), Edith Jacobson is
presented in these pages multidimensionally. She emerges as a
courageous, creative, independent thinker, in many ways far ahead
of her time. She was a declared feminist who felt strongly that
women should have careers. Early in her work she was looking for
the common ground of the various psychoanalytic and psychological
groups and appreciated the focus of ego psychology. She led the way
not only in integrating biology and psychoanalytic thinking,
thereby demonstrating the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to
severe pathology, but also in quietly integrating Kleinian thinking
with ego psychology.
The clinically based child psychoanalytic writings of her Berlin
years (considered in Part I) established her as one of the first
great child analysts, positioned in her thinking between Anna Freud
and Melanie Klein. She put
Editors note: Dr. Ruth Baker died suddenly while engaged in the
final revisions of this review. We appreciated her enthusiasm,
openness, efficiency, and intelligence and deeply regret her loss.
great emphasis on the impact of external circumstances and the
behavior of key persons in the individuals life, as well as these
persons unconscious wishes and fears, on the individuals
development. She also held fast to the concept of a »good« and a
»bad« ideal, modeled on the concepts of »good« and »bad« mother and
with it »good« and »bad« self, concepts introduced by Rado and
Klein.
Despite her admiration for Klein, she was critical of her ignoring
the actual reality and environment of the child. This led to
Jacobsons focus on ego and superego development. But she did not
lose sight of the interplay of these structures and processes
(including imitation, identification, and ego ideal) with libidinal
and aggressive instinctual components in a persons development. She
admitted later that she didnt realize at the time that direct
idinterpretations early on have little emotional impact without
defense analysis, and that more time is needed before affectladen
id material can surface.
In her clinical work, considered in Parts II and III, it is clear
she felt that analyst and patient have a »real« relationship, which
does not disturb the transference. Jacobson felt that the
personality of the psychoanalyst is more important than any theory
he or she might have, but that both needed to be in play. She also
felt it important for the analyst to like and be interested in the
patient and differentiated this from the unconscious
contertransference. Jacobson wasnt interested in reconstruction,
but focused on the here-and-now transference. She wasnt as
interested in interpretation as in confrontation and clarification;
at times her sessions extended beyond fifty minutes, when she felt
the extra time was indicated.
Three of her German-language papers, which are described in detail
in Part I, were eventually translated into English: »On the
Development of the Girls Wish for a Child,« written in 1936,
appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1968. »Ways of Female
Superego Formation and the Female Castration Conflict,« also
written in 1936, appeared in the Quarterly in 1976. This article
was written during the time Jacobson was imprisoned by the Nazis.
Fenichel, who was her analyst and became a lifelong friend, was
able to obtain it and to edit and present it at the 1937 IPA
Congress in Marienbad. While in prison, or shortly afterward,
Jacobson was also able to write the paper, published in English in
1949, »Observations of the Psychological Effect of Imprisonment on
Female Prisoners.«
An important aspect of her Berlin years was her political activism
as part of a small group surrounding Fenichel that tried to
integrate Marxist theory with psychoanalysis. Focusing on external
conditions as important elements in human development, they
rejected the death instinct and primary masochism as »regressive«
in that these concepts ignored external influences on the creation
of symptoms. The group included, among others, Georg Gero, Erich
Fromm, and Wilhelm and Annie Reich. When these analysts fled
Germany, Fenichel started the Rundbriefe, or Circular Letters, to
maintain contact. (For more information on this important group of
socialist analysts, see Bergmann 2005.)
Among Jacobsons German writings are articles in applied
psychoanalysis, written for socialist and communist journals,
addressing the »bourgeois« sexual inhibition that also afflicts
working-class mothers, who were taught that sex is only for
procreation and otherwise is dirty, but who needed to courageously
refute this in order to be able to enlighten their children.
Jacobson also used her psychoanalytic knowledge to educate
kindergarten teachers and social workers, joining Aichhorn and
Bernfeld in an attempt to reform pedagogical practices.
Early in her theorizing, Jacobson split the superego concept,
identifying a forbidding part of the superego and assigning the
affirming part to the ego ideal. In her elaboration of the ego
ideal she described children who made instinctual drive
satisfaction their ego ideal, blaming their environment for it
(e.g., parental mixed messages or the analysts comments).
Elucidating the mechanism involved in manic-depressive illness, she
described the instinctualized ego ideal as influencing the ego
functions in mania, while in depression the punitive, inhibiting
superego takes over. Fenichel used her concept of the
instinct-affirming ego ideal to explain perversions, juvenile
delinquency, sadistic criminality, and paranoid psychosis; all
manifest an excessive freeing from a repressive superego, leading
to the glorification of impulses.
Jacobson used the superego and ego ideal concepts to bring the
environment as an added element in the development of severe
pathology, alongside extreme castration anxiety and instinctual
conflict; to an already too severe superego are added the
contradictory or unreasonable expectations of parents who thus
leave their imprint on the superego – ego ideal.
Upholding her psychoanalytic and socialist convictions, Jacobson
continued to treat socialist and communist patients, even after it
was forbidden. The Nazis refused to recognize doctor-patient
confidentiality. Doctors were supposed to denounce their socialist
and communist patients. When one of Jacobsons communist patients
was caught at the border carrying her name and address, Jacobson
was arrested and accused of high treason. Jacobson had stayed on in
Germany because her mother and brother (her father had died by
then) couldnt believe the Nazis would last; like so many other
assimilated Jews, they refused to leave when they could. She also
was in an identity crisis. Even while protesting her exclusion from
the Berlin Institute when it was taken over by the »Aryans« led by
Felix Boehm, she held on to the feeling that she was German. Slowly
she owned her being a Jew and in one of her poems arrived at just
being a human being. (For more information on the collapse of the
Berlin Institute, see Lax 2002.)
During Jacobsons imprisonment, it was Fenichel who was instrumental
in bringing her plight to public awareness and helped in the plans
for her escape. Jacobson became deathly ill in prison, suffering
from undiagnosed thyrotoxicosis and diabetes. Her jailers, fearing
her dying would not reflect well on them, set her free. She managed
to get to a clinic where her brother was active, and once treated
she escaped in 1938 with the help of a false passport and a
courageous friend who created a diversion at the border crossing.
She managed to get to Prague and from there to New York. Her mother
and brother also managed to get out, her brother settling in
Connecticut and her mother moving in with her in New York City. As
described in Part III of the book, in New York Jacobson quickly
became the analysts analyst, available for second analyses and
involved in teaching, supervising, and clinical theory building.
Her American writings may not be familiar to a German audience but
are certainly familiar to us. Of interest is that her observations,
research, and writings during her prison time laid the groundwork
for the i uportant work she accomplished in the United States.
During her imprisonment, her self-observations and observation of
Illow prisoners resulted in her description of trauma-induced ego
regression leading to psychotic-like defenses (see the 1949 paper
cited above). Jacobson worked out her own traumas in her writings
and research (a coping mechanism she recommended to her patients
too), as well as in »whodune-it« fiction, though she dismissed the
poetry she wrote in prison as a regression to adolescence, with its
emotional turmoil, search for spiritua ity, and admiration of
nature. Her theories of psychosis are clearly rooted in her prison
experiences. Anton Kris has reported a prison story that Jacobson
told to his father, Ernst Kris: she »tamed« a fly with sugar drops
on her finger, creating contact with a living being as a defense
against disintegration in her isolation cell. She used her
observations of fellow female prisoners in the hope of helping in
the treatment of criminals, as well as to effect prison reform.
Later, her interest in psychotic depression led to her helping in
the training of residents at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx,
where she focused on mitigating their anxiety in the face of severe
pathology and helped them recognize and deal with their
reactions.
Always enjoying nature, music, and friends, Edith Jacobson passed
on peacefully at the age of eightyone on December 8, 1978, leaving
behind an impressive and still influential body of
publications.
This book is important for giving us an in-depth portrayal of an
important person in the development and enrichment of
psychoanalysis; it shows how her life experiences shaped her
professional choices and thinking, and especially how she managed
traumas (including the trauma of emigration) creatively. Above all,
besides further detailing the contribution of European immigrant
analysts to American psychoanalysis, it continues the
crossfertilization of ideas between the two continents.
Quelle: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Volume
56, No 1, März 2008.