Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (1897 to 1978) was a German psychoanalyst who trained first as a physician. Born into a Jewish family with a physician father and a musician mother, she took her medical degree in 1922, completed a pediatric internship at the University Hospital in Heidelberg, and began analytic training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1925. She became a training analyst in Berlin in 1934. In 1935 the Nazis imprisoned her for refusing to give up information about a patient, and after falling ill in 1938 she escaped to Czechoslovakia and then emigrated to the United States, where she joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Her writing dealt with the development of identity and self-esteem and with depression and psychosis, and her 1964 book The Self and the Object World set out a revised drive theory joining classical structural theory to object relations.