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THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER is to provide a summary and critique of Edith Jacobson's work. As far as I know, there are only two and quite restricted overviews of her work available at this time, one dealing exclusively with her contributions to depression (Mendelson, 1974), and the other, brief and highly condensed (Blanck and Blanck, 1974). I think the most important contribution Edith Jacobson has made to psychoanalysis is her comprehensive developmental and psychostructural model that includes object relations theory, a sophisticated model that provides a clearly circumscribed and yet broad frame of reference for the psychoanalytic understanding of the entire spectrum of psychopathology and of normal development.
Starting out in 1937 with the exploration of superego formation in women, Jacobson analyzed the relation of depressive syndromes to ego and superego formation and the relation between normal and pathological affects, on the one hand, and structural development, on the other (Jacobson, 1943), (1946), (1952), (1953a), (1953b), (1954a), (1954b), (1954c). In 1954, she formulated her ideas on the development of self- and object representations in her classic paper "The Self and the Object World" (1954d). Throughout the following ten years, she