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This interesting volume about Edith Jacobson is available to the German-speaking 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 Jacobson's 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