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She was of rather stocky build, with somewhat unruly white hair, and wore no makeup whatsoever. She was not particularly interested in the aesthetics either of her clothes or of her personal surroundings. Her apartment, where she taught us as candidates, was sparsely furnished and nondescript. However, what forcefully emerged when I first met her was the expression on her face and her tone of voice.
Her face and bodily posture conveyed an atmosphere of life, of love, of friendliness, of connectedness with people. Equally apparent were her acceptance, her openness, and her unfailing optimism and resilience.
Her voice, rather low-pitched, conveyed a welcoming interest in the other person, with a nonjudgmental attitude, supportive but yet anchored on a recognition of the unavoidable impact of reality. She was the embodiment of the ideal container in the Bionian sense. Her own traumatic history and imprisonment, which she kept hidden from all of us, may have contributed to her extraordinary capacity to work with depressed patients. Very flexible in her approach, she was able to gently touch a depressed patient on the arm to convey her maternal giving without being intrusive or seductive.
I got to know Edith Jacobson first as a teacher and then as a supervisor and eventually a friend. In contrast to her writings, her teaching was a model of clear theoretical formulations supported by clinical material. She would raise her index finger not realizing she was illustrating the influence of the superego she was describing in a patient.
I remember rushing, in my training years, to buy The Self and the Object World hot off the presses, greedily looking forward to reading it, only to put it down in disappointment after reading only a few pages of its dense metapsychological formulations.
My wife and I attended several parties at her house. Among the last to leave, we chuckled when she looked up to us and in a plaintive voice said: “Please don't leave me alone.” I was never aware of a