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This book is mainly but not exclusively about the persona and its manifestations. It could
be described as an essay, of which the four chapters add up to a relatively short book, easy to read and easy to comprehend. To say it is ‘easy’ might mask deceptively the considerable learning and the impressively integrated experience of life that the author displays on every page. She was a skilful writer who knew how to compress and to impress. The corroborative evidence is contained in David Holt's Foreword, in which he gives the biographical facts of Jacoby's life (1890-1973), and comments briefly on ‘the precious balance she … achieved between outer and inner works’. He mentions the political catastrophies in Europe of 1914-18 and of the Hitler years, which deprived her of external continuity but which enabled her to understand fully the importance of politics.
Her parents were Hungarians and both of Jewish origin, but baptised as adults. She was a very intelligent woman, living through one of the important phases of the emancipation of women; she was also intuitive, energetic and persistent. She was married and had two sons. She became a Catholic in her forties. In order to train as an analyst, during that same stage of her life, she agreed to Jung's insistent proviso that she first take a doctorate. She had some experience of Adlerian, and some of Freudian, analysis in Vienna, during the very difficult 1930s. Her dissertation was on the psychology of the change of life; it was achieved under the nose and the eyes of the Gestapo and helped by the literal ‘mask’ of wearing mourning and a veil.
A few years later her parents committed suicide after their arrest—by the Gestapo—in Hungary, and her husband died on the way to a concentration camp. Her move to Switzerland in the process of becoming an analytical psychologist was the long-term result of a very gradual ‘change of life’ and it made possible her successful second half of life during which she not only built up an