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The Berlin psychoanalyst Ulrike May is not only the author of Freuds frühe klinische Theorie (1894-1896). Wiederentdeckung und Rekonstruktion , a very good reconstruction of the scientific context in which Freud formulated what she defined as his early clinical theory (which I myself reviewed for this journal), but started her brilliant career as researcher in our field by contributing the chapter ‘Die Psychoanalyse in den USA’ to the psychoanalytic encyclopaedia edited in 1976 by Dieter Eicke—which she prepared while working at New York University under Prof. Holt. An analogous ability to connect the German-speaking and the American world was shown by Elke Mühlleitner (an Austrian social scientist living in Giessen) in Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse. Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung 1902-1938 , the reconstruction of the biography of almost all the Viennese psychoanalysts, and Otto Fenichel: 119 Rundbriefe , which she edited together with Johannes Reichmayr (taking care of the second and longer part, the American circular letters).
No wonder that the book under review (title translated as: Edith Jacobson. She Herself and the World of her Objects. Life, Work, Memoirs) represents a new and very significant link between several points of view. It connects the German and the American periods of Edith Jacobson's life, the Berlin-trained psychoanalyst who was for several decades one of the protagonists of the American psychoanalytic scene and is still known as the author of the book The Self and the Object World ; it also represents a real joint venture between European and American analysts and historians, including contributions from Otto Kernberg, Theodore Jacobs, Martin Bergmann and Lore Reich Rubin, i.e. a model of transatlantic collaboration. Admirable too is the quality of the connections between psychoanalysis and history: not only are the editors very well qualified in this respect,