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There has been little research into the early years of Edith Ja-cobson, before her immigration to the United States—her origins,
her career, and the details of her political commitment during the Nazi era. The authors, having done extensive research in the relevant archives, provide an interesting synopsis of her personal development in relation to her first (presented and/or published) papers, which have never been translated into English, and give a compelling inside view of what guided her interests in her famous later writings.
Edith Jacobson was born in 1897 in Haynau (now in Poland). Her father was a general physician who was wounded in the First World War and suffered from a severe depression thereafter; he died in 1927. Edith had a better relationship with him than with her mother; she felt she identified with her father's superego, and related her interest in depression to his postwar breakdown. Edith had a brother, Erich, two years her senior, who became a pediatrician and also immigrated to the United States.
As a youngster, Edith was her school's best student in mathematics. She then studied medicine in Jena, in Heidelberg (where she first heard lectures on Freud's psychoanalysis in 1919), and in Munich, and then specialized in psychiatry. In 1925, she went to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute for training. Asked by Sándor Rado in her initial interview why she wanted to become a psychoanalyst, she said, “Because I am so curious”—an answer that was considered satisfactory. She much appreciated Rado as a teacher and stayed in friendly contact with him, even after he had departed from mainstream analysis. Her father paid for her training analysis with Otto Fenichel. She participated in seminars on child analysis, taught by Fenichel, Schultz-Hencke, and occasionally by Anna Freud; Jacobson was also open to Klein's ideas.
After four years of training, she graduated in 1930, with a child analytic case focused on the development of the superego. Jacob-son's fo