Edith B. Jackson, M.D.

In Freud's Women, Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester promise to “explore the lives, the work and the ideas” of the “distinctive and original women … who, through their contact with Freud, played a part in the invention and history of psychoanalysis” (1992, p. 7). They did not include Dr. Edith Banfield Jackson among those women, but she surely qualifies. Her “contact with Freud”—Jackson's analysis lasted from 1930 to 1936—was unusually long and multidimensional; and for four decades thereafter, she applied her psychoanalytic experience and training in atypical and pathbreaking ways. In this paper I shall briefly sketch the 35 years of Jackson's life before her analysis with Freud; present features of their analytic relationship that were particularly unusual and interesting; and finally, examine what I have come to call the curious pattern of Jackson's life after Freud (Silberman, 1994), by way of assessing the long-term efficacy of her many years on his couch.1

Edith Banfield Jackson was born on January 2, 1895, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the fifth of her well-to-do parents' seven children. She was a pretty, highly intelligent, energetic child whose earliest years were, by all accounts, full of love and fun in her big, comfortable home with its magnificent view of Pike's Peak and one of the first indoor bathrooms in town. But just before Jackson's fourth birthday there began a series of tragedies that more than rivaled her early good fortune. In December 1898 her