Abstract
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 any companions she might have had during the time I met her.
I was struck that in the many conversations we had together, including sharing my own history in France during the early months of the war, Edith made no allusion to her own turbulent history. I could not tell whether this was out of her need not to burden us with her memories (she was a model of sensitivity to the other person’s needs) or whether she wanted to put the past behind her and live only in the present.
On one occasion Edith came to visit us in our country home near the ocean. She insisted on going swimming on a rather rough day, curling herself in a ball in order to get beyond the waves. My wife and I had to come to her rescue, as I feared she was overestimating her capacity to handle the stormy waves.
We visited her in her small cottage in Cold Spring Harbor at a time when her strength was beginning to fail. When she mentioned that she could hardly venture beyond a few steps out in her garden, she added that in the morning she could take pleasure in opening her door and observing the progress of the flowers at her doorstep.
This last capacity, to adapt to a harsh reality and find pleasure in small things without a trace of self-pity or regret over her losses, was one of the most admirable aspects of her personality. It highlights her capacity for resilience and her ability to maintain hope, facing whatever fate had in store for her.