Edith Jacobson: Gefängnisaufzeichnungen (Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook)

. . . färben Schmerzen deine Lieder / werden tiefer sie erwärmen

. . . pains tainting your songs / will be warming them more deeply

—Edith Jacobson (“Traurig” [“Sad”])

Edith Jacobson (1897–1978) is a leading voice in anglophone psychoanalysis. Her English oeuvre has been the primary focus of her work’s reception in North America, whereas her German publications dating from the years of the Weimar Republic and incipient Nazism have received significantly less attention. ¹ That Jacobson was not only an analytic author but also a literary writer of prose and poetry is a lesser-known aspect of her fascinating transatlantic career.

While she wrote some fiction in her American exile, she had turned to verse in the Nazi remand prison in Berlin-Moabit, writing in her native tongue. Her voice in Gestapo captivity was primarily poetic and exclusively German, which accords with Jacobson’s autobiographical prison poem “Bekenntnis” (Kessler and Kaufhold, pp. 136; May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 210), where the speaker powerfully characterizes herself as “ein Jude” (“a Jew”) in her traits and ancestry (first stanza), “ein Deutscher” (“a German”) in her language, mind, and birthplace (second stanza), and “ein Mensch” (“a human being”) in her feelings, will, desire, and drives (third stanza). ²

The portion of her identity Jacobson calls German places emphasis on language, which helps explain the intimate bond between her prison verse and her native tongue as they evolve into a subjective voice in her confinement, offering momentary glimpses of hope and truth in the face of overwhelming mendacity and devastation. That said, Jacobson’s intriguing verse deserves close reading for reasons beyond its function as a captive’s vademecum, since it shares clear affinities with her germanophone poetic heritage and with contemporary expressionist poetics. Her verse is not only an emotional outlet or connection to the world; it is also the literary achievement of a unique poetic voice. In prison, Jacobson reclaimed agency through writing; with the exception of some fragmentary analytic texts, she did so primarily in the realm of art. Her aesthetic erudition helped her compose her poems, and writing them helped her survive. The focus of my deliberations is therefore on the proximity of analysis and literature in the work of a seasoned writer who was acutely aware of psychoanalytic theory and poetic expression, both traditional and modernist. Her intriguing engagement with poetry and poetics exhibits Jacobson’s deep understanding of literary commemoration and expressionist innovation.

As Germany’s principal variant of international modernism, the expressionist movement (ca. 1910–1930) centered on painting and poetry and suggested (and expressed) angst as well as protest. In the visual arts, expressionism began before World War I and though disrupted by it was resumed in the 1920s and early 1930s. In Munich, where Jacobson received her medical degree in 1922, the expressionist group The Blue Rider had been active from 1911 to 1914; and in Dresden and Berlin, the expressionist group The Bridge had been a presence from 1905 on. In 1911, the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler published My Wonder in Berlin, establishing herself as a leading voice of expressionism. Around the same time, also in Berlin, the physician and expressionist poet Gottfried Benn, whose work was received with shock as he turned his clinical experience into graphic visceral imagery, published his notorious expressionist collection of autobiographically (pathologically) infused verse (Morgue and Other Poems, 1912). After the war, he expressed his experience as a military doctor in expressionist “absolute prose” pieces known as the Rönne Novellas (1919). Concomitantly, psychoanalysis was gaining ground right at the time that Jacobson was living and working in Berlin. ³

Beyond her Marxist convictions and leftist politics, the fields of Jacobson’s operation and exposure were psychoanalysis and expressionism as contemporary movements in the Weimar context. Both placed great emphasis on language, specifically on the expression of experience from a subjective vantage point; and both revolutionized their primary fields of inquiry and representation (medicine and literature) well beyond their immediate disciplinary scope. The two fields creatively intersect in Jacobson’s prison poetry, where the unique therapeutic capacity of verse meets with pain’s power to energize the poem in the prisoner’s liminal state of utter deprivation and depressing monotony.

My point is not necessarily to claim Jacobson as an expressionist poet, but rather to seriously read her poetic drafts and assess them fairly, that is, against the background of her horrendous predicament in jail, her medical profession, and her literary erudition—and within and beyond the expressionist and analytic cultural contexts in which they were written. Jacobson’s skillful drafts of prison verse merit engaged literary interpretation beyond their autobiographical setting and themes—namely, against the specific background of her psychoanalytically informed expressionist poetics. Like her individual case—which in some ways represents an entire generation—her verse, too, transcends the scenario of the invaluable witness-victim and goes beyond the physical reality of the prison cell. It exemplifies an aesthetically wider panorama of poetic and political influence and a zeitgeist whose path was paved first by Friedrich Nietzsche and then by Sigmund Freud. ⁴

Regarding Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook, which contains her poetic drafts, ⁵ I could not agree more with Hermann Simon, who in his foreword to Kessler and Kaufhold’s edited volume suggests that the book’s merit lies in “conserving and granting access” (p. 8) to Jacobson’s manuscripts. I would, however, refrain from coupling this merit, as Simon does, with the work’s avoidance of any “deliberate interpretive measure” regarding Jacobson’s complex texts (p. 8), which he regards as the desired guarantor of their immediacy and I find problematic. In any case, immediacy cannot be achieved when the transcripts themselves are already two steps removed from the actual manuscripts, still held privately, that Kessler found in a shoebox she inherited (the facsimiles included in the book constitute the extra step).

Instead, a book that suffers from redundancies and repetitions whose purpose is not clear could have benefited from a stricter editorial hand and engaged its readers in a humanistically motivated interdisciplinary dialogue about Jacobson’s captivity notes and poetic drafts; the precise place and poignant significance of literature in her life; and in particular the critical role of poetry during her first days in custody, an incarceration before sentencing that caused a state of unbearable tension between what Jacobson in her poem “New Life” (p. 102) terms “agony” on the one hand and “vital energy” on the other (the German compounds in the original, “Todesqual” and “Lebensmut,” literally mean “death torment” and “life courage”). Phrased differently, Jacobson’s torment while held in custody resembled a Kafkaesque limbo before an indeterminately delayed trial, a prolonged and debilitating threshold experience, and arguably the greatest challenge she ever faced—a trauma that in retrospect Jacobson assessed as having divided her life in two.

Simon notes Jacobson’s double presence in the prison notebook. Jacobson figures not only as a transferentially operating analysand and analyst at once, a situation that allows for what he calls a movement “from the outside to the inside” (p. 8), but also, simultaneously, as a patient and a poet, a coincidence of roles that leads in the opposite direction (“from the inside to the outside” [p. 8]). Solitary confinement is the severest form of sequestering, a type of imprisonment whose brutal, “hermetic enclosure” (pp. 93, 100) Jacobson specifically and repeatedly laments in verse and analytic prose, while opposing it to a “shared” or “communal cell” (pp. 92–93, 111) as a place for “healthy extroversion” (p. 111) within the still unrelenting parameters of incarceration. ⁶

An engagement with this type of bidirectional work that Jacobson painstakingly and creatively performed—while poetically claiming and surviving her horrendous pre-sentence confinement and subsequent sentence in utterly frail states on the brink of collapse—would have suited particularly well the stated interdisciplinary intentions of the psychoanalytic book series in which this volume was published. The Library of Psychoanalysis ⁷ not only sets out to “rediscover,” conserve, and circulate forgotten texts, but also aims to “revive and develop the cultural and socio-critical legacy of analysis,” to cultivate “new impulses,” and to create a “dialogue with neighboring disciplines.” It is the avowed purpose of the series to address the “constitutive cultural and humanistic building blocks of analysis” since Freud, as it is precisely this hermeneutically driven component that assured the crucial “critical potential” of analysis to begin with. In the anglophone world in particular, this quality was in the background as psychoanalysis developed itself as a clinical method (“in the process of establishing itself as a medical-psychological practice, psychoanalysis neglected its relations with the humanities, cultural analysis, and politics”).

Jacobson was raised in a sophisticated family. Her father, Jacques Jacobssohn (1866–1927), was a physician; her mother, Pelagea (née Pulverman), a musician. Jacobson’s path toward an interdisciplinary modus operandi at the intersection of science and the arts began in her upbringing. Her young life included witnessing various hardships, including her father’s trauma as a result of military service in World War I and cases of depression in the family. As a successful analyst, passionate violinist, and prison poet, Jacobson herself consistently practiced various forms of interdisciplinarity, most intensely during her life in prison, where poiein (the Greek verb for “make” and root of “poem”) became her prime agency in the struggle to survive.

Jacobson explained that before Hitler’s frightening rise to totalitarian power she had been scientifically rather than politically inclined (May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 109). But she read and listened to Hitler well before her arrest, and yet decided not to emigrate. Even after meeting with Otto Fenichel in Copenhagen only weeks before her arrest, she once again returned to Berlin. Kaufhold points to her solidarity with patients and friends in this regard. One may add to the list of possible reasons for Jacobson’s risky return to Nazi Berlin her intense sense of professional belonging, including her undeniably strong ties to Germany and the German language as a defining portion of her identity (“I am German, I identify fully as German,” she pointed out [May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 112]) ⁸ ; her political activism; her family’s “denial of the danger” and “reticence to emigrate” (Jacobson, quoted in May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 383); and her own underlying reserve regarding emigration. One is reminded of Freud’s postponed emigraton from Vienna due to a comparable suspension of disbelief, as it were—in 1938, he finally fled via Paris to London when the German annexation of Austria and his daughter’s abduction by the Gestapo signaled the absolute necessity of immediate escape from Berggasse 19. Freud was in his early eighties then and spent the last year of his life in exile.

Jacobson was forty-one when she came to America, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her brother Erich changed his name to Jacobsen and also emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States, as did her mother (via Havana), who died in New York in 1950. At 50 West 96th Street, Jacobson lived with her mother and with her best friend from her university years in Munich, fellow emigré Helene Färber. She also remained close to Annie Reich, another emigré friend of hers. America saved Jacobson’s life and offered a small community of emigrés, which enabled her to continue her professional career and private life (including that of an imaginative writer) after the Nazis had stopped these dead; however, crucial aspects of Jacobson’s former life in Weimar Germany had to discontinue abruptly.

Jacobson’s exile “demanded a tough adaptation” (May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 14) on her part, including a difficult “deep cultural rupture” (Kessler and Kaufhold, p. 70). Her sensibilities for the subversive zeitgeist of the Weimar Republic could not have been more finely tuned, her sociopolitical efforts not more relentless. In America, by contrast, Jacobson turned private and became politically abstinent. Fenichel was in fact surprised that despite her (and his own) leftist politics she (and he) managed to enter America in the first place (here one needs to recall Otto Reich’s death in an American prison). But they did. With difficulty, Jacobson passed her English language and medical examinations in 1939, and soon opened a private practice. Other than possibly expressing her Marxist convictions by keeping consistently low fees for her patients, she remained an apolitical exile until her death in Rochester, New York, in 1978. ⁹

Back to literature. Jacobson’s attraction to the intersection of analysis and literature was already evident in her university years, and her literary ambitions—predating her incarceration and emigration—included her early interest in Freud’s analysis of Norbert Hanold, the fictional protagonist of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, ¹⁰ as well as her own autobiographically infused mystery novel Murder in the Ticino House (May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 373). Jacobson’s literary production in America was in the prose genre, comprising a series of nineteen short stories, including “The American Oak Tree” (pp. 377–380), “Heroes” (pp. 381-384), and “Old Age—Awful or Wonderful?” (pp. 393–395).

Particularly impactful, Jacobson’s story of the oak tree warrants special attention in the present context, as it seeks to reconcile through fictional narrative her German and American lives by inscribing her memory of a decisive moment during her incarceration in the Jauer prison. Jacobson links this memory to the cottage she purchased in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island—she felt the need to escape the bustle of New York City to find peace to write, surrounded by nature. The cottage had an oak tree in its garden, which ultimately convinced Jacobson to buy the place, as she saw, in her mind’s eye, the tree under which she and other inmates at Jauer had been allowed to “sit on the lawn for a few precious, precious minutes” in the fresh air (May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 378). A lover of nature and astute observer, Jacobson at Jauer immediately noticed that the tree’s leaves differed from those of any oaks she had ever seen. When she asked about it, the guard informed her that rather than a German oak, this was an American oak tree. In America, Jacobson remembered answering at the time that one day she would own a tree of this kind (p. 379).

The oak tree’s function in her literary recollection of stories serves, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, as an “objective correlative” ¹¹ —a complex equivalent rife with objectified affect, in which a high amount of perceptive energy is concentrated and which is thus able to capture Jacobson’s Germany and America all at once, her home and her exile, her here and her there, her present and her past in a way that inscribes the depth of emotion while steering clear of superficial sentimentality—very much in line with the demands of modernist poetics. Beyond the presence of objective correlatives in Jacobson’s poetry and literary prose, it is also Eliot’s take that only feelings that are understood can be objectified, that only an examined life can become art. Jacobson’s expressed feeling is clearly beyond the mere “emotional relief” that Eliot considers offensively inartistic (p. 102). While in her analytic prose she describes and analyzes, in her literary writing she expresses and synthesizes. If Jacobson’s stories and verse are cathartic, they are also artistic, poetic (i.e., beyond discharge in the common sense). ¹²

Back to poetry. The German vernacular—such as “gesessen” for “imprisoned” (Kessler and Kaufhold, p. 92), or the Berlin- and/or Yiddish- and/or Silesian-accented “scheen” for “beautiful” (p. 129)—and the German poetic traditions and innovations are at the core of Jacobson’s poetry. In America she produced numerous influencial texts; she did not, however, for all we know, write any verse in English, nor did she translate her German verse into English, nor did she publish her German verse. In other words, poetry is not something we know she wrote in either language before her arrest or after her escape, and never in English. For this reason, among others, her German-written custody poems in Kessler’s black prison notebook could not be more precious.

Constituting a relatively slim oeuvre (about fifty poetic drafts, including revisions), these prison writings are inscriptions of poetic agency and survival. Jacobson turned to the poetic genre only in prison; she composed verse only in states of utter anguish, vulnerability, and precarity. She must have deemed poetry best suited for an attempt at condensed expression of her ultimately ineffable experience of solitary confinement. Her poems convey confessional strength and courage in times of severe crisis, portraying without sentimentality the poet-analyst’s unflinching struggle toward externalization. Jacobson’s poems may be cathartic and therapeutic, but they are also poetically informed and of considerable literary quality.

In custody, Jacobson immediately admitted to her “poetic fury” and “urge to write” (p. 110), understanding poetic lines as “the only possible form of concentration” (p. 111) in times when reading is impossible and “brooding over the case; imagining the appointment, the interrogation etc.” omnipresent (p. 111). Referring to herself in the third person, as she often did in prison (it is also an expressionist dramatic device), in “Unpolitical Poem” Jacobson explicitly says that under conditions other than those of a captive, she would have turned to different ways of writing: “A captive writing sonnets now for almost a year / and a piece on women’s superego here / deep inside she knows so well / how differently she would have written / had she not been sitting amidst eternally monotonous gray / busy only with her hold-on, wait-and-see” (May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 142).

Kessler focuses on the poem “Bekenntnis” (“Confession,” cited earlier), where Jacobson writes of her tripartite identity, that is, as Jewish, German, and human. However, a clear majority of Jacobson’s poetry—written in the first two weeks of custody and printed for the first time in the Kessler and Kaufhold volume—concentrates on an inward journey characterized by increased self-discovery and commemoration (including poetry by others previously learned by heart), on mnemotopes (places she vividly remembers) ranging from Florence, Heidelberg, Munich, and the Swiss town Arosa, to the Moabit prison, the cell, and the hospital; on times present and past, including Christmas, New Year, Sunday, evening, and night; and on human beings other than herself (mainly her father, other inmates, and jailors).

In these poems, the traumatized captive’s memories are blended with yearnings and enthusiasms, such as those characterizing her Heidelberg and Munich years, which she calls “unforgotten-magical” (in “Sonnet VI,” subtitled in the exclamatory mode: “Heidelberg-Munich in memoriam!” [pp. 94, 101]), personifying those years while thanking them apostrophically for alleviating her pain (“to you I am grateful for the suffering I am spared today”); or of springtime in Arosa with its “crocus bells” working themselves through the snow (“Sonnet X: Alpine Spring. Arosa” [p. 103]). In isolation and deprivation, it is verse of this kind that enables Jacobson to revisit a joyful past through the powers of travel memories and creative recollection.

Jacobson’s poetic erudition could not be more obvious. Well before her arrest, she must have memorized (learned by and taken to heart) Georg Herwegh’s and Johann Gottfried Herder’s poems on fear and courage (see Kolb 2020, p. 988); she could not otherwise have remembered them so well. She also inscribed lines reminiscent of Goethe. For ex-ample, in “Sun Magic” (Kessler and Kaufhold, p. 94), “Sonnenfreund, ach bleibe noch!” (“oh sun friend, do remain!”) resonates with Goethe’s appeal to the moment: “verweile doch / du bist so schön” (“linger a while / you are so beautiful” from Faust I (1808, p. 57), while “Kennt ihr das Dorf . . . Wohin? Wohin?” (“Do you know the village . . . Where to? Where to?”) in “Nocturnal Song” (Kessler and Kaufhold, pp. 120–122) is Jacobson’s variation on “Kennst du das Land . . . Dahin! Dahin!” (“Do you know the land . . . There to! There to!”) from “Mignon’s Song” (Goethe ca. 1783, p. 145). Permeated by urgent questions and exuberant proto-expressionistic exclamations, Mignon’s lines, honored by Jacobson, are a dialogue; they communicate in direct speech—and echo Kessler’s important observation about Jacobson conversing with herself (Kessler and Kaufhold, p. 22), as well as the early Freud’s self-analytic attempts to confront his own anxiety.

Mignon’s song of yearning falls among the most famous lyrical sequences in the German language and has been canonized as a classic instance of literary wayfaring. Her lines have been set to music by a wealth of romantic and modernist composers, while in the visual arts, Mignon is frequently depicted as a wayfaring figure with lute and bundle (Jacobson as musician and traveler will have been acutely aware of both renderings). Mignon’s passionate yearning for escape is, it turns out, a return home that never happens. She longs for Italy, which is her homeland rather than an exotic destination, but can never return there before her death in exile. While Jacobson cannot have anticipated her exile at the moment of inscription, in retrospect it is touching, to say the least, that she seems to have summoned Mignon for good reason.

The south as a time-honored medley of Alpine and Mediterranean landscapes—ranging from Goethe’s Mignon to expressionism such as Benn’s—is clearly one intersection of Jacobson’s poetic interest. In the expressionist context, she coined a series of compound neologisms, for instance “Schmerzenserleben” (“pain experience,” p. 86) in her Florence memory “San Marco, Florence, Christmas 1935”; “Freudenschüttern” (“joy trembling,” p. 99]) in “Female Jailor”; “Schmerzensflammen” (“pain flames,” pp. 103, 127) in “To my Father” and “Sonnet IX: To my Father in memoriam” (for another draft of this poem see May and Mühlleitner 2005, p. 204)—among a wealth of others. While neologisms are creative linguistic experiments in any language and attest their inventor’s strong free association and poetic vitality, the nominal compound maximally approaches the visual in the verbal and is a feature of the German language impossible to render in English without losing its ambiguous essence. ¹³ Jacobson’s fascinating compound neologisms transcend the grammar of the compound and foreground a poetic mind formed analytically in the Weimar years, as well as poetically in the context of the expressionist revolt in the arts, where oneirically inspired creative acts of subjective expression emerged as the movement’s defining features. And in her poem “New Year’s Gallows Song” Jacobson writes of the “dream as a realm without limits” (Kessler and Kaufhold, p. 89). ¹⁴

For two main reasons, the expressionist revolt was short-lived until its partial revival after World War II (mainly in painting, in abstract expressionism). For one, many of the movement’s chief representatives (painters and poets) died in World War I; and then, in 1937, the Nazis sealed the movement’s fate by state censorship, displaying its major visual works at their Munich exhibit of “degenerate art,” which followed previous book burnings and anticipated those to come. Because the Nazis characterized psychoanalysis as a Jewish science and censored expressionism as degenerate, it is particularly important to note that the analyst Jacobson, formed by the artistic climate of expressionism in the Weimar Republic, reverted to the movement’s aesthetic features in states of angst and courage, precarity and dreaming, brought about by a regime that banned both analysis and expressionism.

It is conspicuous that Jacobson wrote poetry only under Nazi surveillance. The encounter of poet and psychoanalyst as one person in the exceptional state of prison life seems to have provided her a psychoanalytic and poetic agency in imprisonment in general, and in the limbo of her pre-sentencing weeks in custody in particular. Since she never addressed her prison life after her escape, the manuscripts from this decisive era in her life are an invaluable contribution to her professional biography, which begins with her formation in the Weimar years and ends with her postwar immersion in New York’s analytic community—with an intriguingly intense encounter of analysis and poetic expression in between, during her experience of liminality.

It is unclear whether Jacobson would have wanted to see her poetic drafts published. Had she intended to publish her poetry but was unable to do so because she had no copies of the drafts (it is unknown how this and other prison notebooks got from the prisons via hospitals to apartments and libraries), then their publication seems justified. If she did not, however, want to see her poetry appear in print (which one may assume is a real possibility given the exceptional absence of any poetic activity during her life in America), then one needs to wonder whether posthumously publishing her poetic prison drafts and notes poses an ethical question.

Issues of propriety surrounding a writer’s bequest tend to be permeated by concerns with identity and reputation, legacy and copyright, appropriation and publication. Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod come to mind in the context of controversial posthumous publication, as do the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann and her heirs; and Jacobson is no exception here. It is likely—in light of the excitement about the unexpected discovery of a notebook that had not even been deemed lost, as its existence was simply unknown (a situation diametrically opposed to that of an estate guarded by a writer’s heirs, such as Bachmann’s siblings)—that the ethical question of posthumous publishing has in this context remained unaddressed. It seems crucial to remedy this neglect, however, by raising the issue of a potential violation of the author’s privacy, particularly regarding Jacobson’s extreme vulnerability in prison and her silence about it thereafter. In stark contrast to at least some of her analytic prison prose, she did not, to the best of my knowledge, elaborate on or expand her poetic corpus after 1938.

Generic distinction seems of utmost importance here, as her verse, though marked by expressionist features, is nonetheless personal and autobiographical, while her prose, though autobiographically informed in its witnessing of her own situation and that of fellow inmates (reflections on prison and womanhood, for example), is nonetheless also analytical and theoretical. In other words, if for all we know Jacobson never mentioned her captivity in the many years of her exile, why (and how) would she mention her poetry rooted in this very hardship? Why would she, and why didn’t she, revisit these textual sites of crisis? Are we publicly reading private documents of painful survival in verse?

Jacobson’s verse does not express her crisis viscerally; rather, it underscores the triumph of remembrance over oblivion, of poetry over captivity, of survival over collapse. In her poem “Help” she observes: “My meager songs alone / cool down my searing pain / sing away my grief / quietly still my tears” (p. 137). She humbly calls her songs “meager,” but her prison poems are anything but that. Rather than paltry or scant, lean or poor, they emphatically portray her state of emergency and experience of the bareness of life on the verge of a breakdown, assessing the climate, the atmosphere, as it were, of her pain and her verse about it, both of which are intimately tied to her identity as a prison poet at that precise moment. Her intertextually and idiomatically rich verse expresses in no uncertain terms the mutual relationship of poem and pain—how poetry eases pain (songs cooling down pains) and how pain energizes poetry (pains warming songs).

Against the background of Jacobson’s truly “unique blending of intrapsychic and interpersonal forces” (Tuttmann 1985, p. 145) in analytic research, but also in poetics, it is of great interest that in memoriam is the subtitle of various poetic drafts, including poems that remember Heidelberg and Munich and those in memory of Jacobson’s father. Her verse composed while being held in custody in particular capitalizes on the condensed and displaced poetic-mnemonic image as a carrier of experience and is an homage to her mind’s eye that lays bare her mnemonic poetic techne for survival. In prison, poetic expression helps Jacobson counteract “amnesia” and “alienation” (pp. 110–111).

In spite of its structural and formal shortcomings primarily in design and style, Kessler and Kaufhold’s Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook offers an in memoriam in its own right, that of Jacobson’s previously forgotten remand at Moabit before being sentenced, much in Simon’s sense of a “plea for an exact examination and conservation of any and all of history’s flotsam” (p. 9). One cannot help but add another plea for the future of international, interdisciplinary Jacobson studies. Jacobson’s analytic and literary work calls for careful intercultural contextualization. The appropriate interpretive stance would address the central role of her native language; the scholarly impact of overdue English translations of her German work; a biographically informed reading of her poems and stories; and crucial facets of the historically anchored expressionist aesthetics of her Weimar years.

In 1978, Jacobson’s colleagues mourned her as an analyst whose Berlin formation had continued its strong influence in her American work. While there are German translations of her major American texts, including The Self and the Object World (English 1964, German 1973), Psychotic Conflict and Reality (English 1967, German 1977), and Depression (English 1971, German 1972), too little of her German work has appeared in English—and certainly not her prison poetry. A bilingual edition of the poetry should, I believe, become a priority. Like Freud, who received the Goethe Prize in 1930 for being not only a “scholar” (“Gelehrter”) of the caliber he was, but also a “creative author” (“Schriftsteller”) of beautiful prose (words used by the City of Frankfurt in the letter sent to Freud when awarding him the prize; see Schmidt-Hellerau 2006, p. 355), Jacobson, too, merits the rank not only of a leading intellectual and an outstanding analytic scholar, but also that of an accomplished literary writer.

In contrast to Kessler’s unfounded assessment of Jacobson as “no Hikmet” (2004, p. 19), I think she is in fact a Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) of sorts—a contemporary of the Turkish prize-winning prison-poet. She is herself a noteworthy prison-poet whose work merits wider international circulation, since she exhibits a woman’s clear awareness of an aesthetic juncture of universal interest—the juncture of pen and pain.