Jolande Jacobi (25 March 1890 – 1 April 1973) was a Swiss psychologist, best remembered for her work with Carl Jung, and for her writings on Jungian psychology.
Life and career
Born in
Budapest, Hungary (then under
Austria-Hungary) as Jolande Szekacs, she became known as Jolande Jacobi after her marriage at the age of nineteen to Andor Jacobi.
She spent part of her life in Budapest (until 1919), part in Vienna (until 1938) and part in Zurich. Her parents were
Jews, but Jacobi converted first to the Reformed faith (in 1911), later in life to
Catholic Church (in 1934).
Jacobi met Jung in 1927, and later was influential in the establishment of the C.G. Jung Institute for Analytical Psychology in
Zurich in 1948, where she was nicknamed 'The Locomotive' for her extraversion and administrative drive.
[William McGuire, Bollingen (1989) p. 133-4] Her students at the C.G. Jung Institute included
Wallace Clift.
She died in Zurich, leaving one new book (entitled: "The tree as a symbol") uncompleted.
Writing
Jacobi's first publication was an outline of Jung's psychology in its classical form,
[Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (1986) p. 14 and p. 274] an outline which was to be translated into fifteen languages and go through many successful editions.
[William McGuire, Bollingen (1989) p. 134] Jung himself would call her writings "a
very good presentation of my concepts".
[Quoted in James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower (1980) p. 346] Her subsequent books continued to offer clear expositions of central, classic Jungian themes.
Controversy
In the sixties, Jacobi was involved in a controversy at the Zurich Institute involving the question of boundary violations with a patient on the part of the analyst
James Hillman, something to which Jacobi took strong exception. The result was a firmer policy on, and greater explication of the need to avoid such violations at the institute.
[Thomas B. Kirsch, The Jungians (2001) p. 20]
Criticism
Jacobi's exposition of Jungianism is open to criticism for over-simplification and reification of Jung's more amorphous concepts of the unconscious.
[Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (1986) p. 6 and p. 14] Her belief that "The course of individuation exhibits a certain formal regularity...this absolute order of the unconscious"
[J. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction (1946) p. 102 and p. 42] laid her open to the charge of an over-literal interpretation of Jung; while her diagrams of the psyche – one with the ego at the centre, one with it at the periphery – inevitably provided only one-dimensional snapshots of the richness of psychic experience.
[Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (1986) p. 32 and p. 8]
Works include
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Jacobi, J. 'The Process of Individuation' Journal of Analytical Psychology 111 (1958)
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Jacobi, J. 'Symbols in an Individual Analysis', in C. G. Jung ed, Man and his Symbols (1978 1964) Part 5
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Jacobi, J. (1942) The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction
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Jacobi, J. (1959) Complex, archetype and symbol in the psychology of C.G. Jung (translated by R. Mannheim). New York: Princeton.
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Jacobi, J., Masks of the Soul Translated by Ean Begg, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.
