Jolande Jacobi 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 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 , part in Vienna and part in Zurich. Her parents were Jewish, but Jacobi converted first to the Reformed faith, later in life to Roman Catholicism. 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. Her students at the C.G. Jung Institute included Wallace Clift. She died in Zurich, leaving one new book uncompleted.
Writing
Jacobi's first publication was an outline of Jung's psychology in its classical form, expressing his ideas clearly and simply, an outline which was to be translated into fifteen languages and go through many successful editions. Jung himself would call her writings “a very good presentation of my concepts”. 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 analystJames 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.
Criticism
Jacobi's exposition of Jungianism is open to criticism for over-simplification and reification of Jung's more amorphous concepts of the unconscious. Her belief that “The course of individuation exhibits a certain formalregularity...this absolute order of the unconscious” 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.
Works include
Jacobi, J. 'The Process of Individuation' Journal of Analytical Psychology 111
Jacobi, J. 'Symbols in an Individual Analysis', in C. G. Jung ed, Man and his Symbols Part 5
Jacobi, J. The Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction
Jacobi, J. Complex, archetype and symbol in the psychology of C.G. Jung. New York: Princeton.
