Invitation to the Psychohistory Forum Work-in-Progress Meeting

Holding onto Reality: Edith Jacobson’s Life and Theory

Presenter: Danielle Knafo, PhD
September 6, 2026 (Sunday)
10:30am-1:00pm EDT/NYC (room opens at 10:15am)
Virtual Live Meeting on Zoom

Meeting is free to attend. RSVP is required
Zoom link is provided after completing the RSVP form.

Dear Colleagues and Friends of Psychohistory Forum!

You are invited to a work-in-progress meeting with Dr. Danielle Knafo, who brings us research more than thirty years in the making. In the 1990s, Dr. Knafo set out to write a psychobiography of the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson (1897–1978) and interviewed the people who had known her — her analysands, her students, her friends. The project was set aside when life intervened, and the transcripts sat in a bin for three decades until she came upon them again while sorting through old papers. Nearly everyone she spoke with is now gone. That testimony cannot be gathered a second time, and this paper is what she has finally written from it.

It is a long-standing tradition of the Psychohistory Forum to bring one’s work-in-progress research or book to this collegial space. The format depends on preparation: participants read the paper in advance so that the meeting itself can be given over to discussion and to the questions the author brings to the group. This is not a lecture with a question period at the end — it is a working session, and the author is here because she wants the paper read closely and responded to.

Please read Dr. Knafo’s paper (25 pages) prior to the meeting: Holding onto Reality: Edith Jacobson’s Life and Theory.

During the meeting, we will dedicate 20 min for the presenter to summarize her research, which will be followed by general discussion.

What Is This Paper About?

Edith Jacobson (1897–1978) is rarely taught today, has no eponymous school, and no signature term that circulates independent of her name — yet her structural account of self- and object-representations underwrites Kernberg’s theory of borderline and narcissistic pathology, and through him, much of the contemporary clinical literature on severe personality disorders. This paper is a psychobiography, combining archival texts with interviews the author conducted in the 1990s with Jacobson’s surviving analysands, friends, and students, to explain why.

It traces the biographical sequence beneath her theoretical arc: two years’ imprisonment by the Gestapo (1935–37) for refusing to inform on a patient, which she later described as the origin of her work on depersonalization and ego resilience; her 1937 paper on female superego formation, written from a prison cell and anticipating Chodorow, Miller, and Gilligan by decades; her structural theory of depression as the collapse of self-representation against a punishing ego ideal; her extension of that architecture to psychosis in Psychotic Conflict and Reality (1967); and interview testimony describing a clinical manner — warm, opinionated, personally present — at odds with both her dense prose and the neutral technique her own institute enforced. A closing case, drawn from interview material, shows a former analysand’s internalized bond with Jacobson surviving her dementia to the day she died.

The paper argues that Jacobson’s absence from the psychoanalytic canon reflects not the limits of her theory but the fact that her clinical method, unlike Klein’s, Kohut’s, or Bion’s, was never converted into transmissible technique, and that restoring her name to work now circulating anonymously at the foundation of the field is overdue.

Questions from Dr. Knafo for the Participants:

How much evidentiary weight should retrospective interview testimony — collected in the 1990s, decades after the analyses, some of it recounted to me twice in nearly identical language — carry in a psychobiographical argument? Where in the paper does the argument lean on that weight more than it can bear?

Is the claim that Jacobson’s imprisonment produced her theory of depersonalization and ego resilience a claim about biographical causation, or only about the narrative she herself constructed and published after the fact? Does the paper need to draw that line more sharply?

The “no school” thesis (structural theory without transmissible technique) is one of the paper’s central explanatory move. Does it hold up against other analysts who also lack eponymous schools but aren’t considered forgotten or against ones with schools despite prose just as dense as Jacobson’s?

The gap between Jacobson’s warm, opinionated clinical manner and her official technique is read here as her practicing her theory. Could it as easily be read as her practicing against her own stated commitments — a split rather than an integration?

Given that some of this material concerns identifiable, named analysts and their private clinical histories, how should the paper handle the boundary between honoring testimony and stabilizing it into publishable fact?

A Few Words About the Presenter:

Danielle Knafo, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, a professor and author. Currently she is faculty and supervisor at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs. Dr. Knafo is a popular lecturer and prolific writer. She has written 10 books and dozens of articles and art essays. Her areas of expertise are art and creativity, trauma and psychosis, sex and gender, and, recently, technology and AI. Just a few titles demonstrate her range and interdisciplinary approach: Egon Schiele: The Creation of a Self; In Her Own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in Twentieth-Century Art; Living with Terror: Working with Trauma; Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art; The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Art and Psychoanalysis; The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis. She conducts writing groups for psychoanalysts and serves as an independent writing consultant. Dr. Knafo maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, New York. More information can be found on her website https://danielleknafo.com/.

We hope that you can join Dr. Knafo and the Psychohistory Forum on September 6^th to be a part of the conversation about Edith Jacobson, a theorist and a person.

Paul Elovitz & Inna Rozentsvit

RSVP form