Jolande Jacobi

Jolande's father, senator and privy councillor to the Austro-Hungarian court, was a wealthy businessman. On her mother’s side, one great uncle had been a Deputy in the parliament at Warsaw, while another was professor of Mathematics at the University of Cracow. Both parents were of Jewish ancestry, but had been baptized as adults. In Budapest, as elsewhere in Europe, the emancipation of women was one of the topical issues in the early years of the 20th century. Jolande’s parents believed that the proper place of a woman was in the home, and it was only after a struggle that Jolande obtained permission to study at a gymnasium at the age of fourteen. At nineteen plans for her further education were shelved when she met and married Dr Andrew Jacobi, a distinguished Budapest lawyer, fourteen years her senior. Two sons were born in the years following the marriage. Jacobi’s description of her life in Budapest during the 1914-18 war shows a society with little idea that a world was coming to an end. But with more intuition than others in her circle, it was a friendship made while working for her secretarial diploma that enables her to escape with her family to Vienna, after the communist seizure of power in Budapest under Bela Kun in March 1919. From now on, the family lived in Vienna, though after the collapse of the communist government in Hungary they were able to renew their contacts in Budapest. In 1924, Jolande’s husband was ill for eight months with a severe depression. It was her first contact with such an illness. She read widely in an attempt to understand what was happening to her husband. After his recovery, Dr Andrew Jacobi moved back to Budapest to renew his legal practice. He lived from then on half in Budapest and half with his family in Vienna, where he wanted his sons to be educated. In 1926 Jacobi came into contact with the Kulturbund, the Austrian cultural organisation which was to play a central role in her life for the next twelve years. As executive vice-president she was at the centre of Austria’s cultural life, and in touch with many of the great names of Europe. In 1935 she was honoured by the Austrian government for her work, a rare distinction for a woman. It was through the Kulturbund that she first met Jung and his wife in 1927, when he lectured in Vienna. She gave a luncheon party for the Swiss visitors at her apartment. “At 4.40 the guests went, but Jung stayed to tell me about the I Ching. We sat on the floor and he showed me how to throw the coins. I still have the piece of paper, on which he wrote out from memory the 64 hexagrams. Until that day, I’d never heard of him. I didn’t even know he existed. The whole afternoon he talked to me about ‘the unconscious,’ and how what we threw in the I Ching was so to say parallel with what was constellated within us.” In the following year, Jolande had the dream which in a sense gives the pattern of her life and of her own conception of psychotherapy. She sent it to Jung in Zurich, and he answered: “Now you are caught. Now you cannot get away.” The year before she met Jung, Jolande had become the friend of the Austrian writer Albert von Trentini. “I can truly say that it was Trentini who awakened my spirit and most deeply formed it, even before Jung,” she says. From 1930 to 1933 Trentini was dying of cancer. His physical and religious suffering during those years had a decisive effect on Jacobi. She shared them with him and began herself to struggle more and more with problems of religious character. She was present when Trentini received extreme unction and was so shaken and impressed that she decided to search deeper into the meaning of the Catholic faith, to understand better the significance of Trentini’s struggles. Thus she became a Catholic herself, and was received into the Church a year after his death. After Hitler came to power in Germany, she decided to write to Jung asking if he would train her as an analyst. He replied: only if she took a doctorate first. So, at the age of fourty-four, in 1934 she enrolled at the University of Vienna, to study psychology under Karl and Charlotte Buhler. Since the experience of her husband’s depression eleven years before, Jacobi hasd gained some personal knowledge of the various psychological schools active in Vienna. She worked for eighteen months with a Freudian – “not long enough for a proper analysis, but it gave me some insight into Freudian methods.” At a birthday party in Freud’s honour, she met and shook hands with him. She was still four months from completion of her doctorate when the Nazis occupied Austria in March 1938. She was in danger, and after her flat had been ransacked by the Gestapo, she fled with her husband to Budapest. From there she wrote to Jung that she could not complete her studies, and proposed to come at once to Zurich. He replied: “I’m sorry. Don’t come without a doctorate, I won’t accept you for training.” So she returned to Vienna. Avoiding her own flat, she stayed with a friend of her son, wore mourning to justify a veil, and, literally under the eyes of the Gestapo, took her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Psychology of the Change of Life. Immediately afterwards, she returned to Budapest and finally, on 17 October 1938, came to Zurich. She was nearly forty-nine. Jacobi’s life has been inextricably involved with the work of Jung. When she moved to Zurich, the development begun nineteen years earlier was taken a stage further. Much of her past identity was to be stripped from her. Only gradually did the new woman emerge. When the Nazis finally moved into Hungary in 1944, her father and mother committed suicide after their arrest by the Gestapo, and her husband died on the way to a concentration camp. It is with reference to this tragedy that in moving to Switzerland she said: “I owe Jung my life.”Alone in Zurich in the early years of the war she found herself rejected by many Jews who regarded her as a double traitor to her people: though her parent’s baptism, and through her own conversion to Catholicism. Many others avoided or rejected her - a person with Jewish ancestors, as a woman who had left her husband, as a foreigner with no money, there were people who felt it wiser to keep their distance. During this period, her membership of the Catholic Church, of a spiritual community extending beyond the borders or neutral but beleaguered Switzerland, gave her a sense of “belonging”, of security. But this erosion of her former identity served to stimulate enduring creative activity in the new field of psychology. The great dream of twelve years before was becoming a reality. At Christmas 1938 on a visit to Budapest she had been invited to lecture on Jung’s work to a small group. These lectures she later worked up into a slim volume which was published in German in 1940. (The English translation, The Psychology of C G Jung, appeared in 1942 in New York, and since gone through many editions.) Jung consented to write a forward. This contribution to Jacobi’s book resulted in the banning of his own books throughout Nazi occupied Europe. This first book was followed in 1941 by her study of Paracelsus, and for Jung’s seventieth birthday in 1945 she published a large anthology from his works, Psychological Reflections. A further major work of exposition, Complex/Archetype/Symbol, appeared in 1956. She also published over eighty articles, and two further full-length studies, on the psychology of women and on the interpretation of paintings in psychotherapy. She played a leading part in the founding of the C G Jung Institute in Zurich in 1948. She began to lecture frequently at various universities in Switzerland, and later in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Leyden, The Hague, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Vienna. In the winter of 1953 to 1954 she visited the United States, and gave over fifty lectures, including three courses at the New School for Social Research in New York, and at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Jolande Jacobi was instrumental in organising the one hundredth anniversary celebration of Jung’s birth in London in 1975, which she did not live to see. She died a few months before the event. (Extract from The Way of Individuation by Jolande Jacobi)

• Reference: Biographical Summaries of Notable People - SmartCopy: Aug 24 2018, 13:52:44 UTC