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and continuing throughout childhood, as the primary mode of self-development, he saw adolescence, the pathway between childhood to adulthood, as the critical period for the solidification of identity. According to Erikson, identity is generally formed after some experience of role confusion and social experimentation. He coined the term “identity crisis” to describe the turbulence that often accompanies the development of a sense of self. For Erikson, this turning point in human development seems to involve the reconciliation between the person one has come to be and the person society expects one to become. This emerging sense of self involves the process of forging past experiences with anticipations of the future. Edith Jacobson (1964), following both Freud and Hartmann and drawing on her clinical experience with psychotic patients, further clarified the differentiation between the self and object representations of early introjections and the development of these structures. She sought to reconcile Freud’s emphasis on the internal drive-bound processes with the importance of real experience by proposing a developmental model explicating their mutual ongoing interaction and influence. She stressed that the ego and superego developed in tandem with self and object representations, and emphasized the central role of affect in this process. She introduced the conceptualization of “images”, specifying the genesis of representations of self and other as the key determinants of mental functioning (Fonagy, 2001). Jacobson (1954) noted that before the formation of self-other boundaries, the infant’s perception of the other directly shaped the experience of the self. Thus, the important interplay of actual experience and drive (libido and aggression) results in the feeling tone of one’s earlier experiences and lays the groundwork for self and object images which can determine how we may ultimately feel about ourselves and others. For example, upsetting experiences can lead to the internalization of images of a thwarting, withholding object and an angry, frustrated self while the preponderance of satisfying interactions can lead to the internalization of positive images of self and other. In her conceptualization of separation-individuation, Jacobson drew upon Freud’s (1940) descriptions of libido and aggression as connection-forming and connection-breaking forces. She saw libido as the essential element allowing the child to integrate opposing images of the good and bad objects and good and bad self, and proportional aggression as developmentally promoting separateness and differentiation between the images of self and other. However, an excess of aggression might derail this process. Jacobson noted that the integration of good and bad images (i.e. both the ‘good’ and ‘frustrating,’ mother) facilitated the capacity to tolerate conflictual feeling states, which in turn, enables the capacity for complex emotional and interpersonal experience. In her seminal work, “The Self and the Object World” (1964), Jacobson integrated classical metapsychological theory with the phenomenology of human experience, proposing that the instinctual drives are not ‘givens’ but ‘innate potentials’, shaped by inner maturational processes as well as by environmental factors. Thus, the child’s ‘representational world’ (Sandler and Rosenblatt 1962), is constructed out of her experience of herself in the environment on top of her innate psycho-biological substrate.
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