MAHLER, MARGARET

MAHLER, MARGARET (Schoenberger; 1897–1985), child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Born in Sopron, Hungary, in the early 1930s she directed in Vienna the first psychoanalytically oriented child guidance clinic. In 1938 she settled in New York and in 1941 was appointed associate in psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1955 she was appointed clinical professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She was a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and in 1957 became the director of research of Masters Children's Center, where parallel studies of psychotic and normal children and their mothers are conducted. A comprehensive summary of Mahler's work of the 1940s appeared in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vols. 3–4, 1948. Two main concepts associated with her name are the symbiotic infantile psychosis and the separation-individuation process of normal development during the first three years of life. In her book On Human Symbiosis, vol. 1 (1968), Mahler describes the core of infantile psychosis as "faulty or absent individuation" resulting from a deficiency in the child's intrapsychic utilization of the mothering partner during the symbiotic phase. In 1970 the Margaret S. Mahler Psychiatric Research Foundation was established in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Its objective is to increase understanding of children's psychological and emotional development, particularly in the separation-individuation process, and to transmit that information to parents, therapists, and childcare providers. Other books by Mahler include The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (1975) and The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler (with P. Stepansky, 1988). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Grinstein, Index of Psychoanalytic Writings, 3 (1958), 1295–97, and 7 (1964), 3687–88. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Kramer and S. Akhtar (eds.), Mahler and Kohut (1994); J. McDevitt et al., Separation-Individuation: Essays in Honor of Margaret Mahler (1971). (Miriam Ben-Aaron / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)