Margaret Mahler

Mahler was born Margit Schönberger on 10 May 1897 in Sopron, Hungary. Mazet describes the Schönbergers as "a wealthy and intellectual Jewish family". She was close to her father, Gustav, a general practitioner, while her relationship with her mother, Eugenia, was distant and full of conflict.

Mahler first met psychoanalysis as a schoolgirl in Budapest, through Sándor Ferenczi and his circle. Mazet writes that Ferenczi "greatly impressed her". A school friend, Alice Balint, brought her into that circle.

In 1917 she entered medical school at the University of Budapest. Two years later she moved to Germany, where she studied paediatrics, and in 1922 she graduated magna cum laude from the University of Jena. She then settled in Vienna. She had opted for Austrian citizenship after the First World War, which allowed her to practise medicine there.

In Mazet's account, Mahler's interest moved towards psychiatry and psychoanalysis as she turned away from what he calls the "unempathic, sterile practice of pediatrics" in the Viennese clinic where she worked. She met August Aichhorn and Karl Abraham, and attended Anna Freud's seminar on child analysis. In 1926 she applied to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.

Her training analysis was troubled. The first analyst, Helene Deutsch, ended the analysis after about a year and declared her unanalysable. Mahler was then analysed by Aichhorn, and that analysis got her readmitted to the institute. It ended when the two became romantically involved. Her third analysis, with Willi Hoffer from 1930 to 1935, completed her Viennese training, and Mazet calls it "more successful". She was certified as an analyst in 1933.

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in the early 1930s she directed in Vienna the first psychoanalytically oriented child guidance clinic. In 1936 she married Paul Mahler, a chemist.

As war approached, the Mahlers left Austria, stayed briefly in Britain and in 1938 settled in New York. By 1939 Mahler was in private practice there and a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society; she later became a training analyst at its institute. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records her appointment in 1941 as associate in psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Mazet mentions posts at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

In New York she had a further analysis with Edith Jacobson. The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis dates its start to 1945 and a German lexicon to 1948. Mahler's mother died in a concentration camp.

In the 1950s Mahler became clinical professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The two dictionaries date the appointment to 1950 and 1955. She also chaired the child analysis training programme of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute.

With Manuel Furer she founded a therapeutic nursery, where psychotic children were treated together with their mothers. In the late 1950s she became director of research at the Masters Children's Center in New York. There she ran parallel studies of psychotic and normal children with their mothers.

From 1959 Anni Bergman worked with her on the observational study of mothers and infants at the Center. Mahler had been Bergman's training analyst, and Bergman became her chief collaborator.

A foundation bearing Mahler's name was set up in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, in 1970, to promote the study of children's emotional development and of separation-individuation in particular. Mahler died in New York on 2 October 1985. The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler², assembled from interviews and edited by Paul Stepansky, appeared in 1988.

Mahler's first papers, in the late 1940s, dealt with tics. Her paper On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses³ (1952) set out a symbiotic form of child psychosis, distinct from the autistic form.

The autistic child seems never to have taken the mother in as a living presence. The symbiotic child, by contrast, clings to a delusion of being fused with her. The symbiotic child's breakdown tends to come between the second and fourth years, when growing up confronts the child with separateness, and it brings panic, the loss of skills already gained and a blurring of the boundaries of the self. Mazet notes that Mahler rejected the then popular view that autism was caused by poor mothering.

On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation⁴ (1968), written in collaboration with Furer, gathered this work into one theory of early development and its failures. Normal development runs from a normal autistic phase, through a symbiotic phase in which infant and mother form a dual unity, to separation-individuation.

Infantile psychosis is a derailment of that sequence: the child either cannot use the mother as a symbiotic partner or cannot move out of symbiosis towards a separate self. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises the book as placing the core of the disturbance in "faulty or absent individuation". Mahler described symbiotic psychosis as a fixation at, or a regression to, the symbiotic phase.

The book also describes the tripartite treatment Mahler and Furer developed, in which the mother takes part in the child's sessions with the therapist. It sets the psychoanalytic theory beside non-analytic developmental research, such as that of Piaget and Werner.

In the 1960s Mahler turned from psychotic children to normal ones, studying how ordinary mothers and their infants interact. She set out the resulting theory in papers from the late 1950s and the 1960s, among them Thoughts about Development and Individuation⁵ (1963), and fully in The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. That book begins from the claim, quoted by Mazet, that "the biological birth of the human infant and the psychological birth of the individual" do not coincide in time.

In Mahler's use, separation is the child's growing awareness of being apart from the mother. Individuation is the growth of capacities, such as walking, speech and memory, through which the child takes on a character of its own. The process runs from about the fourth or fifth month into the third year and beyond.

Two phases come before it. In the first weeks of life, the normal autistic phase, the infant is turned towards its own bodily sensations rather than the outside world. The book describes this as a "closed monadic system, self-sufficient in its hallucinatory wish fulfillment", and Mahler framed it in terms of Freud's Primary narcissism.

From about the second month, in the symbiotic phase, the infant behaves as though it and the mother formed a "dual unity within one common boundary". Mahler owed the idea of a mother–child dual unity to Michael and Alice Balint and to Therese Benedek, and worked it out in her concept of symbiosis; Michael Balint is counted among her influences on that account.

The first subphase, differentiation, begins at about five months. Mahler described it as the infant's hatching from the symbiotic orbit. The infant explores the mother's face and body and compares her with others, so that strangers begin to be noticed as strange.

In the practicing subphase, from about ten or twelve months to sixteen or eighteen, crawling and then walking let the child move away from the mother and return to her for emotional refuelling. Mahler called the child's relation to the world in this period a love affair with the world.

In the rapprochement subphase, from about sixteen or eighteen months to two years or a little more, the toddler is now aware of being separate and small. It turns back to the mother and wants to share every discovery with her, while insisting on its autonomy. The conflict between closeness and independence can come to a head in a rapprochement crisis of clinging and pushing away. Mahler gave this subphase a paper of its own, Rapprochement Subphase of the Separation-Individuation Process⁶ (1972). She held that how the crisis is met and resolved shapes later moods, and that a failure here can leave the split between good and bad images of self and other found in borderline patients.

The fourth subphase is open-ended. Its goal is emotional object constancy, a stable inner image of the mother that holds up through frustration and absence, together with a consolidated individuality. Mahler took the term from Heinz Hartmann, who had coined it.

Mahler's scheme was taken up above all in the study of severe personality disorders. At the Menninger Foundation Otto Kernberg built on her account of separation-individuation, using its phases to locate the fixation points of borderline and narcissistic pathology. In Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis⁷ (1976) he combined the British object-relations theories of Klein and Fairbairn with the American ego psychology of Jacobson and Mahler.

Kernberg's model places psychosis, borderline pathology and neurosis at successive points on a developmental line. Psychosis is a failure to tell self from object; borderline pathology is a failure to integrate good and bad images. Fred Pine and Anni Bergman, her co-authors, helped to systematise the theory from the observational data and continued to develop it.

The normal autistic phase met the strongest objections. Infant research from the 1970s on, Daniel Stern's among it, found newborns far more responsive to their surroundings than Mahler's account allowed. Later writers, and by some accounts Mahler herself, gave up the idea.

Mazet sums up the reception: newer research stresses the infant's innate capacities, yet the theory "remains an influential touchstone." A Festschrift edited by McDevitt and colleagues appeared in 1971, and Kramer and Akhtar compared her work with Kohut's in Mahler and Kohut (1994).

Mahler's main papers on child psychosis include On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses, in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (1952). Her monograph with Manuel Furer is On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, volume 1, Infantile Psychosis (1968).

Her papers on normal development include Thoughts about Development and Individuation (1963), in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and Rapprochement Subphase of the Separation-Individuation Process (1972), in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (1975), with Pine and Bergman, is the mature statement of the theory.

Her selected papers were collected in two volumes, Infantile Psychosis and Early Contributions and Separation-Individuation. Her memoirs, edited by Paul Stepansky, were published in 1988.