On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis

Margaret Mahler's monograph, written in collaboration with Manuel Furer and published in 1968 as the first of a planned two-volume study, gathers her work on psychotic children into a single theory of early development and its failures. It first sets out the concepts of symbiosis and separation-individuation: the infant passes from an early, objectless phase of normal autism into a symbiotic dual unity with the mother, out of which a separate self gradually emerges. On this basis it presents the symbiosis theory of infantile psychosis, which reads the psychoses of early childhood as derailments of that sequence, and distinguishes autistic from symbiotic forms. Later chapters take up diagnosis, clinical case material and recurrent patterns of mother–child interaction, and describe the treatment Mahler and Furer developed in New York, in which the mother takes part in the child's sessions. The book draws on non-analytic developmental research such as Piaget's and Werner's, ends with a summary of the theory, and has a bibliography of more than four hundred items.