Margaret Mahler - 1897-1985

Margaret Mahler died on 2nd October 1985 just a month before the first international symposium on her work to be held outside the United States took place in Paris.

She could be said to be the third of a triumvirate of Austrio-Hungarian Matriarchies all born between 1882 and 1897 who were to become of the greatest significance in the theory of the psychology of child-development leading to particular views and concepts of child and adult psychoanalytic theory and practice.

It is difficult not to suggest that the researches of Margaret Mahler have less significance than those of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, if one accepts the views of Anne-Marie Sandler in a review of The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation by Mahler, Pine and Bergman (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 57 Part 3 pp. 360-362). Sandler states

It would be no exaggeration to say that this work represents one of the most comprehensive modifications of the psychoanalytic theory of child development since Freud published his Three Essays in 1905. I would venture to suggest that Mahler's views would have been perfectly acceptable to Freud, for they are based on the most careful and essentially psychoanalytic observation of infants and children, normal and abnormal.

Mahler was born in the Hungarian town of Sopron, near the Austrian border some forty miles from Vienna, where she in due course became a doctor, a pediatrician and later an inspired child psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and child analyst. In 1938 the Nazi threat forced her to emigrate first to London, where she had some analysis under Willi Hoffer, and later to the United States.

Later the expression Symbiotic Psychosis was used in those situations where it was clear that the mother-child unit remained as a unit, and the mother was not experienced as a separate object. The illness began, in fact, at a point where this would normally happen, so that the lack of separation was psychically brought about by vario