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Although Mahler was very satisfied with the initial chapter resulting from her collaboration with the editor of this volume, she “postpond” futher work on the memoir until, as it happened, after her death. Stepansky is tactfully silent, but one tends to suppose that even in her eighties, the material she was working over was still too vivid to be recalled without pain. The very first chapter described how Margaret Mahler's birth, nine months and six days after her parent's marriage, was very much resented by her beautiful, pampered nineteen-year-old mother. Mahler says, “My symbiotic stage of life was difficult: I must have been full of frustrated rage at the rejecting mother whom I greatly loved nonetheless.” When her sister was born, four years later, the mother's maternal instincts were awakened and she greeted the second child with enthusiasm. Mahler says that this was the first infant-mother dyad she studied. Already, before her sister's birth, she had responded to her mother's coldness by becoming quietly observant. “I believe it was my observations of my mother's loving interaction with my sister—and the way it contrasted with her interaction with me—that guided me into pediatrics and psychoanalysis and, more specifically, into my subsequent investigation of the mother-infant dual unity. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that my own mother and sister represented the first mother-child pair that I investigated.”
The examples of maternal rejection described by Mahler are blatant and she was fortunate in having an alternative: “It was to my father's world, the world of the intellect, of science, of medicine, that I turned in early childhood.”