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An excellent introduction to Mahler's Selected Papers is provided by Marjorie Harley and Annemarie P. Weil, themselves notable contributors to the psychoanalytic literature. They concisely trace the major themes evident in Mahler's published work (of which these
two volumes are but a selection) beginning in 1942, and they provide a perspective useful both to the student new to Mahler's thinking and to those already familiar with it.
With an increasing focus on the second year of life, Mahler's interests grew to encompass the motifs of motility, the role of affect in mother-infant communication and development, the developmental history of omnipotence, and comparisons between usual developmental variations and pathological phenomena. The culminating conceptualization of the separation-individuation subphases seems now a natural and inevitable consequence of this work published between 1942 and 1976, based primarily on clinical experience, and gathered in Volume I. Significant contributions along the way include, among others, the distinction between autistic and symbiotic psychoses, the recognition of the importance of the child's innate endowment and the fact that a psychotic infant may evoke deviant and deleterious responses from an otherwise "good enough" mother, and the clarification of the importance of the father in the preoedipal period. Not all of these contributions have been pursued and exploited. As another example of observation which awaits further investigation and refinement, consider the following: while the mother may be less involved in the care of her infant than a nurse who provides immediate need satisfaction, the mother's image seems to attract so much more investment "that it often, though not always, becomes the cardinal object representation" (Vol. I, "On Sadness and Grief in Infancy and Childhood: Loss and Restoration of the Symbiotic Love Object," 1961, p. 263). We still find it easier to explain why certain mothers "fail" than to