The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler: Edited by Paul E. Stepansky. New York/London: The Free Press, 1988. 179 pp.

It was my privilege to know Margaret Mahler over a span of thirty-five years, from the time she began the training program in child analysis at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute in 1950 until her death, at age 88, in 1985. During these years she was my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. I greatly admired and gained a deep affection and respect for her as a good friend and as a uniquely dedicated and determined woman with strong ambition and high ideals. This review of her Memoirs reflects my wish to understand the wellsprings of her ambition and creativity and the development of her remarkably effective character.

Paul Stepansky has succeeded admirably with the task of Editor, as defined for him and by him. Drawing entirely from transcripts of interviews conducted by different interviewers, he has produced a unified, harmonious account adhering to the substance and preserving the tenor, tone, and first-person language of Mahler's own reminiscences and reflections. In his Introduction (pp. xiii-xl), he goes further, offering his own insightful views of the origins, bases, and distinctly psychoanalytic mode of her observational research on early psychic development. Among these, he makes the significant observation that her pediatric and psychoanalytic concerns for the health and development of children were subtended by certain facts of her own childhood (p. xxx). Most intriguingly he introduces the idea that Mahler's own life exemplifies her theory of development, being something of a lifelong enactment of the separation-individuation process.

Indeed, to study Margaret Mahler's life, as presented in these Memoirs, is to conceive that her research was paralleled by self-exploration and self-discovery, and that her theory of symbiosis and separation-individuation was created in part out of her own experience of the first years of life. In this, she emulated Freud and affirmed the concept that psychoanalytic discoveries and contributions to theory ch