The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler. Paul E. Stepansky (Ed). New York:  Free Press, 1988,  xl + 179 pp.

Paul Stepansky, a historian of psychoanalysis, has, with sensitivity and clarity, compiled and edited reflections on the personal life and scientific achievements of Margaret Schönberger Mahler. Using primarily four interviews given to the oral history research office of Columbia University and a number of interviews with Dr. Doris Nagel , Stepansky pulls together the memoirs of this remarkable pioneer clinician/researcher whose original thinking and discoveries have become a cornerstone in the understanding of child development.

An organizing element in Paul Stepansky's compilation is his attempt to interrelate the vicissitudes of Mahler's personal history with her scientific and professional growth. In his introduction, Stepansky suggests that “Mahler's own life exemplifies her theory of development, being something of a lifelong enactment of the separation-individuation process….” The editor goes on to note the memoirs “testify eloquently to Margaret Mahler's own continuing struggle for personal autonomy and professional identity, and her successive leaps forward out of a series of personal and professional matrices, each of which possesses both nurturant and constraining aspects.” In his Afterword, Stepansky suggests that “Since a memoir is, by definition, a subjective recounting of episodes from a life, it is necessarily skewed along certain lines…. To recount one's life at all is to recount it from a particular