Thirteen years ago the Margaret S. Mahler Psychiatric Research Foundation, in conjunction with the graduate psychology department of the New School for Social Research in New York, established the Margaret S. Mahler Observational Research Nursery. Funding was provided by the foundation to develop, within the New School, a laboratory to serve as a research and clinical teaching facility for doctoral students in clinical and developmental psychology, and for interested child observers from outside the university.
Approximately ten students a year take an eight-credit course requiring participation in a variety of activities connected with the nursery. Students participate as research observers and recorders of observational data; attend a weekly literature seminar on clinical theory and research methods in child development; and take part in a weekly clinical conference on the children and families in the nursery project. They also interview parents, conduct home visits, and design research projects. Some use data gathered in the nursery for their dissertations. Since the inception of the nursery project, 133 students have enrolled in this extensive course in child development. With few exceptions, all of these students are currently practicing psychologists in academic, clinical, or research positions. Approximately one-fifth are working directly with children.
Margaret Mahler's observations have deeply influenced the thinking of a generation of practitioners in the field of early child development. Her work focused on the differentiation of self- and object representations and on understanding the genetic and developmental aspects of psychoanalysis. Central to Mahler's thesis is the infant's ability to use the mother for structuralization of the newly developing ego. Separation-individuation is the process through which infants gradually diminish their dependence on the mother figure, a process that culminates in established self- and object representations.
Mahler's description of the sequence of subphases through which the young child passes shows the gradual establishment of the infants physical and intrapsychic independence from the mother and the emergence of the individual. These processes were delineated in a way that greatly expanded our knowledge of such concepts as self- and object constancy, identity formation, and adaptation to reality.
As a researcher, Mahler was closely allied with psychoanalytic developmental research of the sort exemplified by the work of Ernst Kris and René Spitz—research whose findings led to the elaboration of psychoanalytic principles. Her work was relatively remote from academic developmental psychology, a type of research that used new methods to advance the study of infants and young children in the areas of cognition, affect, perception, memory, and language development. Although Mahler had a profound interest in the literature of academic psychology, her main interest was in formulating developmental principles that brought psychoanalytic theory to bear on the early formation of psychic structure and vice versa. Her conceptualization and delineation of the subphases of separation-individuation constituted just such an achievement.
Mahler read widely, and although her formulations relied heavily on metapsychological concepts, she was influenced also by such authors as Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Kohut, whose work did not fall entirely within that framework. She was open to many ideas, and though her emphasis was on delineating aspects of the ego, her thinking was anchored in the classical aspects of metapsychology.
In the last years of her life Mahler was aware that her formulations and hypotheses were gaining widespread acceptance. Although this gratified her, she was nonetheless concerned that her work might be misapplied by the next generation of practitioners. She was not alone in this concern and with a number of colleagues decided to establish a foundation, the purpose of which would be to assure the continuation of her work and to promote independent study, research, and education in early child development. The idea of a research nursery was conceived as a way of implementing these goals.
With the financial support of the De Menil family, the Margaret S. Mahler Research Foundation of the Menil Foundation was established in 1971. Selma Kramer was its first president, Leo Madow the vice-president, Robert Prall the treasurer, and Ernest Witkin the secretary. In 1976 the Margaret S. Mahler Psychiatric Foundation was established as an entity separate from the Menil Foundation, with Bernard Pacella as the first president. Helen Meyers and Annemarie Weil were vice-presidents, Ed Lipton treasurer, Donald Meyers secretary, and Irving Sternschein medical director. Many of Mahler's close colleagues became trustees of the new foundation, or members of its Board of Professional Advisors, which was chaired by John McDevitt.
Harold Blum, Alex Burland, Jim Goldstein, Henri Parens, Fred Pine, Sam Ritvo, Joseph Rudolph, Cal Settlage, AI Solnit, Herman Staples, and Muriel Winestine served on the first board of trustees, as did McDevitt, Anni Bergman, Eleanor Galenson, Louise Kaplan, Paulina Kernberg, Selma Kramer, Peter Neubauer, Bernard Pacella, and Annemarie Weil. The latter group were particularly instrumental in developing plans for the research nursery, which was to be the foundations principal activity. Meanwhile, McDevitt and Bergman continued their follow-up study of children observed in the original research project.
Eventually, in 1981, in conjunction with the New School and its graduate psychology department, the research nursery was made a reality. The New School provided a large playroom, an observation room, and a research laboratory, and Mahler and McDevitt were installed as the principal research scientists and consultants. Robin Persky, the first director, was followed two years later by Patricia Nachman, who has been director ever since.
The nursery is designed to provide a milieu in which the spontaneous behavior of infants and toddlers can be observed in a natural setting as they play and interact with one another, their parents, and other adults. The setting is unlike the traditional nursery school or day care center, in that mothers remain in charge of their children. Thus, the setting more resembles an indoor playground where parents can sit and talk, or join their children in play, yet always assume full responsibility. The caregiving that occurs here is similar, then, to the natural situation of the typical playground.
Patricia A. Nachman, Ph.D., is director of the Margaret S. Mahler Observational Research Nursery.
This rare opportunity to observe children trains students to become accomplished recorders of observed behavior; at the same time, the seminars acquaint them with psychoanalytic theory and the clinical principles on which the data are interpreted.
Students are encouraged to evaluate and use the data as a continual check and guide to their clinical inferences and theoretical propositions.
Each student is assigned one male and one female toddler, whose behavior is to be observed and recorded for an entire academic year. After each nursery session a clinical conference is held to discuss, from a variety of perspectives, the observations made that day. In addition, each parent-child pair is discussed at regular intervals in terms of the child's developing ego and the parent-child relationship.
The children selected for the nursery are all the same age (within a range of two to three weeks), are firstborn, and come from intact families of the same socioeconomic status. There are an equal number of girls and boys in each group. Holding these variables constant allows more systematic comparisons as regards the similarities and differences between the children. It also helps in assessing the relative contributions of maturation, innate endowment, and the parent-child relationship to the developmental profile that emerges for each child.
Mahler's delineation of the separation-individuation subphases provided one of the most important normative timetables of psychoanalytic developmental theory. The studies it was based on involved mothers who were at home with their children during most of the day. With increasing numbers of women entering the work force, however, the important question has arisen of whether a similar unfolding of the separation-individuation process occurs in children whose mothers are employed full-time outside the home. Current research at the nursery is addressing this issue.
Maternal employment brings with it an experience of separation quite different from the prolonged separations in the studies of Bowlby, Spitz, and Robertson. Children of mothers employed full-time experience daytime separations that are relatively brief but are repeated daily for an indefinite period. To document and further understand this difference, the nursery has been conducting an ongoing comparison study of children cared for by their mothers, and children cared for during the day by full-time employed caregivers while the mothers are at work.
These two groups of toddlers and their caregivers were observed at the nursery on different days and were compared in terms of the children's expression of affect, interest in peers, identifications, timing of the separation-individuation subphases, separation protests, signals of communication, and symbolic functioning. Throughout this work, the development of the child's mental representation of the mother asserted itself as an undefined yet pivotal concept in the effort to understand the implications of substitute care and multiple caregivers. The construction of the maternal representation remains a challenging question, one pursued in much of the nursery's work.
Apart from the caregiver study just described, several students are writing dissertations, using videotaped data from the nursery, on topics including sex differences in mother-child play, children's reactions to the loss of attention, and mothers' use of fantasy in mother-child play. The nursery's research uses information and methods taken from both infant research and psychoanalysis, in the belief that the disciplines can learn from each other and can profit from their differences, each serving as a check on the other's inferences and assumptions.
Mahler's conceptualization of separation-individuation is above all a clinical theory that evolved through observational study of the first three years of life. The understanding that students achieve in their yearlong exposure to child observation is probably the most important and enduring clinical lesson they will ever leam. Although the majority of these students go on to practice exclusively with adult patients, many of them report, years after taking the nursery course, that their experience in child observation has helped them enormously in understanding patients and the origins of their conflicts.
The Mahler Foundation, currently presided over by Selma Kramer, who succeeded Bernard Pacella in 1988, has lived up to its early promise. It continues to train a future generation of practitioners in the clinical understanding of young children, and to contribute to research in child development and to the literature on separation. In particular, it addresses the pressing issue of maternal employment and the child's daytime separation from its mother.
Above all, Margaret Mahler wanted her work to be of direct benefit to young children and their families. This was her legacy and the basis on which the foundation is continuing its work.