Margaret Mahler: Biography of This Psychoanalyst

Child development and how the human being gradually acquires its own identity based on the stimulation of the environment and the development of the Self have been the subject of frequent study by psychology. Different models and explanations have been established in this regard.

One of the best known authors in this regard is Margaret Mahler, psychoanalytic author specializing in child development and in psychotic disorders in minors. Below we will review her life and work through a short biography of Margaret Mahler.

Brief biography of Margaret Mahler: early years

Margaret Schonberger, as that was her birth name Until she acquired her husband’s surname, she was born in Sopron (Hungary) during the year 1897.

Daughter of a doctor and a housewife of Jewish origins, Margaret was the first of two sisters. While her father always treated her correctly and encouraged her to investigate (at the time it was considered that she offered him the same treatment as if she had been born a man), he never had a very close relationship with her mother.

Margaret Mahler He was interested in science since childhood, probably in part due to his father’s profession. In her adolescence she was encouraged to read psychoanalytic authors such as Sigmund Freud, becoming interested in the subject of psychology and the unconscious.

He began studying Art History at the University of Budapest in 1916, but ended up deciding to change and study medicine. being transferred to the University of Munich and beginning to specialize in pediatrics. However, at that time anti-Semitism began to be promoted and accentuated and, being of Jewish origin, he decided to move to Jenna until his graduation in 1922, seeing how play and emotional bonds were fundamental in the physical and mental development of minors.

Transfer to Vienna and approach to psychoanalysis

That same year, Margaret Schonberger would receive the news that she could not remain in Germany, being forced to move to Vienna. The author had already begun to be interested in Jenna attachment relationships between parents and children, which once in Vienna led her to become more actively interested in psychoanalytic theory and to train in this area. In 1933 she would join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.

Second World War

In 1936 She married Paul Mahler, from whom she would absorb the surname However, her husband’s businesses and activities practically bankrupted them.

Shortly after his marriage, the Nazi army took over Austria, forcing him to move to England (thanks largely to the intervention of the wife of the viceroy of India) in order to escape.

Later they moved to the United States, a place from which she would try to get her family to join her. However, her mother was deported and murdered in Auschwitz while her father died before the Nazis invaded the region.

Life in the United States and death

In the years after World War II, Margaret Mahler began working and researching psychosis and autism He managed to practice at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. She would also be accepted into the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute of Human Development.

It was at this time that he would establish most of his theory regarding mother-child symbiosis and the progressive acquisition of identity and autonomy She was also one of the first psychologists to specialize in infants with psychotic disorders, creating the center specialized in this, the Masters Therapeutic Nursery, and another focused on individuation and separation, the Masters Children Centre, in 1957.

The author received several recognitions and awards in honor of her contributions throughout her life, especially in her later years. Margaret Mahler died in 1985 in New York City.

Contributions

Margaret Mahler’s work focused mainly on the treatment of childhood, making theoretical contributions in the psychoanalytic field of human development

One of his most recognized theories is about individuation. For Mahler a child’s personality begins to be forged thanks to the interaction with other people, initially fused with the figure of the mother as the baby is not able to differentiate itself and distinguish between what is me and what is not. Throughout development, the infant will try to separate and become an independent entity throughout different phases.

Firstly, during the first month of life the child would be in the phase called normal autism, in which he does not respond to external stimulation and spends more time asleep than awake.

From the second month onwards, the baby enters the symbiosis phase, in which the baby is not able to distinguish between me and not me and is in a stage of fusion with the mother.

In the fourth month of life, the first attempts at differentiation are usually observed, entering the final phase of separation and individuation, the subject begins to explore on his own although he needs the mother figure to be close. After one year he begins to practice locomotion and separation from the mother, temporarily. After this, he begins a conflictive subperiod between dependence and independence, which will culminate approximately after two years of age when he has a permanent Self and begins to be aware that others have their own psyche that is foreign to his own.