Margaret Mahler
Margaret Schönberger Mahler pioneered theories on child development and abnormal psychology that impacted generations of psychiatrists. Mahler began studying medicine in Budapest in 1917 and earned her doctorate from the University of Jena in 1922. She then opened a pediatric practice in Vienna and began training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She fled the Anschluss in 1938 for the United States. She simultaneously taught psychiatry at Columbia University and directed the child analysis training program of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, shuttling between New York and Philadelphia. In 1962 created the Masters Child Center for studying interaction between mothers and their children under age three. She wrote extensively on the mother-child relationship and the separation-individuation process, and in her therapies she encouraged mothers to become partners in their children’s treatment, a pioneering approach.
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EJ.
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Mühlleitner, Elke, ed. Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse: Die Mitglieder der Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung 1902–1938 (1992).
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Swerdloff, Bluma. Interviews with Margaret Mahler, 1969–1974. Oral History Research Project, Butler Library, Columbia University, NYC.
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