Margaret Mahler

Margaret Schönberger Mahler (May 10, 1897 – October 2, 1985) was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested and proficient in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis. Although her main interest was in normal child development, but she spent much of her time with psychiatric children and how they arrive at the "self." Mahler is best known for having developed the Separation-Individuation theory of child development, as well as the concept of object constancy.

Margaret had a difficult childhood because of her own parents' troubled marriage, but found hope as her father encouraged her to pursue the sciences. She turned the difficulties she endured at the hands of sexism and antisemitism into personal triumphs, not only obtaining her education, but through her theories, providing valuable insight into the psychology of children—insights still used by many today.

Life

Margaret was born on May 10, 1897, to Gustav Schonberger and Eugenia Weiner-Schonberger, a Jewish family in Sopron, a small town Hungary, near Vienna. She and a younger sister had a difficult childhood as a result of their parents' troubled marriage. Margaret's father, the Chief Public Health Official for their district, encouraged her to excel in 0mathematics and other sciences. After completing the High School for Daughters, she attended Vaci Utcai Gimnazium in Budapest even though it was unusual at the time for a woman to continue formal education. Budapest was of great influence on her life and career. She met the influential Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, became fascinated by the concept of the unconscious, and was encouraged to read Sigmund Freud (Coates 2003)

In September 1916, Margaret began Art History studies at the University of Budapest, but in January 1917, she switched to Medical School. Three semesters later, she began medical training at the University of Munich, but was forced to leave because of German antisemitism. In the spring of 1920, she transferred to the University of Jena and it was there that she began to realize how important play and love were for growing infants, both mentally and physically. Margaret graduated cum laude in 1922. She left for Vienna, to get her license to practice medicine. There, she turned from pediatrics to psychiatry and, in 1926, started her training analysis with Helene Deutsch. Seven years later, Margaret was accepted as an analyst. Schönberger loved working with children—it was her passion. She loved the way the children gave her their attention and showed their joy in cooperating with her.

In 1921, she began having severe stomach pains and would have attacks that horrified her circle of friend's. She was diagnosed with Heirshsprung disease, a congenital disorder of the colon rectum which causes it to be unable to relax and permit the passage of stool. Her doctors told her she needed to have a partial colonectomy—at the time, major surgery. During the surgery, however, the doctors discovered she needed to have severe adhesions removed rather than any of her colon. After the procedure, the problem ended.

In 1926, she began analysis training with Helene Deutsch. Deutsch was completely against the idea, but with encouragement from Ferenczi, she accepted. After 14 months of constant cancellations Deutsch said that she was unanalyzable. Deutsch insisted the only way her training could continue was if she was paid. It wasn't until 1933, seven years later, that Margaret was finally accepted as an analyst. However, the same year brought grief, when her long time friend and inspiration, Ferenczi, passed away.

Margaret was very active in her field, attending seminars, mixing in circles with Anna Freud, and publishing papers in Journal of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy. It was at one of the seminars, however, that she met Paul Mahler, a chemist with a Ph.D. and a junior partner of Viennese Cordial Factory (a family business that eventually went under). Margaret felt superior to Paul, often feeling that he needed to be taken care of or was very needy, and in that way, they came to be, for Margaret, a perfect match. They married in 1936.

Following the Nazis' rise to power, the couple moved to Britain and then, in 1938, to the United States. Although the transition was difficult, as they had little in the way of money and they spoke even less English, after receiving a New York medical license, Mahler set up private practice in a basement and began to rebuild her clientèle. In 1939, she met Benjamin Spock and, after giving a child analysis seminar in 1940, she became senior teacher of child analysis. She joined the Institute of Human Development, the Educational Institute and the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In 1948, she worked on clinical studies on Benign and Malignant Cases of Childhood Psychosis.

In 1969, Mahler was awarded the APA Agnes Purceil McGavin Award. Barnard College, at its 1980 commencement ceremonies, awarded Mahler its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. In 1981, she eared the Distinguished Service Award.

Schönberger Mahler died on October 2, 1985. Her and Paul's ashes were buried beside her father's grave in the Jewish Cemetery in Sopron on August 1, 1986.

Work

Although her main area of interest was normal child development, Margaret Mahler worked as a psychoanalyst with young disturbed children. In 1950, she and Manuel Furer founded the Masters Children’s Centre, in Manhattan. There she developed the Tripartite Treatment Model, in which the mother participated in the treatment of the child (Coates 2003).

Mahler initiated a more constructive exploration of severe disturbances in childhood and emphasized the importance of the environment on the child. She was especially interested in mother-infant duality and carefully documented the impact of early separations of children from their mothers. This documentation of separation-individuation was her most important contribution to the development of psychoanalysis.

Mahler shed light on the normal and abnormal features of the developmental ego psychology. She worked with psychotic children, while psychosis hadn’t been covered in the psychoanalytic treatment yet (Mitchell and Black 1995).

Symbiotic child psychosis struck her. She saw the symptomatology as a derailment of the normal processes whereby self and object representations become distinct (Coates 2003). Her most important work was The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation, written in 1975, with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman.

Separation-Individuation Theory of child development

Perhaps her most important contribution to child psychology, the Separation-Individuation Theory of child development stresses the importance of consistent attentiveness and affection, especially from the mother or primary care-giver, during a child's first three years of life, as vital to the ultimate goal of raising successful, adaptable children.

Mahler's theory breaks down the early development of a child into the following phases:

• Normal Autistic Phase—Takes place during the first few weeks of life. The infant is detached and self absorbed, spending most of its time sleeping. In order to encourage a healthy childhood, the mother or father needs to be available to lovingly meet the baby's needs and introduce tender, caring interaction. Mahler later abandoned this phase, based on new findings from her infant research (Coates 2003).

• Normal Symbiotic Phase—Lasts from the first month to about 5 months of age. The child becomes aware of its mother but there is no a sense of individuality. To the infant, it is one with the mother, and there is a barrier between them and the rest of the world. Positive stimuli (such as cuddling, smiling, and engaged attention) as well as relief of discomfort (prompt feeding, changing of soiled diapers, providing an appropriate sleep environment) all help the infant to develop a trust that their needs will be met, building a basis for security and confidence.

• Mahler described the third phase as the Separation-Individuation Phase, and it marks the end of the Normal Symbiotic Phase. During this new phase, the child develops limits and the differentiation between the infant and mother (separation), later developing a sense of self (individuation). There are four sub-phases in the Separation-Individuation Phase:

1. Differentiation (5 to 10 months)—The infant ceases to be ignorant of the differentiation between itself and the caregiver. It shows a greater interest in the outside world and shows the first signs of separation anxiety. Infants feel most comfortable exploring from within the safe confines of its mother's or father's arms.
2. Practicing (10 to 16 months)—Brought about by the infant's ability to crawl and then walk freely, the infant begins to explore actively, becoming more distant from the mother—although only briefly, returning often to receive extra support and comfort. Babies will often want to keep the caregiver within eyesight.
3. Rapprochement (16 to 24 months)—Mahler referred to this as "ambitendency" and explained that this behavior is representative of a toddler's sometimes opposing desires and needs. It is during these months that children first get a real sense that they are individuals, separate from their caregiver—which is both an exciting and frightening discovery. Mahler noticed that toddlers became slightly more "low key" when their caregiver was not around; but when they felt comfortable, they felt free to explore the world by imitating adults and desiring toys and objects that others have (sometimes taking them by force).
4. Consolidation and object constancy (24 to 36 months)—The child gets more comfortable leaving its caregiver, allowing for the ego of the caregiver and the child to go their separate ways.

Object constancy

Another major breakthrough made by Mahler was the concept of object constancy. Mahler's theory could be contrasted to Jean Piaget's object permanence—the infant's developing realization that simply because something cannot be seen, it does not cease to exist. Piaget discovered that infants typically reach this stage somewhere around eight or nine months of age. Mahler's object constancy can almost be seen as object permanence's other book end: Rather than simply acknowledging that others exist, the child begins to recognize that other people have separate identities. This, then, leads to the realization on the part of the child that it, too, has its own unique identity—the formation of ego. Object constancy is usually defined by the child's ability to see and relate to another person in his or her own right, part of making a direct, personal contact. It relates directly and specifically to people and how the infant interacts with people.

This leads to the formation of Internalization, which provides the child with an image of itself that helps supply it with an unconscious level of guiding support and comfort from their mothers. Deficiencies in positive Internalization could possibly lead to a sense of insecurity and low self esteem issues in adulthood (Engler 2005).

From the point of view of the separation-individuation theory, the main task of the fourth subphase is two-fold: (1) the achievement of a definite, in certain aspects lifelong, individuality and (2) the attainment of a certain degree of object constancy. As far as the self is concerned there is a far-reaching structuralization of the ego and there are definite signs of internalization of paternal demands indicating the formative superego precursors.

The establishment of effective (emotional) object constancy depends up on the gradual internalization of a constant, positively cathected inner image of the mother. This, to begin with, permits the child to function separately (in familiar surroundings, for example, in our toddler room) despite moderate degrees of tension (longing) and discomfort. Emotional object constancy will, of course, be based in the first place on the cognitive achievement of the permanent object, but all other aspects of the child's personality development participate in this evolution as well

Legacy

Margaret Mahler, having faced persecution both because of her religion and her gender, triumphed not only in obtaining her education, but in making many important contributions to the field of psychology—particularly child psychology. Her theory of separation-individuation remains a touchstone for modern child psychologists, although the innate abilities of newborns have been emphasized more recently. The impact of that work, perhaps articulated best in her The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (1975), has been considerably long lasting. Mahler's work broadened the scope of pyscho-analytic understanding of development, paving the way for later theories, such as dynamic system theories (Coates 2003).

In fact, in the words of Susan W. Coates, Mahler's

…theories, both conceptual and clinical, form the underpinnings of a modern relational psychoanalytic theory of development. …Mahler’s clinical work, though not presented originally to illustrate dynamic systems theory, is nevertheless entirely consistent with a contemporary dynamic systems perspective. Any current reading of psychoanalytic developmental theory makes it clear that dynamic systems theory is reshaping the way we think about and are rethinking development.

Some of Mahler's theories were later affirmed by other researchers. Stern (1985), for example noticed that as children move away from their mother, they check back for "refueling and mirroring;" that is, in order to share what was learned and for verbal affirmation (Shane and Shane 1989).

Mahler's other especially valuable contribution lay in the rapproachement subphase. Insight into the child's uneasy return to the mother and ambivalent attitude after a surge of confidence while exploring the environment at large has helped child psychologists and mothers both relate to children in a more helpful and informed way (Shane and Shane 1989).

That said, her infant observations have been falsified both by her contemporaries and later child psychologists. While Mahler saw the newborn as completely detached from the world, Kohut, for example, saw the infant as both observationally and functionally aware of its surroundings. Later research, by Parens, for example, has backed up this claim (Shane and Shane 1989).

Major works

• Mahler, Margaret S. 1949. Psychoanalytic Evaluation of Tics. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 4: 279-310.
• Mahler, Margaret S. 1959. Autism and Symbiosis, Two Extreme Disturbances of Identity. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39: 77-82.
• Mahler, Margaret S. 1968. On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation. Volume 1: Infantile and Early Contributions. International Universities Press. ISBN 0823637808
• Mahler, Margaret S. 1970. On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation. Volume 2: Separation-Individuation. Basic Books.
• Mahler, Margaret S. Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman [1975] 2000. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465095544

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Coates, Susan. W. 2003. John Bowlby and Margaret S. Mahler: Their Lives and Theories. Retrieved June 30, 2008.
• Mitchell, Stephen. A., and Margaret J. Black. 1995. Freud and Beyond. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 0465014054
• Schur, Max (ed.). 1965. Drives, Affects, Behavior. New York, NY: International Universities Press.
• Bond, Alma Halbert. 2008. Margaret Mahler: A Biography of the Psychoanalyst. McFarland. ISBN 978-0786433551
• Akhtar, Salman, and Selma Kramer (eds.). 1997. The Seasons of Life: Separation-Individuation Perspectives (Margaret S. Mahler Symposium Series). Jason Aronson. ISBN 0765700557
• Shane, Estelle, and Morton Shane. 1989. Mahler, Kohut, and Infant Research: Some Comparisons Retrieved October 16, 2008. In Self Psychology: Comparisons and Contrasts Douglas Detrick, Susan Detrick, and Arnold Goldberg (eds). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. ISBN 0881630772
• Engler, Barbara. 2005. Personality Theories, 7th Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0618496629
• Ware, Susan, and Stacy Braukman (eds.). 2004. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press. ISBN 067401488X
• Stepansky, Paul E. 1992. The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler. The Analytic Press. ISBN 978-0881631685
• Mazet, Philippe. 2005. Margaret Mahler-Schönberger International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. The Gale Group, Inc. Retrieved October 23, 2008.
• Jacobson, Edith. 1964. The Self and the Object World. International Universities Press. ISBN 0823660605

External links

• Margaret Mahler Psychiatric Research Foundation. Retrieved June 30, 2008.

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