Margaret Mahler: biography of this psychoanalyst

Child development and how the human being gradually acquires its own identity from the stimulation of the environment and the elaboration of the self They 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 her and in psychotic disorders in minors. Next we will review her life and work through a short biography of Margaret Mahler.

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Brief Biography of Margaret Mahler: Early Years

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

The 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 (for the time in question it was she considered that she offered him the same treatment as if he had been born a man), she never had a relationship with her mother too close.

Margaret Mahler she was interested from childhood in science, probably in part due to her father's profession. In her teens she was encouraged to read psychoanalytic authors such as Sigmund Freud, interested in the subject of psychology and the unconscious.

She began studying Art History at the University of Budapest in 1916, but she ended up deciding to change and study medicine, she being transferred to the University of Munich she and she starting to specialize in pediatrics. However, at that time, anti-Semitism began to be promoted and accentuated and she, being of Jewish origin, decided to move to Jenna until her graduation in 1922, seeing how play and affective bonding were essential in the physical and mental development of children. minors.

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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 in Jenna to be interested in attachment relationships between parents and children, which once in Vienna led her to take a more active interest in psychoanalytic theory and to train in this area. In 1933 she would become part of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.

Second World War

in 1936 she married Paul Mahler, from whom she would absorb the last name. However, her husband's businesses and activities practically bankrupted them.

Shortly after her marriage, the Nazi army took over Austria, forcing her 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 he 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 to work and research on psychosis and autism. She got to practice at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. She would also be accepted into the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute for Human Development.

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

The author received various recognitions and awards honoring her contribution throughout her life, especially in her later years. Margaret Mahler died in 1985 in New York City.

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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 the personality of a child begins to take shape thanks to the interaction with other people, initially fused with the figure of the mother as the baby was not capable of differentiating itself and distinguishing between what is me and what is not. Throughout development, the infant will try to separate and become an independent entity through different phases.

In the first place, during the first month of life, the minor would be in the phase that he calls normal autism, in which he does not respond to external stimulation and spends more time asleep than awake.

From the second month on, enter the symbiosis phase, in which the baby is not able to distinguish between me and not me and is in a phase 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, beginning the subject to explore by himself even though he needs the mother figure to be close. After a year he begins to practice locomotion and separation with his mother, temporarily. After that, a conflictive sub-period between dependence and independence begins, which will culminate approximately after two years of age. years of age when he has a permanent I and begins to be aware that others have their own psyche alien to his own.

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