Alma Halbert Bond
THE SEPARATION-INDIVIDUATION OF MARGARET S. MAHLER
Alma Halbert Bond is a psychoanalyst and much published author who worked as a participant observer at Masters Children’s Center. The material in this article is taken from her book, “Margaret Mahler: A Biography of the Psychoanalyst,” which was recently published by McFarland Publishers, and awarded Best Books Award Finalist 2008 in the Biography category by USA Book News.. Dr. Bond interviewed many of Mahler’s friends and associates for the book;.some of them now deceased, including the great Jacob Arlow.
Margaret Schoenberger was born to an upper middle class Jewish family on May 10, 1897, in Sopron, Hungary, a charming city known as the ancient jewel of the country. Sopron is located along the
Austrian-Hungarian border at the foot of the Alps, 40 miles from Vienna. The ambiance of the town is perhaps more Austrian than Hungarian. The citizens are famous for their hospitality. There is a lively cultural life in the city, including a tradition of art, music, and theatre. In addition to its high culture, the natural surroundings, the mountainsides with woods, springs, and the air of the Alps make Sopron an ideal place for mental and physical recreation.
Margaret Mahler was a true daughter of Sopron in her gracious hospitality, her love of art, music, and theatre, her pursuit of the intellectual life, and her extensive use of the cultural life of her adopted city of New York. Like her fellow Sopronians who knew how to enjoy their town’s cultural assets, Mahler made good use of the artistic resources of Manhattan. A connoisseur and collector of art, she was a gracious hostess who made sure that every detail of her service was correct.
The Gustztav Schoenbergers lived in a complex of apartment houses in Sopron called Gyoery Palota, where executives of the famous railroad that ran through the town once lived. The Schoenbergers’ home was probably not too different from Margaret’s large European style apartment in The El Dorado, which overlooked the trees of Central Park. Her cherished Connecticut home of Brookfield surrounded with the woods she loved may well have brought back memories of the beautiful natural surroundings of Sopron.
Margaret, or Margit, as she was then called, was born to the nineteen-year-old Eugenia Wiener Schoenberger nine months and six days after her wedding. Eugenia felt very put upon by her pregnancy, as she considered herself too young to be a mother. Apparently she blamed Margit for the mishap, and had as little to do with her as possible. As a result, the future student of symbiosis was left to work out her own destiny, as a normal symbiotic process could not have developed with so rejecting a mother.
As if that situation weren’t catastrophic enough, when Margit’s sister Suzanne was born Eugenia made no secret which child she preferred. Once Margit sat watching her mother nurse her sister, and heard her say, “I suckle you, I love you, I adore you. I live only for you.” Margit said defiantly, “And I was born of my father, not my mother.” She said later that her mother’s remark reminded her of Pallas Athene, who in the Greek legend sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus, her father. This episode, in which the little girl could only have been bursting with envy and rage, was the prototype of all the mothers and babies she was to observe in decades to come. She said, “I believe my mother and sister were the first mother-child relationship I investigated.”
Dr. Karen Berberian, the therapist daughter of Mahler’s student and close friend, Dr. Selma Kramer, personally saw the repetition in action. She said in an interview with me, “I remember when my son Josh was an infant, I was breast feeding him and Mahler came and watched intently. It was kind of creepy.”
As a sequel to the story, Margaret had another screen memory in which her mother who was nursing her sister, developed a breast abscess. The mean-spirited woman informed her older daughter while she was nursing Susannah that she had not breast fed Margaret. This remark set off a paroxysm of rage in the child, in which she angrily thought that the abscess served her mother right. This bout of rage in all likelihood was the forerunner of the frequent outbreaks that were to plague her and her colleagues all her life.
Mahler never overcame the sibling rivalry of her childhood, and continued to act it out all her life with certain junior colleagues and children, such as Jeremy Beberian, the grandson of Dr. Kramer. Jeremy said, “Mahler ignored me, she definitely wasn’t grandmotherly to me at all. If anything, she was very cold. She adored my brother, which would have been fine with me if it wasn’t that he got all the amenities. Just because she was a great analyst doesn’t mean she was a great person. Her contribution to the world seems very significant, but her contribution as a human being was pretty menial.”
It seems that Margit was a watcher almost from birth on. Not surprisingly, she was a sickly infant and a poor sleeper. Her father and a nurse stayed up with her at night, not her mother. Mahler thought perhaps she slept badly because she had so many unusual difficulties in her early childhood. As a result, she said, her Oedipus Complex in her 70s was still not completely resolved. Margaret said, “My mother was a beautiful, in many respects lovable, very sick woman. She certainly did not mean to become pregnant in the first act of her marriage. I was put into the arms of a wet nurse, who was dismissed when I was five months old because she stole something. That is hearsay, but a fact, so that my sleep was disturbed.”
One night when her nurse was walking her up and down trying to put her to sleep, Dr. Schonberger said to the woman, “Why don’t you put her in her crib?” She replied, “How can I? She stares like a lynx.” Mahler herself said later that she suspected she was watchful because she thought her mother wanted to kill her.
Margaret felt she was endowed with greater than average curiosity and a zeal to investigate. This is borne out by another screen memory which took place perhaps a year later. The child, who had been told of the birth of kittens in a neighbor’s attic, snuck in to see them. To her horror, she found the kittens’ eyes sealed shut. To Margit, the watcher, not to see was the worst nightmare she could imagine So she picked up the kittens one by one and pried open their eyes. She said later that she was completely unaware of the danger to her own eyes on the part of the mother cat, who might have attacked her instinctively in defense of her young. Mahler thought the germs of two of her first articles, Pseudoimbecility: A Magic Cap of Invisibility, and Les Infants Terrible lay hidden in this episode.
Dr. Schoenburger treated Margit like the son he never had, and boasted to his friends that he had a daughter with whom he could discuss politics and mathematics. He insisted that she didn’t have to marry and had no need of a husband, as she herself was better than the average man. He also said that she should stay single to take care of her sister, who was weaker and much less self-sufficient than Margaret. She did not blame her problems with men on her rejecting mother who told Margaret she was ugly, or her father who insisted she remain single, but ascribed the difficulties to her lack of acceptance of a feminine role. While her beautiful sister entered adolescence with a slew of beaux, Margaret devoted herself to reading everything she could find about Einsteinian relativity. No man would ever love her, Margaret thought, and if perchance, one did, he was immediately devalued in her mind.
Margaret acceded to her father’s wishes that she remain single until she was 39 years old, when she married Paul Mahler. According to Margaret, “He was not a professor, but a very cultured, really gentle man. But he was far from a successful man, although he had a PhD. In chemistry. Characteristically, her father tried to discourage the marriage. Although she went ahead with the wedding, his influence may well have contributed to Margaret’s ambivalence about her husband. She maintained that the marriage was a pseudo resolution to her psychological problems, because she did not marry her father or anybody like her father, but somebody who needed a mother and a father very badly himself. It seems that Mahler was more a mother to Paul than a wife. She did everything possible to find adequate work for her husband, for she was already highly successful, while Paul, when working at all, held jobs far below his level of competency. On one of her walks in Central Park with the writer, Mahler said that when she and her husband ate out at a restaurant, she would slip money to him under the table, to keep him from feeling humiliated when she paid the bill. She resented, too, that he was a typical European man, unlike many American husbands who do their share of work around the house. She also took offense at his sleeping habits. Margaret told her divorce lawyer, He always wished to sleep as far away from me as possible.” Finding it impossible to live with him any longer, she divorced him after seventeen years of marriage.
Strangely enough for a woman who had insisted on a divorce, when Paul died she conserved his ashes and had them interred with hers in Sopron, next to the graves of her parents. Mahler never remarried, or to the knowledge of the writer, had another serious love affair, although she always “kept her eyes open” looking for one.
From the time she was very little, Margit identified with her physician father and wanted to be a doctor herself. When she was fifteen years old, Alice Kovacs was her best friend. Alice was the daughter of Vilma Kovacs, a distinguished Hungarian psychoanalyst. Alice got hold of a paper of Ferenzci’s German translation of Freud’s Clark University lectures of 1909, which the girls read
surreptitiously under a school bench. Mahler said she could see from that paper how analysis works and what one could do with it, and realized right then that she wanted to become a psychoanalyst herself. Then the girls found an even more forbidden paper, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which they devoured with the avid curiosity and typical ambivalence of teenagers. Margaret emerged from her reading with a pronounced belief in the existence of the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis really began for Margaret in the living room of the Kovacs. There she met important Hungarian analysts like Benedek, Bak, Herman, and the great Ferenzci himself, who introduced the eager student to their thinking on the importance of the early mother-child relationship. It made a lot of sense to a girl who had experienced the lack of such a relationship, and was to become the important work of her life.
Winnicott once said that without the mother there is no baby. One can almost say that in the case of Margaret Mahler, without another person to melt into, there was no Margaret Mahler. According to Anni Bergman, the chief participant observer at Masters Children’s Center and Mahler’s longtime associate, “it was almost impossible for Mahler to work alone, as she was unable to think for herself. All her writing came out of a dyad.” It is most difficult to define her as an individual, because she was a different person in almost every important relationship. She seemed to have as many sides to her personality as there were people she related to. As if in illustration of her theories on symbiosis, she and each individual she was close to blended into each other and established a union that was different from any other. For these people, as with the present writer, a relationship with Margaret Mahler often could serve as a litmus test for unexplored parts of their nature.
Dr. Fred Pine said of Mahler, “Separation-Individuation came from somewhere deep inside of her, and she knew about it personally. She was able to convert it into an important contribution, but was not able to excise it from her character. The negotiation of boundaries between herself and people who were close to her was always hard for her….”
With a few colleagues such as Harold Blum and Selma Kramer, Mahler was intimate and let them into her deepest needs and fears. With others no less valued by her, Fred Pine, for example, she battled constantly and stubbornly. She had a number of “daughters,” but, characteristically, treated each one differently. Her analysand Bluma Swerdloff, later to become her friend and interviewer, generally found her kind and caring. With Judy Smith, Mahler’s film editor, she was also helpful and accepting, but cooly professional.
Dr. Smith said, “Margaret Mahler was a very important person in my life. She was a strong, smart woman, who let me into her den in some ways. Her ideas were very important to me. They sort of formed the basis of my professional identity. It was nice being liked and taken into the world of history. I worked for her probably from 1975 or 76 until she died. She couldn’t tell me precisely what to do because she didn’t know about film making. I knew she was a difficult lady, but I didn’t feel she impeded me.”
Another “daughter” was Kitty LaPerrière, who said, “James Anthony introduced her to me. He said, ‘If you can forgive some eccentricities you will have an interesting time with her.’ She seemed to me to be intense and cloudy in her eyes, not a happy woman. I thought I could be forgiving, and we agreed that I would come to work for her as a research psychologist. I had my PhD already and didn’t have to work for her if I didn’t want to. She said, “Kitty thinks like a man.” That was the highest compliment she could pay any woman.
“Anni Bergman was the chief participant observer,” LaPerrière continued. “Mahler had a way of humiliating people. Once she invited me to dinner in front of Anni, and said to her, “You can come for dessert.” Mahler used me as a cat’s paw with the others. We would sit and have meetings every morning, where we would read the observations. She could reduce a person like Imogene Kamakaio to tears. She would say, “LaPerrière would never do that!” When I was there nobody else had a Ph.D. The men all had M.D.s, and Mahler thought PhDs were higher. I am a linguist, and speak French, Check, and German, and am a Latin scholar. Maybe that impressed her.
“She was a vulnerable, lonely woman. That was clear when she wanted you to work on holidays. Instead of saying I’m lonely and inviting a few people over, she would order you to come. If you refused, she would say, ‘Do you want to work here or not?’ Shock and awe in Bagdad, that was what people experienced with Mahler when they worked for her.
“Mahler taught the fellows in child psychoanalysis in Philadelphia, some of whom were already well known. About four or five of them came and she taught them in her apartment. Once or twice she asked me to sit in. I remember once when she went out to make a phone call. The analysts behaved like a second grade class who made nasty comments and threw spit balls when the teacher turned her back. To me, the analysts were like demi-gods. In those days they would go to psychoanalytic meetings, where if you were well analyzed you sat motionless. You were supposed to be removed from all human emotions, to have eliminated all unacceptable drives and be all intellect and sublimation. Nobody scratched their nose, in contrast those four or five grown men carrying on like that.
“In retrospect, I think I enjoyed her, but remember that I felt very oppressed by the situation. I got myocarditis after being with her two years, and needed to get out of it. Then I quit and began to work with Nathan Ackerman. When people said Ackerman was difficult, I said, ‘Not after Margaret Mahler!'”
Lucia Wright, a dancer, who worked for Mahler in the last year of her life, also stressed her terrible loneliness. Wright didn’t care much for her employer. She said, “Mahler had lost her assistant and needed help. She was very unpleasant, an overly self-important, bad mood person. For example, she was dictating a letter to a person new in the field, who had sent her a paper. Mahler was put out of shape because this person had attached a note saying, ‘I’m sending you my paper, as you requested.’ Mahler got all in a wad. She said she had not requested the paper, but that the person had asked her to read it. What’s the difference? Oh, the politics of Academia!
“She was very carried away with herself and I just didn’t like being around her. I often got there late, and it really upset her. She would say things like, ‘I need you to be here on time. I was waiting for you.’ One day I just didn’t show up. She exuded a sort of a neediness. I remember her being very cranky and needy. It was too much for me, it was unpleasant. She was very critical of everything, of her colleagues, but not of my work. She seemed to appreciate me. Her philosophy was just focus on your work. I think that’s what kept her going. Sitting up in her bed and doing her work, that’s the only thing that kept her alive.
“I got a pretty lonely feeling when I went into the apartment. Maybe there were a few professional friends that occasionally came by, but it was not a lively household. I would sit by her bed and take notes. I don’t get the idea that she was doing anything of importance. “She was quite pathetic, she made me sad. I don’t think I was the right person to work with her, but I felt bad about it. I felt sort of sad, to see such an important life come to an unimportant, lonely end.”
Par for the course, Dr. Leo Maddow’s experience with Mahler was different from everyone else’s. He said, ” I found her a wonderful hostess, who was very pleasant. She gave nice parties and had good food. This was the same woman who was supposed to be a terror, who would pulverize people. But she never did that sort of thing with me.” I said, “Why do you think she was so nice to you, in contrast to many of the others?”
He answered, “I think she saw me as the chairman and used to call me the chief. I think she had me in another category than the others.” “You were her boss.”
“Yes.” We smiled. “If anything, she needed me, and it didn’t pay her not to be nice to me. but I think her friendship was genuine, I know it was. Mahler was one of those people you either loved or hated. Even though she was hard on some of our people, all of them loved her.”
I asked, “In your opinion, what was behind her rages?”
“As a psychiatrist, my guess is that she was a perfectionist, and was intolerant of imperfection and stupidity. She couldn’t stand it if people around here were unintelligent. We had a few candidates who were not the brightest. She was either impatient or would be nice to them. If she was nice, you knew she didn’t think much of them.” Mahler was well known for her temper and seemingly uncontrolled outbursts of rage. She herself acknowledged it with “I have a very bad temper.” In an interview with Dr. Darlene Levy, one of Mahler’s students and closest friends, Levy said that Mahler shouted at her when she was trying to teach her something. Darlene said she was scared to death when Margaret yelled at her, and added that when she didn’t get it right, Margaret would be disappointed and get terribly upset, particularly if she felt that Levy had said something that would hurt her child patient. “She didn’t get angry if you just said something dumb,” Selma Kramer, President of the Philadelphia Mahler Foundation and close friend, intervened. “But only if you made a mistake that in any way could hurt the chid.” Kramer added that she and Cal Settlage soon realized that Margaret only hollered at people in whom she had trust and confidence. When asked if Margaret ever shouted expletives, Kramer indignantly responded that she never would, because she was “too much of a lady.” Then Mahler gave her own explanation of why she hollered so loudly. She said that she wanted to impart the knowledge very, very badly, but wasn’t confident that the way she said it would get through to the student, so she tried to do it with the volume of her voice.
Dr. Helen Meyers agreed with Mahler’s appraisal of her terrible temper. “Once in Portugal when we had a reception for her, she was the center of the whole thing,” Meyers said. “She saw Peter Bloom and Eric Erickson in another part of the room. ‘Why is it that they don’t come over and congratulate me?’ she asked. There was a sort of a little girl quality about her. Margaret was afraid to travel alone, and was traveling at the time with a young companion, a college girl. She got into terrible arguments with this young girl. Every morning she would call me and say, ‘Do you know what she said to me today!'” Corroborating one of Mahler’s methods of demonstrating her anger, Dr. Myers said, “She wouldn’t talk to somebody for months because they didn’t come to dinner. When she was happy with me she called me Helennitchka, when she was mad it was Helen.”
It seems that Mahler was less angry with people who maintained their distance from her. Mahler got along very well for decades with her closest research associate, Dr. John McDevitt, but they never were on intimate terms. “She didn’t tell me about her personal life, and I didn’t tell her about mine,” he said.
With her longtime associate, Anni Bergman, their loving relationship was interwoven with sadomasochism. Although Mahler encouraged Bergman to return to school for advanced degrees and was instrumental in fostering her career, many people told me that they had been present when Mahler humiliated Bergman. She said, “Margaret had an enormous need to work with other people, she couldn’t work alone. In a way, I have inherited that from her. I always like to work with other people. But what I don’t wish to inherit from her was the way she could be very destructive to people and very demanding. She needed other people to think; she was unable to think by herself. That was my role. Whether about the design, the results, or the individual children, she always needed someone to think with. Underneath her brilliance there was a tremendous insecurity. She had a terribly unfortunate temper, had rages, you had to be a very special person to be able to tolerate and appreciate her good sides. She had a desperate need for people, and could never be alone.”
An analyst who wishes to remain anonymous said, “As far as personal friendship, you couldn’t depend on Margaret to keep the same frame of mind for very long. She criticized Anni Bergman, and made it very difficult and embarrassing for her. Perhaps the people who did not have to depend on her and could take her for what she was could get past the criticism. My children talk about how fiery a character she was, and how she couldn’t abide fools. They also knew John McDevitt well, and would laugh at how she had him in tow.” The late great Jacob Arlow, the Grand Old Man of psychoanalysis, saw Mahler as a “dour” woman. He said, “I never saw her in a temperamental outburst, but she was not a woman who was easily crossed, especially if she was in control. She was a difficult person, but I didn’t reach the degree of working together in intimate projects, where such flair-ups are likely to occur. The lasting impression I have of her is kind of a embattled woman, and the word ‘dour’ comes up in connection with her. I don’t recall her kidding around, joking, or making word plays, but that might have been my own stiffness. I always felt there was a toughness about her that foreordained that a distance would be kept ”
Dr. Samuel Ritvo, one of the few interviewees who had known Paul Mahler, said, “Mahler and I were not close friends. Our contact was mainly around the Institute. I was invited to parties at her apartment and met her husband. He was a very well-mannered, gentle man, with a neat appearance in a European way. He was fairly quiet. Everyone was quiet in Margaret Mahler’s presence.”
Dr. Ernst Abelin, a research associate at the Masters Children’s Center, got to know Dr. Mahler privately and stayed in touch with her until she died. He, like Dr. McDevitt, apparently was able to stay friendly because their relationship was not an intimate one. He said, “I tended to be very low key and cautious with her. We had a friendship, perhaps because of my European background. My wife and I would invite her to a summer place we rented in New Rochelle perhaps two times every summer. Our children grew up with her. She gave them nice presents. I would often cook for her. I made goose, which she loved. It reminded her of Europe. She was very upset when my first wife and I separated. She knew us as a family and thought we had an ideal marriage. In her will she left me some vases from Vienna which I have in my office. My first impression of her was that she was intimidating and severe, but I grew to admire her. She got along better with men than with women.”
Although Dr. Judith Smith, the editor of the Masters Children’s Center tapes, said that Dr. Mahler was an extremely important person in her life, she found her highly critical. She said, “What I most remember is how she would point out my faults. Once when I knew her for six months, she called me and demanded that I come to her house right away. She said it was an emergency. She’d once had a fire in her house, and since then had a safe where she kept her most important papers. They had opened it and couldn’t close it. She called me because I was the so-called technical person. I got there and couldn’t fix it. She got furious, and said, “You are such a dilettante, you think you can do all these things and you can’t!” I must have a strong ego, because it didn’t bother me. It was too ridiculous.”
Dr. Bluma Swerdloff said about Mahler’s temper, “She wanted me to work with her. I saw how she handled some of the people, how she spoke nastily with them, so I turned her down. She was known for having temper tantrums. The first time she started screaming at me, I walked away. I thought I better not start with her. Once when I came to have tea with her, the housekeeper brought a cup that didn’t match, and Mahler had an absolute fit. I said, “Don’t get yourself upset about it. It isn’t important.” She said, “In my house we do it right.” She was a very difficult person, and everyone always tried to figure out why she was so difficult. We generally figured out that she was weaned very suddenly. She basically wasn’t a bad person, she just was hard to get along with.”
Dr. Henri Parens, author of important work on aggression, experienced Mahler as “complex, fascinating, and impossible…I found her someone who understood a great deal, and really knew human dynamic processes. I didn’t particularly find her fascinating as a person, but admired what she knew and was able to convey to us, her insights and knowledge.
“I once danced with Mahler,” he continued. “It was like I was dancing with a small, life size statue. To try to get her to move with the flow, I had to yield to her; I had to figure out where she wanted to go and guide her there gently. She was very demanding, but there was a real lovingness about her. I really loved Mahler. It was the person I loved, difficult as she was. What a pain in the ass! Mahler was very hungry, and too demanding of people’s personal environment. She was very object hungry, but was very choosey. She wouldn’t just latch on to anyone. Certain people adored her and she adored them. Like Selma Kramer. She loved that Mahler wanted so much of her and was exceedingly demanding. I think Mahler wanted to be a member of Selma’s family, and it was terribly painful for her that she wasn’t. Some people rubbed her the wrong way. For those people she would find a clever way of putting them in their place. She would make some comment which could frizzle a person.”
Dr. Leo Rangell, renowned analyst, writer, and former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, said, “We were socially and personally friendly, but it was not an intimate relationship. For instance, she never talked to me about her childhood. She knew my wife and children. Mahler made a first birthday party for my daughter, Judy, who is now sixty years old, in her apartment on Central Park West. I tell her, ‘Do you know that Margaret Mahler made you your first birthday party?’
“After Pearl Harbor, I left for the army. She wanted me to write a book on tics with her. I would have done it, if I hadn’t had to leave. She got mad at me, and said crazy things, like I left her. She said I rejected her. As if I wanted to be in the army!
“By the time we met for the last time, she had become bitter and feisty, with the same paranoid streak, and wore a self-satisfied look She felt she did not get the acclaim she deserved. She was a forceful, difficult, and important person, who didn’t get enough recognition. She was not as sweet forty years later as she had been in 1941. I remember her gently because of the party she gave for my daughter.” A colleague who wishes to remain anonymous said, “One time we invited her to dinner in our house in Wellsfleet. My son, who was adolescent at the time, was the driver who picked her up. Mahler was in the back seat. She must have been jealous, because from Central Park West all the way to our home in Wellsfleet she berated me that I didn’t care for her, was cold, didn’t invite her enough, etc. etc. My son said, ‘What is the matter with that lady? Why was she so nasty to me?’ She was speaking to me through my son. She knew that would hurt me more than if she had said such things to me directly. She would say things like that to me sometimes. I would look at her and know she was in one of her cruel, bitter moods.
“We saw a lot more of each other in Wellsfleet during the summers. One evening we had
six friends from New York for dinner. Margaret loved lobsters. We had several three pound lobsters for dinner, and cut them in half so that everybody could have a pound apiece. Margaret grabbed four pieces. We divided up the rest. Either she didn’t understand the situation or she didn’t care. She wanted a whole lobster and she didn’t care. The men were furious, but the women said, ‘She is just a greedy little child!'”
Difficult as Margit’s relationship with her mother had been, it took a turn for the positive after she learned that her mother had been killed by the Nazis. Mahler made peace with her mother after her death, which spurred on her creativity, according to Dr. Harold Blum, friend of Mahler and well known analyst, writer, and speaker. He said, “We had a private conversation about her mother, who was murdered at Auschwitz. Mahler told me about it as if she were revealing a dark secret. She clearly felt conflicted, had grown up hating her mother, and was now honoring her mother in her martyrdom. She said she would never forgive or forget her mother’s murder, and had a memorial put up for her in the Hungarian cemetery which said, ‘She died a martyr to the Holocaust.’ There was an evolution in Mahler’s work. First she was a traditional analyst, when she wasn’t accepted by the inner group. Then after the war, she began to evolve into Margaret Mahler. The development started right after World War 11, when she learned about her mother’s murder. The knowledge had a formative influence on her creativity, as she was honoring her mother in her research. “I think another aspect of her work was compensation for being childless,” Dr. Blum continued. “It was Margaret’s way of being a surrogate mother, and was also in identification with her mother. She identified with the lost object. It is a deduction on my part about a very complex individual.”
The story of Mahler suddenly cutting off a relationship in punishment for some minor or unknown deed was repeated by a number of interviewees. Besides Drs. Pine and Furer, the list of victims included Doctors Ruth Lax, Louise Kaplan, and the present writer. Dr. Lax said that she and Mahler were good friends for many years, until they sat next to each other at a dinner party. Margaret told Ruth that her husband had just died and she was very upset. Ruth said, “But you were divorced many years ago.” After that, Mahler didn’t talk to Ruth for two years. I asked her if Mahler had ever abused her. She said smilingly, “Not unless you call not talking to me for two years abusive.”
According to Dr. Louise Kaplan, “Mahler was abusive to a lot of people. They took it because they needed her and put up with it. She was not abusive to me because I didn’t need her, just as Fred Pine didn’t. She adored my husband. He was very charming and could make her laugh when no one could. When it came to a choice between me and Donald, she would always favor Donald. So she was reenacting the Oedipal situation, and taking her father away from her mother. That made us very close, from her point of view.”
From her earliest relationship with her mother, who discouraged the formation of a symbiosis with her baby, Margaret Mahler continuing motivation in life was to individuate and become her own person. This was evident all through her life, from rejecting the idea that her mother had given birth to her, to breaking away from her family at the age of fifteen to live on her own in Vienna, to her unusual ways of gaining knowledge – she was actually an autodidact – to her move to Philadelphia when she was not accepted as one of the powerful hierarchy of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, to her plea to psychoanalysts everywhere to encourage individuation in the younger generation of analysts and allow them to become themselves. Given the dreadful circumstances of her symbiosis with her mother and an Oedipus Complex wreaked with havoc, the life of Margaret Mahler is a triumph of the Separation-Individuation process. I believe that Mahler, a person who never adequately resolved the symbiosis with her mother, used aggression to set the boundaries her ego was unable to construct. Margaret Mahler overcame two great obstacles of the times, her sex and her religion, which few women were able to do in the early 1900s. Her constitutional endowment of aggression surely contributed to the her ability to accomplish so much of value. But perhaps the determining factor in the character of the adult Margaret Mahler was that she was a victim of the Holocaust. Her mother died in a concentration camp, and many other members of her family also were murdered by the Nazis. Margaret was forced to leave her homeland and interrupt her life and career. The great losses caused by the Holocaust left her with a storehouse of rage, much of which she was able to sublimate into her work. It may well be that the fury so many of her colleagues complained about was the force that saved the life of Margaret Mahler. As she said in her 1981 interview with the feminist, Nancy Chodorow (p. 10), “I survived through my ‘chutzpah.'”
References
Many newspaper and magazine articles were consulted for this paper, but major sources referred to are Bluma Swerdloff’s Oral History, The Memoirs of Margaret Mahler, by Paul E. Stepansky, and numerous interviews the author personally conducted with Mahler’s friends, associates, and colleagues. The author also examined and utilized a great deal of material from the 187 boxes in the Margaret Mahler Collection in the Yale Archives, including interviews conducted by Darlene Levy, Nancy Chodorow, Doris Nagel, Milton Senn, and Lucy Freeman. Unless a source is cited, all quotes from interviews are taken from personal consultations with the author.
Alma H. Bond, Ph.D
Http://alma_bond.tripod.com
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