Work
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. 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.
Symbiotic child psychosis struck her. The symptomatology she saw as a derailment of the normal processes whereby self-representations (the representation of one's self) and object-representations (the representation of a familiar person) become distinct. Her most important work is The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation, written in 1975 with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power.”
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“I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of “work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do.... The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.”
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“The complexion of the element
In favor’s like the work we have in hand,
Most bloody-fiery, and most terrible.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)