ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the work of Margaret Mahler in three parts: her early papers, including her work on infantile psychosis; her research project on separation–individuation and her theory of subphases resulting in beginning self and object constancy; and applications of separation–individuation theory to psychoanalytic theory and treatment. In her psychoanalytic work, Mahler began to treat several children suffering from childhood psychosis. Mahler is essentially a psychoanalyst and a clinician, and her early papers are filled with clinical vignettes from the many severely disturbed children whom she treated as a child analyst. Mahler’s papers on child psychosis contain many references to her view on normal development. Mahler’s interest in and views on childhood psychosis and normal development were still closely intertwined at this point in her work. These remarks on early development occur in the same paper in which she outlines her views of autistic and symbiotic childhood psychosis.
