AcademiadeMedicina · CC BY-SA 4.0
Margaret Mahler
Hungarian born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
1897 – 1985aged 88
A pioneering child psychoanalyst who spent decades observing infants and toddlers directly rather than reconstructing childhood from adult patients' memories. Her separation-individuation theory described how a child psychologically differentiates from its mother across the first three years of life, becoming a foundational text in object relations theory and shaping how clinicians think about early development to this day.