The moving story of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century child psychiatry is finally in paperback.

Margaret Mahler revolutionized our understanding of the first years of life in her classic work of 1975, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, which explained how infants and toddlers gradually acquired the ability to separate and individuate from their mothers and achieve psychological autonomy. Two years after her death in 1986, historian Paul Stepansky compiled Mahler’s intensely personal memoirs — the dramatic and moving saga of a determined woman who, struggling for professional independence in an era of stifling sexism and anti-Semitism, forged a new understanding of early development.

Filled with revealing assessments of Mahler’s eminent teachers and colleagues, the Memoirs provide an engrossing account of a remarkable life that spans Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and New York, two world wars, psychoanalytic politics, and the birth of observational research into infancy and early childhood.