GARDINER, MURIEL (1901-1985)

An American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Muriel Gardiner was born November 23, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois and died February 6, 1985 in Princeton, New Jersey.

The daughter of Edward Morris and Helen Swift, she was born into a family of wealth and privilege. During her childhood she became aware of the plight of the poor and disenfranchised and subsequently developed a life-long commitment to social and political reform. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1922 she traveled to Europe where she lived until the outbreak of World War II.

In 1926 she settled in Vienna where she underwent the first of two periods of analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick. During this period she developed an interest in applying psychoanalytic insights to education. Simultaneously with her psychoanalytic training she attended the Vienna Medical School, graduating in 1938. In 1934, in the midst of her training and a second period of analysis with Mack Brunswick, a fascist dictatorship was installed in Austria. Witnessing the brutality that accompanied these events was a turning point in Gardiner's life. She resolved to help endangered individuals escape from fascist Europe, and for the next six years worked tirelessly in the Austrian underground. These years are vividly described in her memoir Code Name "Mary" (1983).

After returning to the United States in 1939 Gardiner completed her analytic training at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, with which she was associated for many years. Gardiner was appointed a training and a supervising analyst in 1955, but she never accepted any candidates. Rather she found fulfillment by using her training in psychoanalysis in her work as a consultant in schools, hospitals, and residential settings. Here she was able to offer help to children and adolescents, and to their teachers, social workers, and doctors.

Gardiner's publications include The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill (1976), a book which grew out of her work with children and adolescents; andThe Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (1971), which she edited. This is a compilation which includes his autobiographical reminiscences, Freud's original case report, Ruth Mack Brunswick's 1928 essay, and Gardiner's paper recording her contacts with the Wolf Man over three decades. After the Wolf Man's death in 1979 she wrote The Wolf Man 's Last Years (1983a) wherein she described his final years and gently but pointedly took issue with Karin Obholzer's portrayal of the Wolf Man in her 1982 book, The Wolf Man, 60 Years Later.

Muriel Gardiner's contribution to psychoanalysis goes beyond her books and papers, her generous support of the Hampstead Clinic, the Freud Archives, and the Freud Museum, and her long relationship with the Wolf Man, characterized as it was by her concern for his dignity and psychological well-being. Of equal significance was the fact that she took psychoanalytic insights and her counsel into settings—schools, hospitals, and prisons—where they are usually not found.

Nellie L. Thompson

See also: Brunswick, Ruth Mack; Freud Museum; "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Wolf Man); Pankejeff, Sergei.

Bibliography

Gardiner, Muriel M. (1971). The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. New York: Basic Books.

——. (1976). The deadly innocents: Portraits of children who kill. New York: Basic Books.

——. (1983). Code name "Mary": Memoirs of an American woman in the Austrian underground. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

——. (1983a). The Wolf Man's last years. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 31, 867-897.

Guttman, Samuel A. (1985). In memoriam Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D. (1901-85). The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 40, 1-7.