Muriel Gardiner Buttinger (née Morris; November 23, 1901 – February 6, 1985) was an American

psychoanalyst PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: + . is a set of Theory, theories and Therapy, therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a bo ...

and

psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...

Early life and career

Gardiner was born on November 23, 1901 in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, the daughter of Edward Morris, president of the Morris & Company meat-packing business, and Helen (née Swift) Morris, a member of the family which owned

Swift & Company JBS USA Holdings, Inc. is an American food processing company and a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational company JBS S.A. The subsidiary was created when JBS entered the U.S. market in 2007 with its purchase of Swift & Company. JBS speci ...

, another meat-packing firm (her parents eventually divorced and her mother remarried to British politician and playwright

Francis Neilson Francis Neilson (26 January 1867 – 13 April 1961) was an accomplished actor; playwright, stage director; political figure; member of the British House of Commons; avid lecturer; author of more than 60 books, plays and opera librettos and the ...

). She was born into a family of wealth and privilege.Joseph Berger
"Muriel Gardiner, who Helped Hundreds Escape Nazis, Dies"
nytimes.com, February 7, 1985; accessed December 16, 2011 After graduating from

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...

in 1922 she traveled to Europe where she lived until the outbreak of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. She attended the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

and then, in 1926, went to Vienna, hoping to study psychoanalysis and be analyzed by

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

. She received a degree in medicine from the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor ...

and married Joseph Buttinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists. In 1934, she became involved in anti-Fascist activities. Using the code name "Mary", she smuggled passports and money and offered her home as a safe house for anti-Fascist dissidents, activities which she described in her memoir ''Code Name Mary: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground'' (1983). At the outbreak of

on September 1, 1939, Gardiner, Buttinger and their daughter moved to the United States. Gardiner edited ''The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man'', which documents the case history of a wealthy young Russian who went to Vienna in 1910 to be analyzed by Freud and who became the subject of Freud's ''History of an Infantile Neurosis.'' Gardiner met Freud only once, but she knew the "Wolf-Man" in Vienna, and ''Code Name Mary'' carries a foreword by Freud's daughter,

Anna Freud Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contribu ...

. In 1976, she authored a study of teenage violence called ''The Deadly Innocents''. Between 1965 and 1984, Gardiner gave a total of to the

Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association The Watershed Institute, formerly known as the Stony Brook–Millstone Watershed Association, is a New Jersey nonprofit organization devoted to promoting and protecting the watersheds of central New Jersey's Stony Brook and Millstone River, alo ...

(now called The Watershed Institute), including Brookdale Farm and two other properties. In 1983, Gardiner became entangled in the controversy between Mary McCarthy and

Lillian Hellman Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted aft ...

, when she claimed that she was the character called Julia in Hellman's memoirs, ''

Pentimento A pentimento (plural pentimenti), in painting, is "the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over". The word is , from the verb , meaning 'to repent'. Significance Pentimenti may show that ...

'' (1973), and in the movie ''

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...

'' based on a chapter of that book. Hellman, who never met Gardiner, claimed that her "Julia" was somebody else. Gardiner wrote that, while she never met Hellman, she had often heard about her from a friend,

Wolf Schwabacher Wolf Schwabacher (died 1951) was a prominent Jewish entertainment lawyer, a partner in the New York City law firm of Hays, Wolf, Schwabacher, Sklar & Epstein, whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell. He ma ...

, who was Hellman's lawyer. In Gardiner's account, Schwabacher had visited Gardiner in Vienna and, after Muriel Gardiner, Joseph Buttinger and their daughter moved into their house at Brookdale Farm in Hopewell Township near Pennington,

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

, in 1940, the house was divided with the Gardiner-Buttinger family living in one half and Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher in the other for more than ten years. Most people believed that Hellmann based her story on Gardiner's life. Gardiner's editor cited the unlikelihood that there were two millionaire American women who were medical students and anti-Nazi activists in Vienna in the late 1930s.

Personal life and death

Her first husband was British artist Julian Benedict Orde Gardiner (1903-1982); they had a daughter, Constance, whom she raised in Vienna before sending her to New York City to live with her sister, Dr.

Ruth Morris Bakwin Ruth Morris Bakwin (1898 – July 31, 1985) was a noted pediatrician and child psychologist and the first woman intern at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City (now the New York Medical College). Bakwin and her husband, also a pediatrician, w ...

, a pediatrician married to Dr. Harry Bakwin. Muriel Gardiner died of cancer on February 6, 1985 in

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

, aged 83.

Legacy

* Muriel-Gardiner-Buttinger-Platz in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

is named in her honour. * Th
Western New England Psychoanalytic Society
in

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

, runs a series of monthly meetings called the ''Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities''.

References

External links

Photograph of Muriel Gardiner
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gardiner, Muriel 1901 births 1985 deaths 20th-century American physicians 20th-century American women physicians Alumni of the University of Oxford American expatriates in Austria American people of British descent American people of German-Jewish descent American psychiatrists American women psychiatrists Analysands of Ruth Mack Brunswick Deaths from cancer in New Jersey Morris family (meatpacking) People from Chicago People from Mercer County, New Jersey University of Vienna alumni Wellesley College alumni

Early life and career

Personal life and death

Legacy

References

Further reading

External links