Muriel Gardiner Buttinger

Muriel Morris Gardiner Buttinger (born November 23, 1901 in Chicago , Illinois ; † February 6, 1985 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was an American psychoanalyst and author who was active in political resistance in Austria in the 1930s.

Life

Born in Muriel Morris, she came from a family of wealthy meat industrialists. From 1918 to 1922 she attended Wellesley College near Boston , where she studied literature and history. She then lived in Rome for a year and then went to Oxford to study literature . There she married an Englishman named Gardiner, with whom she had a daughter, Constance. The marriage soon failed.

In 1926 Muriel Gardiner came to Vienna ; she intended to undergo psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud . But Freud refused her as a patient. Muriel Gardiner then studied medicine in Vienna in order to become a psychoanalyst herself.

Muriel Gardiner, who sympathized with the ideas of social democracy despite her upper-class origins, became involved in Austria in this regard, especially after the civil war events of 1934, as a result of which social democracy was banned. That year she met Joseph Buttinger , with whom she fell in love. Through him Muriel came to the Revolutionary Socialists and worked in the political resistance. So she made her somewhat isolated house in the Vienna Woods available for conspiratorial meetings and also gave money for the cause. She also established contacts with foreign contact persons and procured false papers through which many politically persecuted people could flee.

Gardiner also stayed in Vienna in 1938, although she was considered a first-degree Jewish half-breed under the National Socialist rule . In June 1938 she obtained her doctorate and doctorate in medicine. After that, as an American, she was advised to leave the country. She went to Paris , where she met again with Joseph Buttinger, who was there in a leading position for the Austrian socialists. She married Buttinger and they both emigrated to the USA in 1939.

In America, Muriel Gardiner Buttinger worked in refugee aid during the war years. Later she worked as a doctor and psychoanalyst. She wrote several books on topics of psychoanalysis, but also memories of her time in Austria. As an author she is best known under the name Muriel Gardiner . The biography of Gardiner Buttinger in the book Pentimento was freely processed by the American playwright Lillian Hellman . But she pretended that these were her own memories. But it is unlikely that there were two rich American women at the end of the 1930s who studied medicine in Vienna and supported the socialist underground struggle. Because of this supposed appropriation of someone else's memories, there was a dispute between Hellman and Mary McCarthy in 1980 , where Hellman was accused of lying and McCarthy was sued for damages. Muriel Gardiner Buttinger stayed out of this argument. The controversy began after the 1977 film adaptation of Julia , whose script, written by Hellman, was based on the book Pentimento . For Gardiner this was just an incentive to write her own memoir Code Name Mary .

In 1989 the Muriel-Gardiner-Buttinger-Platz in Favoriten was named in her honor in Vienna .

Fonts

• The wolf man from the wolf man. With the medical history of the Wolfsmann by Sigmund Freud , the addendum by Ruth Mack Brunswick and a foreword by Anna Freud . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-10-092601-3 . (Edited with annotations, an introduction and additional chapters by Muriel Gardiner; the American original edition The Wolf-Man was published by Basic Books, New York 1971)
• The Deadly Innocents. Portraits of Children Who Kill. Basic Books, New York NY 1974, ISBN 0-465-01583-2 .
  German: murderer without guilt. When children kill - reasons and backgrounds. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-10-025502-X .
• Code name "Mary". Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 1983, ISBN 0-300-02940-3 .
  German: alias "Mary". Memories of an American woman in the Austrian underground. Promedia, Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-900478-27-9 .

literature

• Gardiner, Muriel , in: Élisabeth Roudinesco ; Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: Names, Countries, Works, Terms . Translation from French. Vienna: Springer, 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 323-325

Web links

• Literature by and about Muriel Gardiner Buttinger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Joseph Buttinger. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
• Muriel Gardiner Buttinger. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).