COMMENTS
Gardiner, Muriel
Muriel Gardiner (1901-1985) We have lost a dear friend. Muriel Gardiner was a distinguished psychoanalyst, author of several valuable books on psychological and social themes, and the wife...
...Forthright, simple, unpretentious yet dignified, she struck me as really belonging to a generation somewhat older than herself—the generation of early feminists, settlement-house workers and labor activists like Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Rose Schneiderman...
...Adopting the code name Mary, she offered her apartment as a safe house for the underground, arranged false passports for fleeing dissidents, and helped with money...
...Not herself a political activist, she was firm, sometimes even a little strict, in her political convictions: a socialist since early youth, and quite ready to help all sorts of people in trouble and all sorts of groups and communities that seemed to her beneficial...
...I first met Muriel 31 years ago, when we were starting Dissent...
...For while she had been born to wealth, she lived simply, almost austerely, and looked upon her money as a resource for helping others and benefiting good causes...
...Muriel met and fell in love with a leader of the socialist youth, Joseph Buttinger, and then, with that quiet and calm modesty that would mark her entire life, she proceeded to help the antifascists...
...Muriel Gardiner was a distinguished psychoanalyst, author of several valuable books on psychological and social themes, and the wife of Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian socialist movement during the 1930s and, for many years now, a member of the Dissent editorial board...
...I thought of her as one of the last representatives of a certain line of Americans: independent, critical, naturally inclined to a certain rebelliousness, hostile to all sorts of cant...
...As a young woman, after graduating from college, Muriel Gardiner went to Vienna, to attend medical school and study there with the Freudian analysts...
...We approached Joe and Muriel for help, and they quickly, with a fraternal ease, contributed a thousand dollars—half the amount that formed our initial "capital...
...It was a pleasure to be her friend, an honor to be her comrade...
...She was a remarkable woman, a splendid human being—I say this not as the ritual one engages in at a moment of death, but out of complete and strong conviction...
...Code Name Mary, an account of her years in Austria...
...By 1932 Austria had been taken over by a fascist regime that was persecuting the suppressed socialists...
...She wrote The Wolf Man, a valuable follow-up to a major case study by Freud...
...I. H. 132...
...as well as other books and papers...
...Even toward the end she was full of wit, vitality, passion...
...Over the years, whenever we hit a rough spot, we knew we could count on Joe and Muriel...
...Back in the United States, Muriel became a practicing analyst and writer...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
