Muriel Gardiner

Muriel Morris Gardiner Buttinger (born November 23 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, died February 6 1985 in Princeton, New Jersey) was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

The daughter of Edward Morris (president of the Morris & Company meat-packing business) and Helen Swift (a member of the family which owned Swift & Company, another meat-packing firm), 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. She attended the University of Oxford and then, in 1926, went to Vienna, hoping to study psycho-analysis and be analyzed by Sigmund Freud.

She received a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna and married Joseph Buttinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialist movement. 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 World War II in Autumn 1939, the couple and their daughter moved to the United States.

Dr. Gardiner edited The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, documents in 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. Dr. 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.

Involvement in the McCarthy-Hellman controversy
Gardiner became involved in the controversy between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman when she claimed that she was the character given the pseudonym Julia in Hellman's memoirs, Pentimento (1973). Hellman, who never met Gardiner, claimed that her Julia was somebody else. Many people believe otherwise, citing the vanishingly low probability that there were two millionaire American women who were medical students in Vienna in the late 1930's.

In the introduction to Code Name Mary, Dr. Gardiner says that, while she never met Hellman, she had often heard about her from her friend, Wolf Schwabacher who was Hellman's lawyer. Schwabacher had visited Gardiner in Vienna and his family had later shared a house with the Gardiner-Buttingers for more than 10 years -- after Muriel Gardiner and Joseph Buttinger moved into their house at Brookdale Farm in Lincroft, New Jersey in 1940, the house was divided in two, Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher living in the other part of the house. (Brookdale Farm was later donated by Gardiner to the Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Association. Between 1965 and 1984, Gardiner gave a total of 585 acres to the Association, including her own Brookdale Farm and two others she purchased.)

Public honours
Muriel-Gardiner-Buttinger-Platz in Vienna is named in her honour. The Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut, runs a series of monthly meetings called the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities.