Muriel Gardiner

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

Early life and career Gardiner was born on November 23, 1901, in Chicago, 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, another meat-packing firm (her parents eventually divorced and her mother remarried British politician and playwright Francis Neilson). Similarly to other writers of the Lost Generation, Gardiner was born into a family of wealth and privilege.

In 1983, Gardiner became entangled in the controversy between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, when she claimed that she was the character called Julia in Hellman's alleged memoirs, Pentimento (1973), and in the movie Julia based on a chapter in that alleged memoir.

Gardiner wrote that, while she never met Hellman, she had often heard about her from a friend, Wolf Schwabacher, 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, 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 now believe that Hellman wrote a fictional story in her "memoir", based on stories told by Schwabacher about Gardiner's life. Gardiner's editor further cited the unlikelihood that there were two millionaire American women who were medical students and anti-Nazi activists in Vienna during the late 1930s. She married Joseph Buttinger before the couple fled Europe in 1939. Muriel Gardiner died of cancer on February 6, 1985, in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 83.

Legacy 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.