About

Susan Mailer

Norman Mailer’s first-born, raised between New York and Mexico City, and a psychoanalyst in Santiago de Chile since the early 1980s.

After her parents divorced, when she was nearly two years old, her mother moved to Mexico. As a result, Susan grew up in both countries, between New York and Mexico City, bicultural and bilingual. She went to Barnard College in the late 1960s and was a first-hand witness to, and participant in, the tumultuous spring of the Columbia sit-ins in 1968. Later she moved back to Mexico, where she met her husband, an exiled Chilean anti-Pinochet economist.

Susan has lived in Chile since the early 1980s, where she became a psychoanalyst. She has taught at the Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Alberto Hurtado and Universidad Diego Portales. She also supervises and has a private practice. Susan is co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Association of Santiago and is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), based in New York. Her articles have been published in Latin American journals in Spanish, and in English in the United States.

She has three children and four grandchildren.

In 2013 she was the keynote speaker at the Norman Mailer Society conference. Since then she has been an active member of the Society’s board and has taken part in various panels. Her work can be read in The Mailer Review from 2014 onward.

Her memoir In Another Place was published by Northampton House Press in 2019. It tells the story of her intense and complex relationship with her father, her divided loyalties to her parents, her two countries and their cultures, and her life in Chile as an adult. It also describes the intimate texture of life with the Mailer clan in Maine and Provincetown. It is Susan’s first book.