Margaret Naumburg (May 14, 1890 – February 26, 1983) was an American psychologist, progressive educator, author and among the first major theoreticians of art therapy. She named her approach dynamically oriented art therapy. Prior to working in art therapy, she founded the Walden School of New York City.
Life and work
Family Life Margaret Naumburg was born in New York City on May 14, 1890, into a prominent German-Jewish family whose wealth and cultural capital positioned her within New York’s elite circles. Her father, Max Naumburg, descended from a long line of musicians and Reform Jewish community leaders originally from Bavaria. The family had a deep legacy in music patronage: her cousin Walter Naumburg founded the prestigious Naumburg Prize, and her uncle Elkan Naumburg funded the construction of the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, where free classical concerts continue today.
Despite these privileged surroundings, Margaret’s childhood was emotionally difficult and creatively stifling. Her mother, Therese Kahnweiler Naumburg, was socially conservative and upheld rigid domestic norms, which Margaret found oppressive. Margaret later described her early home life as one in which “youthful efforts at creation were laughed at or brushed aside” and where compliance, silence, and order were expected above all else. As a teenager, she wrote on her bedroom wall: “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing”—a bleak encapsulation of the psychic confinement she experienced within her family home.
She had two older sisters, Alice and Florence, and one younger brother, Robert. Of all her siblings, Florence, eight years Margaret’s senior, exerted the most enduring influence. Florence was graceful, artistic, and independent—qualities Margaret longed for and admired. In adulthood, Florence became an artist and educator, later collaborating with Margaret at the Walden School as the head of its art department.Cane, K. D., Frank, T., Kniazzeh, C. R., Robinson, M. C., Rubin, J. A., & Ulman, E. (1983). Roots of art therapy: Margaret Naumburg (1890–1983) and Florence Cane (1882–1952), a family portrait. American Journal of Art Therapy, 22, 111–123. Together, they would pioneer early practices that integrated psychoanalytic and creative expression in child development, laying the groundwork for art therapy.
In 1916, Margaret married the writer and intellectual Waldo Frank. Their marriage was forged within the progressive, bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village and was understood by both to be unconventional. Frank was openly unfaithful and considered the marriage more of a social arrangement. They had one son, Thomas Frank, in 1922. While Waldo hoped that parenthood would bring emotional unity to the relationship, Margaret found herself overwhelmed—both by the demands of motherhood and the collapse of their shared idealism. The marriage deteriorated, and they divorced in 1924.
During and after her marriage, Margaret engaged in an intense romantic and spiritual relationship with Jean Toomer, the Black writer and mystic best known for Cane. Their bond was forged through mutual involvement in the teachings of Georges Gurdjieff, whose spiritual system of “The Work” emphasized harmony between mind, body, and emotion. However, their relationship ultimately fell apart due to both interpersonal tensions and the racialized dynamics of Toomer’s leadership within the Harlem Gurdjieff community, which Margaret struggled to navigate.
Margaret's family life—marked by emotional constraint, gendered expectations, and personal longing—deeply informed her educational and therapeutic innovations. Her vision of child-centered education and her later development of dynamically oriented art therapy can both be seen as direct responses to the repressions of her early familial world. Rather than replicating the moralism and rigidity of her upbringing, Naumburg’s life work sought to liberate creativity, give voice to unconscious expression, and foster relational freedom.
Education Margaret Naumburg’s educational path reflected both her rebellion against conventional schooling and her lifelong search for integrative, liberatory approaches to learning. After a childhood marked by dissatisfaction with rigid classroom structures—where she recalled “the hard wooden benches, the rigid posture, often hands behind the back, and the enforced silence of school periods”—Naumburg sought out alternative models of education that emphasized individuality, creativity, and psychological insight.
She first attended public schools and then transferred to the Horace Mann School, an experimental division of Teachers College, Columbia University. Despite the school's progressive mission, Naumburg found little relief from what she described as the "monotony" of education. These experiences planted the seeds for her later rejection of conventional pedagogy in favor of more psychologically attuned, child-centered models.
In 1908, Naumburg enrolled at Vassar College, but after one year transferred to Barnard College, where she graduated with a B.A. in 1912. At Barnard, she came into contact with influential thinkers such as philosopher John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn Dewey, a fellow student and prominent suffragist. Although Dewey’s progressive ideas would later shape Naumburg’s theoretical foundations, she was at the time unsure of her professional direction. In fact, she later wrote, “When I graduated from college, I thought that the one profession I must avoid was becoming an educator,” due to her own disillusionment with the schooling she had endured.
While at Barnard, Naumburg majored in economics and psychology—fields that were, at the time, still contested spaces for women. She was drawn to the nascent discipline of psychology, especially the emerging psychoanalytic literature. She read some of the first U.S. publications on Sigmund Freud, including articles by A.A. Brill, which sparked a deep fascination with the unconscious that would shape both her educational and clinical work.
After graduation, she began graduate study at the London School of Economics in 1912, where she attended Sidney Webb’s seminar on labor conditions in the cinematography industry. Although she initially thrived there—writing to her parents that her experience in London “meant more to me than my four years of college”—she left after one term to study with Maria Montessori in Rome. She enrolled in the First International Montessori Training Course in early 1913, one of the first Americans to do so. While she was initially enthusiastic, a personal and philosophical rift soon developed between Naumburg and Montessori, whom she found to be authoritarian and unwilling to tolerate questioning. Nevertheless, she remained committed to the principles of child-directed learning and sensory-based education that she encountered in Montessori’s work.
While in Rome, Naumburg also met Ethel Webb and Irene Tasker, both of whom were early practitioners of the Alexander Technique. Intrigued by their ideas, Naumburg later traveled to London in the summer of 1913 to study directly with F. Matthias Alexander. She was struck by the Technique’s focus on bodily awareness, inhibition, and psycho-physical integration. Though their professional philosophies would ultimately diverge, Naumburg incorporated aspects of the Technique into her pedagogical and therapeutic thinking.
Naumburg’s educational formation—spanning elite American colleges, European progressive movements, and somatic disciplines—was eclectic, experimental, and foundationally interdisciplinary. Her ability to synthesize ideas from psychology, education, the arts, and somatic practice would become a hallmark of her later contributions to art therapy and progressive schooling. In many ways, her education was less about formal credentials than about intellectual immersion in new and creative modes of thinking—modes she would continue to explore for the rest of her life.
Progressive Education and the Walden School Margaret Naumburg’s entry into the field of education marked a transformative contribution to progressive schooling in the United States. Although she initially resisted the profession due to her own negative experiences with traditional classrooms, she emerged as a pioneering educational theorist who fused psychoanalytic insight, somatic learning, and creative expression into a new model of child-centered education.
Naumburg opened The Children’s School in 1914 in New York City. Initially housed at the Leete School on East 60th Street, it began as a Montessori-inspired kindergarten that expanded grade by grade. By 1921–1922, at the request of her older students, it was renamed The Walden School, signaling its deeper alignment with Thoreauvian values of individuality, nature, and self-reliance.
The school’s curriculum was profoundly interdisciplinary. Drawing from her training with Maria Montessori in Rome in 1913, Naumburg adapted sensory-based and developmental methods but moved away from Montessori’s authoritarianism. Instead, she synthesized influences from psychoanalysis, the Alexander Technique, Dalcroze Eurhythmics, and Alys Bentley’s work on movement and rhythm. Her pedagogical emphasis shifted toward emotional and symbolic expression, kinesthetic awareness, and relational attunement.
Psychoanalytic theory formed the foundation of Walden’s educational philosophy. After undergoing Jungian analysis with Beatrice Hinkle, and later Freudian analysis with A.A. Brill, Naumburg encouraged all Walden teachers—including her sister Florence Cane, who directed the school’s art program—to pursue their own analyses. This emphasis on self-understanding was considered essential for fostering affective and creative development in students.
Naumburg believed children would not only acquire knowledge but learn how to use knowledge to their advantage.Milite, G.A. (2011) "Naumburg, Margaret (1890–1983)". Encyclopedia of Psychology. FindArticles.com. She believed understanding yourself was so important that she encouraged her staff at the school to undergo psychoanalysis.Up to the present time, education has missed the real significance of the child's behavior by treating surface actions as isolated conditions. Having failed to recognize the true sources of behavior, it has been unable effectively to correct and guide the impulses of human growth.... The new advances in psychology, however, provide a key to the real understanding of what makes a child tick.The school was deeply embedded in the New York bohemian and intellectual milieu of the 1910s and 1920s. Many notable individuals taught at the Walden School including Lewis Mumford, Hendrik van Loon, her sister Florence Cane, and Ernest Bloch. Drawing inspiration from this environment, Naumburg’s curriculum rejected rote learning in favor of methods that privileged inner life, spontaneity, and symbolic exploration. Art and music were not treated as peripheral subjects but as central, therapeutic modes of learning. Florence Cane’s art program, heavily influenced by Jungian symbolism and creative unconscious expression, would become foundational to art therapy’s early formation.
Though Naumburg briefly included the Alexander Technique in her vision for educational reform, her efforts to integrate it system-wide were thwarted by F. M. Alexander’s critique of “free expression” schools, including Walden itself. Nonetheless, she maintained the Technique within Walden’s curriculum, and its principles continued to influence music education at Juilliard and beyond through her network of educators.
In 1922, following the birth of her son Thomas and amid the disintegration of her marriage to author Waldo Frank, Naumburg began to withdraw from day-to-day operations. She formally resigned as director in 1924, though she remained involved in an advisory capacity and was always acknowledged as the school’s founder in its publications.