Publisher's Initial Listing For Mary Trump's Book About Her Dysfunctional Family Gave Her Name As "Mary Compson" (From Faulkner)

About 20 years ago, Mary Lea Trump began a new career. As the story below notes, she studied patients who were delusional, hallucinatory and suicidal. Over the years, she contributed to a book on treating schizophrenia, wrote a dissertation on stalkers, and became a clinical psychologist.

She earned a master's degree in literature from Columbia University and a doctorate in psychology from Adelphi University. She has taught courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology. She examines her own family's history (including her famous uncle) in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, which is scheduled to be published next month.

As Michael Kranish of the Washington Post writes, the Trump family is trying to block publication of the book, claiming a confidentiality agreement forbids Mary Trump from writing about her family.

Two days ago, a Queens County Surrogate's Court denied the family's petition, but it was refiled yesterday with the New York State Supreme Court.

A few years after her alcoholic father (Fred Trump Jr., Donald Trump's brother) died at age 42, Mary

attended Tufts University, where she studied the Southern novelist William Faulkner. In a seminar with English professor Alan Lebowitz, Mary and her 15 or so fellow students analyzed the Compson family portrayed in novels such as The Sound and the Fury.

The Compsons bore some similarities to her own family: Like Donald Trump's mother, the Compsons immigrated to the United States from Scotland, and the family was riven by dysfunction. ...

"She was just as smart and accomplished as any I've taught in 40 years," Lebowitz said. "She took a seminar on William Faulkner with me and she wrote two absolutely stunning papers, long, deep and elegant. We studied an enormously complex, interesting writer and she got deeply into it because she is a deep thinker. ... I knew that her father had been a very sad story and that she was carrying the burden of that story." ...

[I]t was around this time [2000], after working on a master's degree in English at Columbia University, that she served in a voluntary role in the study of schizophrenia patients, assisting senior social worker Rachel Miller at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.

Miller said Mary Trump showed an intense interest in understanding what drove people into psychological dysfunction. "She went into a situation that is hard to see. Many doctors and social workers couldn't go there, it was so frightening to see somebody losing their mind," Miller said. ...

Later, when Miller needed help on a book she co-wrote, Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, about the study, she said Mary worked long hours to help her research and write the manual, which became popular in the field and with families of people with the disease.

Mary Trump continued her studies at Adelphi University, where she earned a master's degree in psychology in 2001, a master's in clinical psychology in 2003, and a doctoral degree in clinical psychology in 2010, a school official said. ...

Last year, according to corporate filings, Mary created a company that echoed the name of the tragic family in Faulkner's novels: Compson Enterprises. In an initial listing for her book, designed to keep the project a secret, her name was given as Mary Compson.