Marie Langer’s Exiles: Marxism and Feminism in the Long Journey of a Psychoanalyst (Part II)

Abstract

Marie Langer (1910-1987) was an Austrian-born psychoanalyst who died in Argentina, after collaborating with the Spanish Republic in the 1930s and the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s. The first part of this article dealt with her training years, her joining the Austrian Communist Party, her militant trip to Spain, her settling down in Buenos Aires –as one of the founding members of the first psychoanalytic association in the Spanish-speaking world– and her early writings on “"women’s issues". This second part focuses on her famous book, Maternidad y sexo [Motherhood and sexuality] (1951), and the three decades that followed, where Langer increasingly tried to apply psychoanalysis to different forms of social commitment, recovering the Marxist framework of her youth. In so doing, in the seventies, she broke up with the association she had contributed to create, before going again into exile, this time from Argentina to Mexico. In this stopover, Langer became acquainted with the Sandinista Revolution, with which she actively collaborated during her final years.