Marie Langer’s Exiles: Marxism and Feminism in the Long Journey of a Psychoanalyst (Part 1)

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. Having escaped the Anschluss, in Buenos Aires, she was among the founding members of the first psychoanalytic association in the Spanish-speaking world, in the 1940s. Her first articles showed an early interest for “women’s issues”. Her famous book, Maternidad y sexo [Motherhood and sexuality] (1951) combined innovative aspects with conservative elements. In an original way, Langer made use of ideas from Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and Karen Horney, who questioned Freud’s theories about women’s sexual development. Langer’s activism to wed psychoanalysis with social change corresponds to the last two decades of her life, and will be dealt with in the second article of the two dedicated to her.