I do not think we can afford to ignore the external world, its influence over us and ours over it. Someone said that we are in this world to change it. If this is so, we must know this world and ourselves very well.
Marie Langer
I just watched Lily Ford’s documentary ‘Chasing the Revolution’, about the psychoanalyst Marie Langer and found it really interesting to learn more about Langer’s life and work. You can watch it online here.
I find a lot of attempts to bring Marx and Freud together weirdly abstract. Why bother obsessing over the fact that Marx and Freud both use the word ‘Triebe’ or that both of them talk about different kinds of economy? I don’t know much about Marie Langer’s theoretical work, but I was fascinated to read about her life, in which theory (both psychoanalysis and Marxism) and practice (both her clinical practice and her political organising) were interlinked and sometimes at odds. I don’t really care whether or not psychoanalytic theory is 'compatible’ with Marxism. I’m more interested in moments when actual historical events and political struggles have prompted people to rethink psychoanalytic concepts and practices.
Langer was born in Vienna in 1910 and belonged to what she described as ‘the sceptical, atheist, Jewish bourgeoisie.’ She grew up in Red Vienna and was taught ‘about surplus value and man’s exploitation of man’ at high school where many of her teachers were Marxists. She identified with the Russian revolutionary Vera Figner and following her inspiration chose to pursue medicine.
She divorced her first husband after three years ‘on grounds of incompatibility: ‘while he loved opera, I like mountains; while he hated sports, I skied and swam in the Danube; while he was conservative, I was an ultra-leftist.’ She joined the Communist Party in 1933, which was declared illegal just six weeks later:
Joining the Party meant finding myself in a new environment with new values, solidarity as daily practice. It meant that my life had acquired meaning beyond the personal, the individual.
She also worked – for a fee of lemonade and sandwiches – as an anaesthetist for a clinic offering abortions to working class women and women in the Communist underground. While clandestinely active in the Party, assigned to Agitprop because she had useful bourgeois connections and a mimeograph, she began her training as a psychoanalyst with Richard Sterba who insisted she read all of Freud’s works.
Her commitment to Communism came before her interest in psychoanalysis in this period: ‘One cannot contemplate one’s navel while the world’s burning’. She recalled no theoretical discussions of psychoanalysis within the Party, nor of Marxism within the psychoanalytic community. Despite the fact that many Jewish psychoanalysts who had recently fled from Berlin were active in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, she found the Austrian psychoanalytic community alarmingly naive about the threat of Nazism in Austria.
At a meeting of analysts in February 1934 summoned by ‘Herr Professor’ Freud, it was agreed that practicing analysts could not be involved in any banned party. Her continued underground activities soon came to light, when Langer missed a psychoanalytic lecture because she had been arrested and imprisoned for two days for her involvement in a pacifist doctor’s group. She was reprimanded, but avoided expulsion.
In 1936 she left Vienna for Barcelona to volunteer as a doctor in the Spanish Civil War: ‘my departure for Spain.. saved my life or at best saved me from having to flee two years later as a Jew persecuted by the Nazis.’ She described Barcelona at that time as the most alive place she had ever witnessed – ‘full of music and enthusiasm’ – and reflected positively on the atmosphere within the anti-fascist movement. She escaped Spain to France while seven months pregnant and gave birth to a daughter prematurely who died three days later. She then went to join her family in Czechoslovakia. Following the Anschluss in Austria they had obtained papers to travel to Mexico, but instead ended up briefly in Uruguay and then in Argentina.
In Buenos Aires she was one of the co-founders of the Argentinian Psychoanalytical Association (APA). She quit her political activities at the end of the Second World War, replacing political militancy with a militant dedication to orthodox analysis. She was interested in the psychology of women and adopted a framework that drew on concepts from the work of Melanie Klein. Her most famous work is Motherhood and Sexuality (1951). She refuted penis envy. Some of the film’s interviewees are critical of her early pronouncements on womanhood and femininity, including her claim that to be fulfilled a woman must be a mother. Though they claim she revised some of these views through critical discussion with a younger generation of feminists. As late as 1969 she expressed opposition to the pill, but as the 1970s wore on, partly influenced by reading antipsychiatrists like RD Laing and David Cooper, she became increasingly critical of the institution of the family.
Her husband’s death in 1965 and Onganía’s coup in 1966 seem to have acted as hinge points in her life, after which she reengaged in political activity and revised her approach to her psychoanalytic work accordingly. She spoke alongside other former members of the International Brigades at Vietnam war solidarity events. Ford’s film emphasises the significance of the Cordobazo, an uprising of workers and students in the city of Córdoba. Some analysts from the APA went on strike in solidarity with victims of repression in Córdoba, which met with disapproval from many of their more conservative colleagues. They also criticised the hierarchies and elitism of the organisation, which was officially politically neutral. Why, they asked, should analytic neutrality in the consulting room be combined with political neutrality towards violent state oppression on the streets?
When the 26th International Psychoanalytic Congress met in Rome in 1969, Argentinian analysts were among those who broke from the official meeting to form their own alternative congress in a nearby restaurant to respond to the urgent social and political questions thrown up by 1968. On their return to Buenos Aires a local branch of the international group that formed at the counter-congress was established. In 1971 that group, Plataforma, broke with both the APA and the International Psychoanalytic Association and committed themselves to a socially engaged approach to mental health, substituting private practice with bourgeois clients for work in communities and hospitals.
Langer's political activities in Argentina forced her into exile again. In 1974, she left Argentina for Mexico. While in Mexico, she resumed private practice and offered treatment to survivors of torture and repression from military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. She was also an active supporter of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, where she helped to construct a free mental health care system. She was irritated when she met Fidel Castro that he asked her how to make apple strudel, rather than enquiring about her work.
In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud differentiates ‘normal’ mourning from ‘pathological’ melancholia. The process of mourning involves ‘reality-testing’, through which the subject gradually comes to acknowledge and ultimately accept the loss of the loved object. In Mexico Langer encountered patients whose loved ones had been ‘disappeared’ by military dictatorships. With no definitive proof of death, the process of mourning is impossible. Endless images of possible deaths and possible lives occupy the mind, blotting out both reality in the present and the more enlivening aspects of fantasy life. Decisions are put on hold, relationships strained. Langer described this experience of prolonged anguish and uncertainty as ‘frozen grief’. Ford speculates that the concept could also provide ways of making sense of Langer’s own life experiences.
Langer returned to Buenos Aires shortly before her death in 1987.
On Langer I read:
Marie Langer, From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a Psychoanalyst
Mariano Ben Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina
Nancy, Caro Hollander, Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas: Psychoanalysis, History, Memoir