The Rediscovery of Walter Langer, 1899-1981

When David Satin asked me to speak at his series of talks on the history of psychiatry, I had just been asked by a researcher at the BBC if we at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute knew anything about Walter Langer (Fig. 1). I not only knew him but had collaborated with him on a paper in 1974, [a paper] reposing quietly in the files of a modest journal (Langer and Gifford, 1978). Thus recalled to mind, I chose this opportunity to recall an unusual and gifted man, nearly forgotten by all but my oldest colleagues, as one of our first non-medical graduates of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. This also recalls a stormy period in our early history, when the 1928 Boston Psychoanalytic Society of Isador Coriat had been taken over by zealous young analysts, just returned from their analytic training abroad. They were determined to reform the easy-going ways of the old Society between 1930 and 1935. Among their reforms was a strong opposition to the training of non-medical analysts, and yet Langer gained acceptance by great patience and courage.

I had planned to present a short, dramatic period of his life, 1936-1938, in Vienna, where he was accepted as a candidate, had a training analysis with Anna Freud and supervision on his control cases by Edward Bibring. He was also engaged in clandestine operations to help Jewish and politically radical colleagues to escape the Nazis after the Anschluss in March 1938. Other foreign students in analytic training were engaged in similar secret rescue operations: Muriel Gardiner, Ann Ramer, Mary O'Neill Hawkins and Helen Tartakoff, among others. But each worked alone, usually unaware of what their fellow candidates were doing.

My original paper, in collaboration with Dr. Langer, emerged from an Oral History Workshop at the December 1975 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, called “Americans Abroad: Psychoanalytic Training in Europe, 1923-1938.” I had invited Langer, as well as Dr. Muriel Gardiner