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The relationship between psychoanalysis and politics has always been a disputed one. On the one hand have been those, probably a majority, who see the two standing in distinct, if not opposing, spheres. On the other are those, certainly a significant number today, who find in psychoanalysis at least the possibility of a social critique (the ‘ambivalence of psychoanalysis’ identified by David Ingleby), if not the inherently subversive view of society found by others, notably Norman Brown and Russell Jacoby. For much of her life, the Austrian psychoanalyst Marie Langer lived the tension between psychoanalysis and politics, refusing to subordinate one to the other but seeking a praxis, a unity of theory and practice forged in activity.
Born into a middle-class (secular) Jewish family in Vienna in 1910, Marie Langer trained as a doctor, one of the first women to do so in Austria. She came to psychoanalysis through psychiatry and entered analysis with Richard Sterba (after Heinz Hartmann told her, rather condescendingly, that she probably could not afford his fees). This became her training analysis after Anna Freud accepted her at the Wiener Vereinigung. At the same time, Langer was an active member of the Austrian Communist Party which she had joined in response to the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the threat of Austro-fascism at home. The Party was declared illegal six weeks after Langer joined it, and its first clandestine congress was held in her flat. Later, Langer was to be called on to smuggle top Party functionaries out of Austria into Czechoslovakia.
Living with both her Communist activities and psychoanalysis was not easy. In 1934 the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis, in a misguided attempt to protect psychoanalysis from repression, laid down that no analyst could be active in a clandestine party or even treat someone who was. (By this time, the social democratic parties had also been banned in addition to the Communists and the far left.) Typically, Langer