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Marie Langer has been, until recently, a hidden heroine for those people in the English-speaking world interested in the connections between psychotherapy and politics. She made the rare attempt to combine the profession of psychoanalyst with political commitment and activism; thus it becomes impossible to read her book outside the context of her life. Like many other psychoanalysts of her generation (she was born in and died in ), she grew up in Vienna and left because of Hitler's persecution of the Jews. What was unusual was that she left to volunteer as a doctor in the Spanish Civil War. She fled from Europe to Argentina and was later a political refugee in Mexico. She built up the Psychoanalytical Institute in Argentina, always stressing the importance of connecting the psychoanalytical perspective with a Marxist understanding and an awareness of the position of women. It was during this period of her life that Motherhood and Sexuality was first published (in ). However as the dictatorship in Argentina became more repressive Langer led a group of psychoanalysts who believed that psychoanalysis could not remain neutral and eventually left the International Psychoanalytic Association. In exile in Mexico she