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I met Marie Langer in Santiago de Chile, during an International Congress of Group Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy in March 1959.
In Córdoba, Argentina, where I graduated as a Doctor in Medicine, we didn’t know that since 1942 there had been an Association of Psychoanalysis (Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, APA) member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Through a German colleague, I knew about APA, and he stated “one of the founders is an Austrian, Marie Langer. During the Nazi period she became an exile in Argentina”.
Very soon after that, I started my psychoanalysis with her; it lasted 10 years, followed by a friendship and a shared exile in Mexico until her death in December 1983.
The first years were of an orthodox psychoanalysis, with 4 or even 5 meetings weekly; it was more of a Kleinian-oriented analysis. At the time, her affinities were with Arminda Aberastury, who introduced Klein’s ideas in Buenos Aires.
She collaborated with Emilio Rodrigué and León Grinberg in the book El grupo psicológico Buenos Aires: Nova. (The psychological group), a classic of psychoanalytic South American literature.
The book contains original papers on groups and group therapy that are primarily informed by the work of S. H. Foulkes, E. J. Anthony, and W. Bion.
In some of Langer’s conferences, you could feel her preoccupation with spreading psychoanalysis beyond the affluent population to make it available to low-income populations. She did this while preserving core
psychoanalytic concepts, such as the unconscious, children’s sexuality, mechanisms of defense, etc. She was always clear about the importance of the founding concept in the psychoanalytical science: the unconscious. Among her many publications of that period, her best known was her book Maternity and sex, published in 1951.
She was mainly interested in women and their insertion in society. She was aware and interested in the increased importance of women in the labor market, technological changes, the u