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This posthumous English translation of a book first published in Argentina in 1951 and reissued in 1964 and 1972 has a text and several subtexts. It is mainly a text about the conflicts experienced by women around issues of mothering, sexuality, and having careers
in modern society. But it also is a chronicle of the life and clinical writings of a Belva Plain-like heroic figure, Marie Langer, who was born in 1910 in Vienna, where she trained as a psychoanalyst. She emigrated (because of the Nazi occupation) to Buenos Aires, where she helped to found the Argentinean Psychoanalytic Association. After suffering several miscarriages and losing a baby at three days old, she went on to bear five children. These experiences stimulated her writings on psychosomatic factors in pregnancy, miscarriage, and premature birth. Toward the end of her life, owing to the political situation in Argentina, where she was put on a death list, she emigrated once again, this time to Mexico, where she was a political activist and social reformer. She assisted the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to build a national health system. This psychoanalyst/social reformer was influenced by Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, and Margaret Mead. Although one might not wish to spend much time in a room occupied by these three, Langer manages comfortably to synthesize their ideas into her work. As she grew older, she attempted to integrate aspects of Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories of the oppression of women. She finally returned to Buenos Aires in 1987, where she died.
Another subtext is that of the translator of this volume, Nancy Caro Hollander, professor of Latin American History and Women's Studies at California State University and Clinical Affiliate of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. Hollander met Langer in 1983 in order to write about her life, and has a tremendous amount of admiration for her and her work. Citing recent articles relevant to Langer's text, Hollander provides up-to-da