This is a quite remarkable book, one of those rare achievements that is at one and the same time a fascinating and intimate story of a person's life and an important intellectual contribution. Marie Langer, who died in 1987, lived a very full life, marked by personal integrity and deep political commitment. She was one of those few people who manage to be deeply immersed both in psychoanalysis and in the world of political and social events.

In the first part of the book she reflects in an honest and intimate way her early background in a bourgeois family in Vienna, tracing her early intellectual influences. She left Austria to join the International Brigade to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. She subsequently settled in Argentina, where she was a founder member of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association. Over the next twenty-nine years Langer was one of the most important influences on the Association's development,