Questioning the Family
RACHEL GREENSPAN
Marie Lange, 1938; based on a photo by Greta Stern
“Generally, the analytic and psychiatric tradition compels you to continue on in the family until the end; but it can do a lot of harm.”
–Marie Langer, “Una de mis maternidades”
In 1971, psychoanalyst Marie (Mimí) Langer published an edited collection of essays written by clinicians in Argentina and Uruguay that sought to question the ideological underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The collection, Cuestionamos (We question),[1] was a response to the escalation of state-sponsored violence in the region, where the rise of secret police, the armed suppression of student protests, and the detention, torture, and disappearance of presumed government “subversives” demanded a reconsideration of psychoanalytic institutions’ long-standing commitment to political neutrality. Langer had immigrated to Argentina via Uruguay as a Jewish refugee during WWII and viewed the deterioration of democratic processes in the Southern Cone as an urgent occasion to challenge universal psychoanalytic theories that ignored the historical specificity of a materialist analysis. In her own contribution to Cuestionamos, Langer argued that “psychoanalytic interpretation can complement our sociological and political comprehension, but it loses meaning if we issue it in isolation instead of locating it within a social structure which Marx made intelligible for us.” Cuestionamos identified and reevaluated those social structures from the perspectives of practicing psychoanalysts who witnessed rapid transformations in modern society alongside the unwillingness of psychoanalytic institutions to acknowledge them clinically or conceptually. Across two volumes of Cuestionamos, Langer brought together thirty-four clinicians to articulate a critique of psychoanalytic conservatism that she considered at odds with the radical potential of psychoanalytic praxis: not just to reflect social change, but to provoke it.
In the second volume of Cuestionamos,[2] Langer insisted that psychoanalytic treatment could destabilize the most intimate unit of social organization: the family. Invoking Marx and Engels to question the family’s foundation in private-property relations, Langer admitted the danger of her approach:
We run the risk of breaking the family. But is the family generally such a healthy institution? We psychoanalysts, who live off the errors committed by the family in our patients’ infancy, should have known to question it earlier. In any case, for several years, [R. D.] Laing, [David] Cooper, and others have done it with intelligence and clarity. Why has it taken us so long? Because to question the bond between mother and child does not only imply an attack on the present-day family, the foundation of class society, but on our most intimate and absolute private property, on perhaps the most possessive bond in existence, in which children belong to their parents and learn from them an identity based on possession.
Langer stops short of rejecting the nuclear family entirely, positing, instead, the urgency of accounting psychoanalytically for the consequences of primary social bonds rooted in property relations.
Langer was not alone in questioning the oppressive and proprietary nature of the mother-child relation in Argentina during the 1970s. Another Cuestionamos author, Armando Bauleo, affirms that “the mother-child relation is privatized,” arguing that Kleinian theory has “rationalized” that dynamic with “scientific notions” that “serve to mask the ideological problems of class society.” For Bauleo, the affective difficulty of “overcoming the Oedipal situation” is mirrored in the political difficulty of “separating oneself from the types of friendships or economic relations that gave us pleasure in one moment of our existence.” Thus Bauleo considers what forms of exploitative enjoyment must be given up in order to develop intimate attachments outside an economic paradigm of ownership. Child analyst Emilce Dio de Bleichmar argues that, “as a fundamental institution, [the family] has, like all the others (school, hospital, etc.), the function of maintaining and conserving the structure and relations of domination typical of our class society.” If the mother’s claim over her child is proprietary—a narcissistic projection of her own social value—then her role in reproducing the family institution is politically complicit with capitalist domination.
Argentina’s oppressive political regimes were able to manipulate proprietary family relations to great effect before and during the military dictatorship of 1976–83, aptly (if euphemistically) known as the Process of National Reorganization. Nancy Caro Hollander argues that by sponsoring newspaper headlines like “Parents: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” the ruling junta ensured that “responsibility for their deaths was displaced onto their parents, who were accused of inadequately supervising their children and failing to rear them with the appropriate respect for authority and private property.” Uncertainty surrounding the circumstances or fact of a son or daughter’s death was compounded by the bureaucratic norms of a military regime that, withholding any legal records of detainment or execution, effectively forced parents to make the formal declaration of their own child’s death. For some parents, Hollander argues, this was experienced as an act of filicide: “A husband, wife, parent, or child cannot mourn without risking intense guilt, for without proof of death to go on with one’s life is tantamount to a kind of murder of the disappeared loved one.”
Langer gives voice to an ambivalence at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition: the simultaneous critique and idealization of the family.
The junta’s rhetorical perversion of parental responsibility demonstrates the extent to which political violence in Argentina during the 1960s—’80s conceptually entangled a battle over the fate of the nation with a battle over the concept of the family. The suspension of democracy, enacted in the discursive register of Christian paternalism, became a tactical means of eroding social bonds by encouraging parents to inform on their children for the sake of their protection. This information was used to detain, torture, or kill the child it was purported to protect.
Though Langer’s radical critique of the family in the 1970s and ’80s took aim at the economic logic of private property that the military junta mobilized to oppressive ends, this essay examines how that critique also coincided with unconscious repetitions of the intergenerational violence it exposed. Looking closely at the narrative forms through which Langer presents her own maternal experience as inspiration for her professional formation as a psychoanalyst reveals a foundational tension between her repudiation and idealization of the bourgeois nuclear family. In enacting this tension narratively, Langer gives voice to an ambivalence at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition: the simultaneous critique and idealization of the family.
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Langer’s editorial and authorial contributions to Cuestionamos represent a significant professional shift for a clinician whose psychoanalytic writing in the 1950s and ’60s did not openly engage the political field. Instead, Langer’s early work focused on how psychoanalytic treatment could cure women’s reproductive dysfunction by helping them overcome psychosomatic resistances to motherhood. This earlier work, popularized in her bestselling 1951 book Maternidad y Sexo (Motherhood and Sexuality), promoted the inherent value of women’s reproductive role in the family. Drawing primarily on Langer’s own case studies, Kleinian object relations theory, and anthropological work by Margaret Mead, Motherhood and Sexuality offered psychoanalytic accounts of women’s embodied experience of menstruation, sex, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and menopause, as well as the psychic mechanisms that “inhibit” those instinctive, biological functions. Motherhood and Sexuality posits female reproduction and maternal care as the hallmark of fully realized femininity, arguing that women’s bodily capacities—their “specifically feminine” power to gestate life—are enervated by cultures that devalue maternal labor, leading to frigidity, amenorrhea, and miscarriage. Langer’s clinical approach aims to “cure” sexual dysfunction by feminizing the body itself, promising her patients regular menstruation, pregnancy, and even pain-free birth through analytic treatment alone.
Historian Mariano Ben Plotkin emphasizes Motherhood and Sexuality’s “traditional models of the family” to explain Langer’s authoritative contribution to the diffusion of psychoanalytic thought in midcentury Argentina. Plotkin argues that Langer’s approach to female sexuality did not contradict dominant Christian gender roles, even as more women were pursuing educational opportunities and entering the workforce than ever before. In fact, for Plotkin, Langer gave this conservative view of women’s reproductive role in the family scientific validation.
Plotkin links Langer’s conservatism in the realm of family values to the work of her Argentine contemporary, Arnaldo Rascovsky, a child analyst who pioneered and popularized psychoanalytic research on the concept of filicide. In Filicide, Rascovsky argues that “murder, humiliation, mutilation, denigration, and abandonment of children by parents has become such a glaring fact of everyday life that to broach it scientifically, we must begin by exposing the universal denial of this ever recurring, pervasive phenomenon in which each of us plays an active or passive part.” Rascovsky reconsiders psychoanalysis’s primal preoccupation with Oedipus Rex to observe that filicide precedes patricide in Sophocles’s tragedy: first, in Pelops’s curse against Laius (Pelops was killed, cooked, and served to the gods by his father, Tantalus), and then, in the murderous abandonment of Oedipus by his father, Laius. In “The Prohibition of Incest, Filicide, and the Sociocultural Process,” Rascovsky views Oedipus’s unwitting act of patricide as revenge for (and a reenactment of) Laius’s earlier filicidal violence: “Parricide as the ultimate evolution of object destruction must be regarded as a consequence of filicidal behaviour and its principal roots must be attributed to the infant’s identification with the parents’ aggression.” To mitigate against a universal filicidal instinct, Plotkin argues that, like Langer, “Rascovsky proposed a conservative model of the family, centered on the mother. In this model, women, once again, should stay home and take care of their children.” Furthermore, Plotkin argues, “Rascovsky blames feminism for the proliferation of mental diseases” because it distracted women from “their primordial role as mothers,” leaving their children prey to mental illness.
If Langer’s earlier writing saw the modern expansion of women’s role beyond the home as a factor inhibiting their biological reproductive functions, her later work approached women’s troubles in a radically different way. From the early 1970s until her death in 1987, Langer argued that the ideological tenets of social life under capitalism alienate and hystericize women, contributing to their somatic disorders and the widespread disintegration of the family. In 1972, Langer presented a research project co-authored with Sylvia Bermann, Horacio Mazzini, Francisco Ortega, and Sonia Zanatti: “Patología femenina y condiciones de vida” (Feminine pathology and life conditions). Based on surveys with twenty working-class housewives in Buenos Aires, the study aimed to examine “the pathological conditions of a family structure disharmoniously organized” among working fathers, socially isolated mothers, and their children.[1] For the authors, women’s exclusively domestic role in the nuclear family yields infantile emotional dependency and sexual frustration. Women’s domestic labor is “invisible,” diminishing their “self-esteem,” “alienating” them from other members of their social class, and stimulating a possessive attachment to their children and mothers(-in-law). The authors explicitly link the “gradual degradation of marital sexual life for the wife” to “her frequent lack of interest in ideological or social matters,” arguing that a politically engaged “new woman,” working in solidarity with her partner and friends toward social transformation, will be liberated from the “sexual taboos that subjugate woman (and also man).”
How is it that Langer’s position on women’s role in the family—and the psychological consequences of the nuclear family itself—could shift so dramatically in the decades between the publication of Motherhood and Sexuality and Cuestionamos? One answer is to consider her work in the context of the political and cultural movements that influenced it: the diffusion of Marxist thought across Latin America, the rise of the antipsychiatry movement in Europe and North America, and the development of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and ’70s. These influences are apparent not only in Langer’s intellectual references, but also in the extent to which ideology became the central focus of her psychoanalytic writing. Langer’s primary critique of Rascovsky, for example, was of his refusal to acknowledge ideological forces at work in what he designated the most extreme form of filicide: parents sending their children to die in war. She argues that Rascovsky’s “extrapolation of psychoanalysis as a clinical and bipersonal field to the social field” reduces armed conflict to a universal, ahistorical filicidal instinct rather than a political phenomenon born of contingent power relations. Though Rascovsky deployed his theory of filicide in defense of the traditional nuclear family, leftist psychoanalysts like Langer challenged it as an ahistorical, apolitical explanation for war.
But the filicidal instinct to which Rascovsky called attention can also be understood as an attempt to account psychoanalytically for oppressive intergenerational dynamics manifesting on the scale of the state during the military dictatorship. The sadistic forms of political violence performed by (para)military agents on students and activists from a predominantly younger generation reveal not only a proprietary claim to the victims’ bodies, but also a wish to dominate, possess, and “educate” the youth. From this perspective, forced disappearance is a paradigmatic form of filicide: the child is not only murdered but erased from the official record, not just killed but annihilated. In disappearing any physical evidence or bureaucratic archive of the murder, filicidal lust is disavowed and a narrative of patriotic service is preserved.
The tactical emergence of forced disappearance in Argentina thus exposes otherwise implicit forms of violence and exclusion through which official narratives are mobilized to establish official history. It also brings another dimension of Langer’s professional transformation into focus. Langer’s eventual efforts to challenge—even “break”—the traditional family model are not only local iterations of transnational intellectual movements circulating during her era (Marxism, antipsychiatry, feminism). Rather, examining Langer’s own official narrative of maternal and professional development reveals the intimate and ambivalent ways in which her work reckoned with the family as a narrative ideological construction. Tracing key inclusions and exclusions from Langer’s autobiography brings the ideological complexity of the bond between mother and child to bear on what, I argue, constitutes her own unconscious act of filicide.
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Langer writes at length about her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in her 1981 autobiography, Memoria, historia y diálogo psicoanalítico (From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a Psychoanalyst). The book toggles between literary genres, moving from a relatively straightforward recounting of the author’s personal and professional life to a clinical dialogue about psychoanalytic theory and praxis, and back again. It also includes prologues, appendices, photographs, and lyrical reflections on Langer by various authors who knew her. One effect of including these supplemental materials is to support the veracity of Langer’s self-representation with external documentation, granting her autobiography the semblance of a case file, an official record complete with character witness testimony.
“Part One: Remembrances” outlines Langer’s early career in Vienna, where she pursued training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society during the early years of the Third Reich. Her first pregnancy occurred in 1937 while she was providing medical aid to the Republicans in Barcelona as a Communist member of the International Brigades. Premature delivery during an administrative trip to Nice, where no incubators were available, led to her first child’s death three days later. Langer’s memoir cites this event as her emotional and intellectual initiation into a lifelong preoccupation with women’s psychosomatic illness, attributing her premature labor to various sources of guilt and anxiety surrounding the pregnancy, including its interference with her political commitment to the Spanish Civil War.
Langer’s autobiography narratively weaves together her competence as an actual mother and her clinical skill in promoting female reproduction among her patients.
Later that year, Langer went into exile in Uruguay, then Argentina, where she eventually raised four children. She regularly invokes their names—Tomás, Martín, Ana, and Verónica—in her autobiography and in public interviews, offering charming anecdotes about the children, who grew up in the apartment that also housed her private consulting room. Despite its distinct literary elements (or perhaps because of them), the story the autobiography tells is chronological and cohesive: Langer had difficulty conceiving and sustaining a healthy pregnancy until Tomás was born, then, as she continued having children, she devoted her career to understanding the psychosomatic mechanisms of female reproductive dysfunction that she herself had experienced. With great confidence, she claims, “I was able to verify that in analysis … psychogenic sterilities, habitual miscarriages and other dysfunctions of this nature were resolved.” Specifically, she argues, “When the sterile or infertile woman is able to identify with her mother—and here we come into contact with another very important concept of Melanie Klein’s, reparation, when she can ‘repair’ her and internally reconcile herself with her—she will be able to overcome her disorder and have a child.” In practice, Langer claims that identification with the mother is accomplished through identification with the analyst-as-mother. Thus Langer’s autobiography narratively weaves together her competence as an actual mother and her clinical skill in promoting female reproduction among her patients.
Curiously, in a fragment of an interview published posthumously by the Mexican journal Debate Feminista, Langer’s narrative of successfully mothering four children, already supplemented by the pregnancy loss that inspired her commitment to psychosomatic medicine, is further complicated. Presented not as a dialogue but as a brief, first-person narrative in the “Testimony” section of the journal, “Una de mis maternidades” (One of my maternities) introduces another child: Kiki. Kiki was born after Langer’s first surviving child, Tomás. At six months of age, Kiki suffered an encephalitic fever that left him with neurological damage and severe developmental delays. In her testimony, Langer wonders whether the “tremendous conditions of proletariat life” had contributed to Kiki’s encephalitis, but concedes, “this doesn’t happen to all proletarians, right?”[4] Langer recalls Kiki’s jealousy when her next child was born, including an episode in which she found Kiki sitting on top of the younger infant in his bed. Out of concern for her other children’s safety, Langer sent Kiki to live with her parents, who had emigrated from Vienna to Uruguay. Though her husband, Max, was devastated to lose Kiki from their home, Langer understood his pain as a “narcissistic wound” and confessed, “When I decided to send [Kiki to live] with my mother, I felt total relief.” When Langer’s father died and Kiki grew too big for his grandmother to care for—he would sometimes run naked in the streets—the Langers institutionalized him in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Langer and her husband visited Kiki over the years, but he died suddenly at age twenty-two under circumstances she does not disclose.
Langer expresses regret at having omitted Kiki’s story from her autobiography, claiming a “lack of space” in the book. Her justification for publicly claiming Kiki in the context of Debate Feminista is “so that other people can be encouraged to make that decision”—that is, the decision to “remove a child from the family” who would otherwise “ruin” it. She explains, “[Kiki’s] presence neurotisized—within limits—his brothers and sisters, yes, he neurotisized them. He also endangered our relationship (Max’s and mine) at one time. The fatigue brought about by a situation like that is terrible.” Langer thus frames Kiki’s story as an opportunity to advocate for the removal of a child whose disability threatens the integrity of the nuclear family. She writes anecdotally that her personal encouragement of institutionalization brought relief to a colleague whose son’s microencephaly caused her family much distress. At the same time, her testimony reveals that, for Langer, an extended social network including her parents, a nanny for her children at home, and a residential facility for Kiki were all necessary to sustain the image of the successful bourgeois family that her autobiography projects. In other words, Langer advocates for the removal of children who threaten the nuclear family while putting forward a much more expansive notion of what social resources such a family might require.
Langer’s testimony positions Kiki’s story as a feminist effort to encourage a break with conservative traditions demanding that the mother perform all aspects of social reproduction at all costs. If in Motherhood and Sexuality Langer presents motherhood as a natural function of female development to be valued and therapeutically restored, here she highlights the limits of natural motherhood and questions the degree of sacrifice maternal obligation may require. “Generally,” she points out, “the analytic and psychiatric tradition compels you to continue on in the family until the end; but it can do a lot of harm.” For Langer, forcing the family to bear the full burden of Kiki’s disability was not politically or psychologically justifiable.
Despite its purported clarity of purpose—to liberate women from unbearable maternal responsibilities—the tone of Langer’s testimony is ambivalent, even chaotic, alternating between feminist screed and guilty confession. Langer remembers being told by Kiki’s pediatrician, who attributed Kiki’s encephalitis to her having fed him vegetables as an infant, “You have killed him, you have killed this child!” She recalls the injustice of this event with a kind of sarcastic detachment—“Enough to kill the pediatrician, no?”—mixed with narcissistic vindication: “Currently, children are given vegetables from when they’re very small, but then it wasn’t the custom.” At the same time, she acknowledges some degree of guilt, believing that Kiki was “the root of why I had so many children: repair, repair.” There is at once a critique of the asymmetrical ideological pressure put on mothers to produce and maintain healthy children as a sign of their own social value and a sincere recognition of unconscious guilt untouched by rational political analysis. Though Langer has the ironic distance to scoff, “supposedly I had ruined a child, Kiki,” she also justifies her parenting in a defensive tone, recruiting psychologist Arnold Gesell’s theory of early childhood development to support her choice to remove Kiki from the home. Far from upholding the respectable narrative coherence of her autobiography, Langer’s testimony is messy and incomplete, full of colloquial asides to an interviewer from whom she seems to seek affirmation, but who never appears on the page.
Langer’s political justification for Kiki’s institutionalization is consistent with her interest in socialized forms of child-rearing, elaborated in 1973, when she wrote about the challenges Soviet childcare programs posed to dominant psychoanalytic assumptions about the purity of mother-infant relationships. In the second volume of Cuestionamos, she asks,
Is it really wrong that in socialist countries many children are raised from the second week of life in nurseries? I think it’s good. I think that a daycare provider with a calling, who has access to all the necessary means and works just one shift per day, is much more prepared than a mother—generally nervous, tired, and sometimes exasperated—to raise a child. Furthermore, I suppose that recent collective child-rearing really threatens [the idea of] private property. […] Is it wrong that a child loves his daycare provider more than his mother? This still has not been demonstrated.
In questioning the roots of Oedipal attachment, Langer wonders whether it relies only on the emotional vicissitudes of love and hate or if it is overdetermined by capitalist property relations that intensify feelings of ownership, possessiveness, and envy—affects historically gendered female in the psychoanalytic tradition: “The only visible and durable product that the woman achieves within her domestic life is the child. To her love for and bond with this child is added, possessively, her need to show him off to others and to educate him in a way that testifies to her own value before the growing terror of losing him when he becomes an independent adult, stolen by another woman.” Alternative child-rearing arrangements, she imagines, might modify the implicit status of the child as an object of control and exploitation, or as public evidence of the mother’s own worth.
If in 1973 Langer could advocate for collective child-rearing, why in 1981 could she not acknowledge how it shaped her own experience of motherhood?
In view of Langer’s testimony about Kiki, the promise of these alternative child-rearing arrangements appears more as a wish than a source of conviction—a desire for assurance that Kiki’s life under collectivized care could be just as loving as his life in the family home, even more so, to the extent that collectivized love would be uncontaminated by the power struggles intrinsic to private-property relations. But if in Debate Feminista Langer frames Kiki’s institutionalization as a political—even feminist—intervention into the bourgeois family norms she had dedicated her late career to challenging, why exclude Kiki from her official record, her autobiography? What does that exclusion make narratively possible? If in 1973 Langer could advocate for collective child-rearing, why in 1981 could she not acknowledge how it shaped her own experience of motherhood? Why include the death of her first daughter in the origin story of her psychoanalytic career but fail to even name the son who survived severe disability? In a self-representation framed by the intellectual and professional impact of the author’s own reproductive experiences, and a body of work deeply concerned with the psychosomatic dynamics of motherhood, Kiki’s absence raises provocative questions about what a family is and whom it claims.
Jaime del Palacio, a Mexican writer and academic, contributed a doting reflection on his friendship with Langer to the end of her autobiography. His “Last Words” consolidate what is perhaps the most vivid idealization of Langer’s bourgeois domesticity, as well as Kiki’s most striking exclusion: “The Langers were and are a clan. Since the death of Maximo, which took place exactly fifteen years ago today, the family (Tomás, Martín, Ana and Verónica, the children in chronological order, and from time to time Gucki, the ‘tante’ who died in 1979, the daughters-in-law and the grandchildren) frequently gathered together around Marie, at the prompt, regular lunches and dinners in a large apartment in Calle Juncal near the Botanic Gardens, or in the weekend country house, built largely by Maximo and Marie about thirty years ago in Escobar, a small village near Buenos Aires.” The neat chronology of heirs to the Langer “clan,” the wholesome family meals, the chic urban address, the handcrafted country home—it all adds up to an ideological archetype so at odds with Langer’s radicalism on the concept of the family that it could only function narratively as “last words,” a means of putting an end to further scrutiny of Langer’s own family. Del Palacio’s essay is punctuated by a family photo of the Langers taken outdoors on a bright day in 1953. The photograph features Max, Marie, Tomás, Martín, and Ana (Verónica was not yet born), as well as Langer’s father and sister, all gathered together, squinting into the sun. Considering the timing and subject of the photograph, one wonders, where is Kiki? Is he at home, in Uruguay, with Langer’s mother? Or is he there, in the garden, kept just out of frame?
Langer’s autobiography is one of many strategic self-representations through which she constructed a public persona to bolster her psychoanalytic credibility on the topic of pregnancy and mothering by affirming her authoritative experience as a mother. But that persona was built on a foundational omission: the disabled child she visited but could not narratively claim. That is Langer’s unconscious act of filicide: not Kiki’s removal from the family home or his later institutionalization, but his exclusion from Langer’s official history—a narrative annihilation that mirrors a political aim of forced disappearance during the period of Argentine dictatorship during which Langer authored her autobiography.
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In “La mujer, la locura y la sociedad” (Women, madness, and society), Langer describes efforts made by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to restore their children’s names and faces to the historical record after their forced disappearance. Since 1977, the Madres had circled Argentina’s presidential plaza shrouded in white scarves, demanding information regarding their children, acting as physical monuments to their memory. Langer argues that the therapeutic effect of the Madres’ protest is not located in their role as mothers, but in their role as activists working collectively in solidarity with other women, presenting a solution to women’s domestic isolation and political marginalization. The Madres’ mourning is transferred from the private, domestic sphere of the family to the public domain of the streets, articulating a political demand rooted in the reparative act of laying claim to a lost child. Like all acts of reparation, the Madres’ is not a feeling but a doing, an embodied exercise socialized in the collective work of marching, witnessing, and testifying to their loss.
Naming Kiki as “one of my maternities” in Debate Feminista was Langer’s posthumous act of reparation—not to have more children, but to claim the child she was told she had “killed” within the narrative of her life. As both an addition to and substitute for the curated personal story aiming to stabilize Langer’s public legacy in her autobiography, her posthumous testimony in Debate Feminista functions as a supplement to disrupt the fiction of narrative integrity the autobiography binds together. Of course, Langer’s testimony was only published five years after her death, after all the central figures in the story (Langer’s husband, her parents, Kiki) had died. Though Langer could admire the Madres’ struggle for reparation, she was unable to fully realize her own within her lifetime.
Langer’s testimony about Kiki situates maternal responsibility within the context of an ideological field that shames women for their children’s vulnerabilities. But the erratic tone of the interview—at times sarcastic, defiant, defensive, vindicated, and contrite—reveals the ongoing internalization of her shame. Langer’s experience of Kiki is so psychically unintegrated that it could not be written into the smooth narrative framework of her autobiography. Instead, Kiki is the ghost that haunts it, the invisible fissure in the ideological fiction of the family. By advocating for other women to make the choice she made, Langer challenges possessive, proprietary relations between mother and child; but she also reassures her own conscience, politically justifying a loss that is still unfolding.
By publicly claiming Kiki, Langer does not resolve the implicit contradictions running through her critique of the family; on the contrary, she reveals the unconscious force of ambivalence in shaping psychoanalytic ideas about what a family is, whom it includes, and what obligations it confers. Her testimony’s concluding remark, that “to continue on in the family until the end … can do a lot of harm,” is a humbling rejoinder to the idealization of motherhood and reproductive femininity put forward in her own body of work (and in the psychoanalytic tradition of which that work is a part). But it is also a reminder that an analyst can change her mind, that narrative violence committed in the service of protecting a family ideal can be met with acts of reparation, however belated, however incomplete.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to M. E. O’Brien, Michelle Rada, and Conrad Stern-Ascher for their invaluable contributions to the development of this work.
[1] Marie Langer, ed., Cuestionamos [We question], vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Granica Editor, 1971). All quotes from this volume are my translations.
[2] Marie Langer, ed., Cuestionamos [We question], vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Granica Editor, 1973). All quotes from this volume are my translations.
[3] Marie Langer, Sylvia Bermann, Horacio Mazzini, Francisco Ortega, and Sonia Zanatti, “Patología femenina y condiciones de vida” [Feminine pathology and life conditions], presented at the Fifth National Congress of Psychiatry, Córdoba, 1972, 7. All quotes from this source are my translations.
[4] Marie Langer, “Una de mis maternidades” [One of my maternities], undated fragment from an interview by Marta Lamas, Debate Feminista 6 (1992): 247. All quotes from this interview are my translations.