Newsfeed > Introduction to Peter Loewenberg’s Franz Alexander Lecture
Introduction to Peter Loewenberg’s Franz Alexander Lecture
New Center for Psychoanalysis, May 17, 2018
by David James Fisher, PhD, posted on May 30, 2018
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On May 17, Peter Loewenberg, PhD, presented this year's Franz Alexander Lecture on the topic of "Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Charismatic Power, and Political Leadership," comparing the lives and thought of two great Central European shapers of modern culture. We invite you to read the introductory remarks presented by David James Fisher, PhD.
It is my honor to introduce Peter Loewenberg for tonight’s Franz Alexander Lecture.
Peter has many exceptional qualities and accomplishments. He is a gentleman, an erudite scholar, and a compassionate person. He possesses an astonishing level of knowledge about many subjects, spanning multiple disciplines. Peter is humanistic without illusions about humanism; a skeptic who is open to experiment and innovation; an intellectual and critical thinker who appreciates the classics of the Western intellectual heritage, while being open-minded and flexible about contemporary perspectives. As an educator who is not pedantic, as a cogent thinker who is non-condescending to his students, Peter represents the best of a rich Western cultural legacy, but functions democratically, expanding his grasp of cultural, historical, and psychoanalytic perspectives. He is an outstanding Freud scholar who is non-parochial, recognizing the importance of post-Freudian theory and practice, including the work of Winnicott, Kohut, the intersubjectivity school, and contemporary relational contributions.
Peter was educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Free University of Berlin, and took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied intellectual and cultural history with Carl Schorske. Peter participated in the Free Speech movement at Cal-Berkeley; he consistently defended the First Amendment, has made a career of speaking out on controversial issues, while courageously being a voice of principled protest and dissent. He has advocated for student rights, patient rights, democratic policies, and the rights of non-Western countries such as China in their efforts to achieve equality with dominant countries and regions in the International Psychoanalytic Association. He consistent supported the ideals of social justice.
Peter was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1933. His family was driven out of Germany in that same year by the Nazi seizure of power. The Loewenbergs emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 as Jewish refugees, where Peter lived the first four years of life. His father Richard was a psychiatrist; his mother Sophie a trained nurse. Peter remained deeply connected to China, establishing a familial bond with its people and culture.
For many years, Peter was a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1970’s, he developed a branch of history called psychohistory, integrating the clinical and theoretical insights of depth psychology into his historical researches. His analytic training and identification with psychoanalysis were largely opposed by senior historians both in his field and his own department at UCLA. Many old style historians considered psychoanalysis unscientific, esoteric, and most egregiously “unhistorical.” Once again the courageous pioneer, Peter practiced psychohistory with considerable risk to his standing in the historical profession.
Because of his clinical training, he was particularly attuned to the emotional lives and internal world of his subjects, including their developmental conflicts. His writings demonstrated specific attention to the impact of their early childhoods, to periods of crisis, to thoughts and fantasies about their bodies, to ambivalent emotions toward sex, aggression, parents, authorities, and an assortment of transference figures. Peter’s psychohistory was informed by a sensitivity to latencies, to the deeper layers of psychical meanings and unconscious conflicts in the lived experience of men and groups.
He was also very aware of the autobiographical components of writing history. The historian brings his or her own subjectivity, anxieties, transferences and resistances, ideals and values into the writing of history, no matter how detached or objective they appear to be. Since there really is no history, only historians, each with a subjective point of view and bias, a polemicist might argue that all history is psychohistory in that it involves the unconscious and conscious mind of the historian. Peter’s psychohistorical approaches, plural, addressed the illogical and irrational contradictions in the historical process without the psychological blinders of most of his academic colleagues and with an historical consciousness that his psychoanalytic colleagues lack. Peter’s two books, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1983) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995) collected and summarized much of his seminal writings in the discipline.
Peter is a cosmopolitan man with an international outlook. Yet with all his sophistication and broad knowledge, he is the opposite of an elitist. I have always found him to be receptive, caring, and engaged--a good listener and a person of wise and sound judgments. He is non-defensive about critiques of his work, open to dialogue, and a generous advocate of young scholars and analysts in the field.
From 1966 to 1974, he trained at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles, where he was not warmly embraced initially. There were a myriad of obstacles and delays in making progress toward graduation. Many members of the institute resented him; questions were raised about the dangers of training candidates outside the medical-psychiatric field. Pete overcame the barriers, becoming a psychoanalytic-historian with Sisyphenan abilities to endure. Peter was the first fully trained historian to be trained by an analytic institute affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. This dual training has brought to his research projects and teaching a twin competence.
After graduation, he initiated the training of academics in the medically dominated psychoanalytic institutes of Los Angeles. Peter established a new category of therapeutic practitioner, the Research Psychoanalyst. Governor Jerry Brown signed the Research Psychoanalyst bill in September, 1977. Thus, Peter single-handedly opened up and enriched the analytic institutes to non-medical analysts, that is, to academics who were trained in the humanities and social sciences, as well as judges, actors, and musicians. The program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute became the country’s most distinguished one for the training of psychoanalytic researchers, producing outstanding and prolific authors. The presence of the Research Psychoanalysts has made the institutes closer to the university model of education, rather than a technical training center. The spirit of encouragement and inclusion was vintage Peter Loewenberg, deriving directly from his value system, his politics, and his way of being in the world.
As the first Research Psychoanalyst, Peter blended the roles of precursor, benign paternal figure, and ego ideal. To those of us who followed him, his registration number 001 humorously echoed that of James Bond. While Bond drove an Aston Martin, Peter wheeled around in a turquoise Porsche.
Psychoanalytic history has infamously been one of acrimony and outright splits, beginning with Freud’s breaks with Adler, Jung, Stekel, and Rank. Peacemakers are exceptional, mediators rarely successful. The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute split from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Society in 1950. As dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in the early 2000’s, Peter dramatically reversed the course of the history of psychoanalysis, helping to orchestrate the eventual merger of the two societies, healing an old split that no longer made sense in the new century. With Peter’s energy and vision, and with the active collaboration of Mark Thompson, Director of Education of L.A.P.S.I., the merger occurred. Old grievances were repaired, or at least modified. Peter risked his reputation, losing old friends and collegial relationships to promote and ultimately secure the merger in 2005. He was personally attacked in a manner distinctly psychoanalytic, that is, with a high degree of nastiness and personal venom. Yet, he worked to secure the merger with a distinct degree of patience, finesse, persistence, and strength of will.
Let me conclude by saluting 001. Our entire community is grateful to him for so many rewarding years of friendship, comradery, care, intellectual and clinical stimulation, and good times. As he now tirelessly takes his visionary psychoanalytic humanism to China, we are all inspired by his vitality, his desire to disseminate psychoanalysis to another continent and another culture. Peter personifies the process of diffusion of psychohistory and the extension of analytic theory and practice, including its application to culture-- broadly defined. He continues his quest to learn and to acquire knowledge, with an equally powerful commitment to extend that knowledge base to curious and receptive others. If Peter’s vision was always internationalist, he has now expanded it into a generous offering to succeeding generations and to the world.
Now let’s welcome Peter Loewenberg for the Franz Alexander Lecture entitled “Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Charismatic Power, and Political Leadership.”
Peter has many exceptional qualities and accomplishments. He is a gentleman, an erudite scholar, and a compassionate person. He possesses an astonishing level of knowledge about many subjects, spanning multiple disciplines. Peter is humanistic without illusions about humanism; a skeptic who is open to experiment and innovation; an intellectual and critical thinker who appreciates the classics of the Western intellectual heritage, while being open-minded and flexible about contemporary perspectives. As an educator who is not pedantic, as a cogent thinker who is non-condescending to his students, Peter represents the best of a rich Western cultural legacy, but functions democratically, expanding his grasp of cultural, historical, and psychoanalytic perspectives. He is an outstanding Freud scholar who is non-parochial, recognizing the importance of post-Freudian theory and practice, including the work of Winnicott, Kohut, the intersubjectivity school, and contemporary relational contributions.
Peter was educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Free University of Berlin, and took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied intellectual and cultural history with Carl Schorske. Peter participated in the Free Speech movement at Cal-Berkeley; he consistently defended the First Amendment, has made a career of speaking out on controversial issues, while courageously being a voice of principled protest and dissent. He has advocated for student rights, patient rights, democratic policies, and the rights of non-Western countries such as China in their efforts to achieve equality with dominant countries and regions in the International Psychoanalytic Association. He consistent supported the ideals of social justice.
Peter was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1933. His family was driven out of Germany in that same year by the Nazi seizure of power. The Loewenbergs emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 as Jewish refugees, where Peter lived the first four years of life. His father Richard was a psychiatrist; his mother Sophie a trained nurse. Peter remained deeply connected to China, establishing a familial bond with its people and culture.
For many years, Peter was a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1970’s, he developed a branch of history called psychohistory, integrating the clinical and theoretical insights of depth psychology into his historical researches. His analytic training and identification with psychoanalysis were largely opposed by senior historians both in his field and his own department at UCLA. Many old style historians considered psychoanalysis unscientific, esoteric, and most egregiously “unhistorical.” Once again the courageous pioneer, Peter practiced psychohistory with considerable risk to his standing in the historical profession.
Because of his clinical training, he was particularly attuned to the emotional lives and internal world of his subjects, including their developmental conflicts. His writings demonstrated specific attention to the impact of their early childhoods, to periods of crisis, to thoughts and fantasies about their bodies, to ambivalent emotions toward sex, aggression, parents, authorities, and an assortment of transference figures. Peter’s psychohistory was informed by a sensitivity to latencies, to the deeper layers of psychical meanings and unconscious conflicts in the lived experience of men and groups.
He was also very aware of the autobiographical components of writing history. The historian brings his or her own subjectivity, anxieties, transferences and resistances, ideals and values into the writing of history, no matter how detached or objective they appear to be. Since there really is no history, only historians, each with a subjective point of view and bias, a polemicist might argue that all history is psychohistory in that it involves the unconscious and conscious mind of the historian. Peter’s psychohistorical approaches, plural, addressed the illogical and irrational contradictions in the historical process without the psychological blinders of most of his academic colleagues and with an historical consciousness that his psychoanalytic colleagues lack. Peter’s two books, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1983) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995) collected and summarized much of his seminal writings in the discipline.
Peter is a cosmopolitan man with an international outlook. Yet with all his sophistication and broad knowledge, he is the opposite of an elitist. I have always found him to be receptive, caring, and engaged--a good listener and a person of wise and sound judgments. He is non-defensive about critiques of his work, open to dialogue, and a generous advocate of young scholars and analysts in the field.
From 1966 to 1974, he trained at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles, where he was not warmly embraced initially. There were a myriad of obstacles and delays in making progress toward graduation. Many members of the institute resented him; questions were raised about the dangers of training candidates outside the medical-psychiatric field. Pete overcame the barriers, becoming a psychoanalytic-historian with Sisyphenan abilities to endure. Peter was the first fully trained historian to be trained by an analytic institute affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. This dual training has brought to his research projects and teaching a twin competence.
After graduation, he initiated the training of academics in the medically dominated psychoanalytic institutes of Los Angeles. Peter established a new category of therapeutic practitioner, the Research Psychoanalyst. Governor Jerry Brown signed the Research Psychoanalyst bill in September, 1977. Thus, Peter single-handedly opened up and enriched the analytic institutes to non-medical analysts, that is, to academics who were trained in the humanities and social sciences, as well as judges, actors, and musicians. The program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute became the country’s most distinguished one for the training of psychoanalytic researchers, producing outstanding and prolific authors. The presence of the Research Psychoanalysts has made the institutes closer to the university model of education, rather than a technical training center. The spirit of encouragement and inclusion was vintage Peter Loewenberg, deriving directly from his value system, his politics, and his way of being in the world.
As the first Research Psychoanalyst, Peter blended the roles of precursor, benign paternal figure, and ego ideal. To those of us who followed him, his registration number 001 humorously echoed that of James Bond. While Bond drove an Aston Martin, Peter wheeled around in a turquoise Porsche.
Psychoanalytic history has infamously been one of acrimony and outright splits, beginning with Freud’s breaks with Adler, Jung, Stekel, and Rank. Peacemakers are exceptional, mediators rarely successful. The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute split from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Society in 1950. As dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in the early 2000’s, Peter dramatically reversed the course of the history of psychoanalysis, helping to orchestrate the eventual merger of the two societies, healing an old split that no longer made sense in the new century. With Peter’s energy and vision, and with the active collaboration of Mark Thompson, Director of Education of L.A.P.S.I., the merger occurred. Old grievances were repaired, or at least modified. Peter risked his reputation, losing old friends and collegial relationships to promote and ultimately secure the merger in 2005. He was personally attacked in a manner distinctly psychoanalytic, that is, with a high degree of nastiness and personal venom. Yet, he worked to secure the merger with a distinct degree of patience, finesse, persistence, and strength of will.
Let me conclude by saluting 001. Our entire community is grateful to him for so many rewarding years of friendship, comradery, care, intellectual and clinical stimulation, and good times. As he now tirelessly takes his visionary psychoanalytic humanism to China, we are all inspired by his vitality, his desire to disseminate psychoanalysis to another continent and another culture. Peter personifies the process of diffusion of psychohistory and the extension of analytic theory and practice, including its application to culture-- broadly defined. He continues his quest to learn and to acquire knowledge, with an equally powerful commitment to extend that knowledge base to curious and receptive others. If Peter’s vision was always internationalist, he has now expanded it into a generous offering to succeeding generations and to the world.
Now let’s welcome Peter Loewenberg for the Franz Alexander Lecture entitled “Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Charismatic Power, and Political Leadership.”
Dr. Fisher is the author of Bettelheim: Living and Dying; Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition; and Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement. He specializes in the history of psychoanalysis, the intersection of psychoanalysis with cultural movements, critical theory, and the application of psychoanalysis to high and popular culture. He is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at ICP and a Senior Faculty Member at NCP.