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The Psychohistory Forum presented Peter Loewenberg with a Lifetime Achievement Award on January 14, 2023.

Peter J. Loewenberg, PhD, is Professor of History Emeritus, UCLA; Dean and Director of the Training School Emeritus, Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and New Center for Psychoanalysis; Board, International Psychoanalytic Association, 2015-2019; Chair, IPA China Committee, 2007-2013.

After receiving extensive training in the disciplines of history and psychoanalysis, Peter has provided psychohistory with rigorous foundations in both fields. Interdisciplinary and comparative in approach, he has grounded psychohistory in the clinical and theoretical perspectives of classical and contemporary psychoanalysis.

For most of his academic career, Peter taught at UCLA, promoting psychohistorical approaches to historiography, and simultaneously advancing the penetration of psychoanalysis locally in Los Angeles, nationally, and internationally, most recently in China. Having published two major articles in its important journal, The American Historical Review in 1971, he legitimized the methodology and served as a model for serious scholarship in the emerging field. His two books, Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1983) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995) have become seminal examples of psychohistorical method and application.

Peter helped to pass the Research Psychoanalyst Law in California in 1977, permitting full psychoanalytic training to academics in the humanities and social sciences. The New Center for Psychoanalysis is now the premier training center for this cohort of researchers in America. His personal and analytic style blend a coherent and unsentimental form of humanism, one that rejoices in the uniqueness of personalities, that is respectful of privacy, difference, and otherness, and that sees the potential for growth and deepening awareness of the self. He is consistently empathic to those oppressed by history, and tough-minded and realistic about those who use hatred, violence, and ideology to oppress others. For over forty-six years, he has been my loyal buddy and fellow traveler, or as the French say “compagnon de route.” As a distinguished member of the psychohistorical avant-garde, Peter Loewenberg is richly deserving of this lifetime achievement award.

First presented at the Psychohistorical Forum, Clio’s Psyche, Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony on January 14, 2023.