Paul Roazen (1936-2005): In Memoriam (memorial)

Paul Roazen, a political scientist and historian of psychoanalysis, died at age sixty-nine in Boston on November 3^rd from complications of Crohn’s disease. His life began in Boston on August 14, 1936 as the second of three children of a

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Jewish family making its living in the auto parts business. In 1954, he graduated from Brookline High School, and in 1958, from Harvard College, where he studied American Government with Robert McCloskey. He went on to do graduate work in political science and psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago, Oxford, and finally, at Harvard, where he was mentored by Louis Hartz and Erik Erikson.

With the help of Helene Deutsch, Roazen embarked on a massive research project, between 1964 and 1967, interviewing seventy people who had known Freud personally, (twenty-five of whom were also patients), and forty others who were involved in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. This voluminous body of data furnished the basis for many of his books in years to come. He was also the first non-psychoanalyst to be granted access to the library at the British Psychoanalytical Institute. Anna Freud, who allowed him access, heartily regretted her decision when Roazen published Brother Animal (1969), an instructive but extremely controversial gloss on the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salome concerning an all but forgotten analyst named Victor Tausk who had once shown considerable promise, but committed suicide while under Salome’s care. As it happens, Freud was analyzing Salome while she was analyzing Tausk, and in retrospect, Freud’s attitude toward Tausk was profoundly disconcerting. Roazen antagonized Anna Freud and her circle even further when he revealed in Freud and His Followers (1975) that she had been analyzed by her own father. Kurt Eissler, a Freudian stalwart, wrote a scathing critique of Roazen in 1985 entitled Victor Tausk’s Suicide. While seriously flawed, Eissler’s book embodied the attitude of many analytic practitioners who felt that Roazen’s work was little more than “gossip.”

While Professor Roazen did not flinch from igniting controversies like these during his colorful career, he also devoted considerable effort to spelling out the political and philosophical roots and ramifications of psychoanalytic theories at the social, cultural and historical level. Indeed, his first book Freud: Political and Social Thought (1968), was an adaptation of his doctoral thesis: it paved the way for his appointments in the Political Science Department and the Social Science Division at York University in Toronto, where he taught from 1971 to 1995, prior to taking early retirement to become Professor Emeritus. Always a prolific writer, Roazen continued to publish widely until his death, including a study of Canada’s most popular (and eccentric) Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, entitled Canada’s King: As Essay in Political Psychology (1998). “The Political Psychology of Paul Roazen,” was published in Clio’s Psyche (Vol. 2, 4: 73, 75-80) as a featured scholar interview and his article, “The Enigma of Canada’s MacKenzie King,” was published prior to the release of the above mentioned book (Vol. 4, 4: 122-126). At the time of his death he was researching the papers of Ambassador William Bullitt who, together with Freud, wrote a psychological study of Woodrow Wilson. A book on Bullitt is one of three forthcoming books listed in Paul Roazen’s CV. Roazen is survived by two sons, Jules and Daniel, whom he fathered with his former wife, Deborah Heller.

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