Psychoanalytic Humanist, Visionary, and Friend

In May 2012, we will be celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UCIPC). If the name of this association is not felicitous, its conceptual foundation is formidable, unique, and possibly non-

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existent anywhere else in the country. These meetings are held annually at the UCLA Conference Center, located on the shores of Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. This beautiful and inspired site, which insiders refer to as “the magic mountain,” was selected by Peter Loewenberg and a number of psychoanalytically-oriented academic colleagues throughout the University of California system. Peter was the prime mover, joined in his efforts by Nancy Chodorow and Robert Nemiroff. The idea was visionary—namely to bring together in an informal way serious thinkers in the humanities and social sciences with analytic clinicians from the medical schools to engage in a weekend long discussion of seminal social and psychological issues.

Peter’s vision has animated these meetings for two decades; it is the spirit of inclusion, of mixing generations, genders, and disciplinary orientations. It is the spirit of promoting research, of advancing critical thinking, of demonstrating scholarly and personal exchange in an ambience of safety and conviviality. The optimal meeting will bring together three generations of academics and clinicians who use psychoanalytic methods in their research. Here, graduate students are encouraged to converse with senior analysts and scholars in multi-disciplinary fields. Fellowships are offered to cover the lodging expenses and transportation for the graduate students. Grants are offered for the best research proposals. Many papers originally delivered at the Lake Arrowhead Conference, including research projects, have developed into published papers and books. We dine together, take hikes around the lake, and engage in lively interactions inside and outside the structured sessions. People remember these meetings as high-powered, stimulating, and fun, and they are. They also reflect in a metaphoric way Peter’s style regarding interpersonal and scholarly communication. Not least, these conferences have expanded psychoanalytic perspectives into the university milieu.

Peter Loewenberg initiated the training of academics in the medically-dominated psychoanalytic institutes of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. We are called Research Psychoanalysts. He was the first of us: a precursor, benign godfather, and ego ideal. To those of us who followed him, his registration number 001 humorously calls up the echoes of James Bond, 007. He was and still is

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an adept politician. He knows how to build and solidify alliances; he is practical without compromising his ideals. He persuaded Howard Berman, State Assembly Majority Leader, to support a bill to create a new category of therapeutic practitioner, the Research Psychoanalyst, enabling us to practice psychotherapy and psychoanalysis after completing analytic training at an accredited analytic institute. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill on September 30, 1977. It is a strong registration, certifying us by the Medical Board of California. This successful operation, largely done by Peter alone, opened up the analytic institutes to non-medical candidates—that is, to humanists, social scientists, and other talented members of the community, including, for example, judges, actors, and musicians.

Peter’s concept of academically trained, practicing psychoanalysts presupposed a respect for the ethical responsibilities of the individual being trained. He proposed screening perspective candidates in terms of their commitment to psychoanalytic modes of thinking, analytic approaches to clinical process, and the workings of the unconscious. He tapped into the contemporary analytic attitudes regarding safety, care, and compassion both for the patient and the student, with an analytic appreciation of trauma and of individual vulnerability. Such training, he argued, would expand the academic arsenal of research methodology by emphasizing the clinical dimension, while simultaneously enriching the psychoanalytic mainstream by introducing significant perspectives from other disciplines. Peter exemplifies the creative possibilities of having dual training, of working at the points of convergence of psychoanalysis and allied disciplines. Analytic training, including a training analysis, would alert the researcher to aspects of subjectivity, the inner world, affectivity, transference, and countertransference dynamics, all of which come into play in research, writing, and teaching.

The program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, now the New Center for Psychoanalysis, became the country’s most distinguished one for the training of psychoanalytic researchers nationally, producing outstanding and innovative authors. Some, like Peter, have gone on to become deans of the institutes, able educators and administrators, integrating analytic forms of

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pedagogy into their teaching and professional activities. Many have gone on to become award-winning authors and teachers at their analytic institutes and universities. They have raised the level of discourse in the seminars, providing higher levels of rigor, of questioning basic presuppositions, of reading texts in a sophisticated fashion, and of posing critical questions about psychoanalytic method and application. In short, the presence of the research analysts has improved the quality of institute education, made it intellectually more stimulating, more democratic, more supportive, and receptive to younger members. The model is closer to the university, rather than a technical training center, focused on specialized or strictly pragmatic issues. The spirit of encouragement, inclusion, and promoting young members is vintage Peter Loewenberg, deriving directly from his value system and his way of being in the world.

Peter again became mobilized when the Medical Board of California decided to investigate and possibly “sunset” the law for research psychoanalysis in the middle 1990s. We attended a board meeting to address their concerns. Peter was poised, well prepared, and masterful. He answered the questions of the various board members in an articulate and respectful manner, alerting them to the various achievements of our cohort of research psychoanalysts. Peter’s strong presence at this meeting floored members of the board. Peter spoke of full professors at the major research institutions of the University of California system, recited their impressive list of publications, often with major publishers, and their significant contributions to education and service for the state. The Medical Board unanimously renewed our registration, a major victory for research psychoanalysis and a personal victory for Peter.

Psychoanalytic history has infamously been one of continuous acrimony, bickering, and outright splits, beginning with Freud’s break with Adler, Jung, and Stekel. Peacemakers are exceptional and rarely successful. The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute split from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Society in 1950. The key issues in the split turned on medical orthodoxy versus support of lay analysis, distance versus closeness to Freud’s major teachings and theory of technique, and not least personal and transferential loyalties. As Dean of the Southern Califor-

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nia Institute, Peter personally orchestrated the eventual merger of the two split societies, healing an old breach that no longer made sense in the new century.

Under his effective guidance, and with the assistance of the Director of Education at LAPSI, Mark Thompson, the merged institute, the New Center for Psychoanalysis, has effectively combined the strengths of the two institutes. We now operate under one roof and share one library, financial assets, faculty, and administrative services. Without Peter’s energy and vision, this merger would not have occurred. Peter risked his reputation, losing old collegial relationships to promote and ultimately secure the merger. He was personally attacked in a manner distinctly psychoanalytic; that is, with a high degree of nastiness and personal venom. But yet, he accomplished the merger with an amazing degree of patience, finesse, and strength of will.

I have known Peter personally for over 35 years; we have been friends since 1977. Before that, I knew him from his writings, particularly his essays published in The American Historical Review in the early 1970s from a psychohistorical perspective. He was on the search committee that brought me to UCLA for an academic position in European intellectual history. At first, he provided me with consistent encouragement of my scholarly activities but more significantly of my desire to receive analytic training. He helped me to pick my training analyst, was generous with his time and advice, and opened up his home and his heart to me. We went through specific personal and professional crises together. He invited me to my first psychoanalytic party at his home in 1977, introducing me to two senior analysts who spoke of their desire to unite the two contending institutes. He was consistently loyal. We come from similar but not identical family and cultural backgrounds: both of us have training in European intellectual history (his with Carl Schorske, mine with George Mosse); we both are secular Jews and share a commitment to left-wing politics; both of our fathers were physicians.

Initially, he functioned as a symbolic older brother, referring patients to me, supporting my analytic career, helping me to avoid the pitfalls of being an analytic candidate, alerting me to the ambiguities and ambivalences of being a non-medical practitioner. As

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the friendship evolved, it has become more reciprocal. We now refer patients to one another. We cover each other’s practice on vacations. He and I are privileged readers for one another’s papers, mutual advisors, and confidants. We share our respective professional and personal networks. Peter, it should be noted, has the most fascinating people come through his home, and his contacts are national and international. He is a generous host. Josefine Loewenberg, his charming and intelligent Austrian wife, has long functioned as my travel agent. I recently ran in an election for the institute’s Educational Committee, and though I was not well known to his colleagues from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, Peter not only endorsed my candidacy, but personally phoned 50 or 60 individuals urging them to vote for me—speed dialing and fidelity at their best. I won by a landslide, thanks to Peter. Without his friendship, my life would be significantly diminished.

Let me conclude by saluting 001. I am grateful to him for so many rewarding years of friendship, camaraderie, care, intellectual and clinical stimulation, and good times. As he now takes his visionary psychoanalytic humanism to China, I continue to be astonished by his vitality, his desire to promote the growth of psychoanalysis to another continent and to another culture. He personifies the diffusion of psychoanalytic history, theory, and practice. Peter’s life has been a continual 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.

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