My Friend Peter

Peter has been my closest friend for over 40 years. We first met in 1968 when I was chairman of the Research Committee of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, and he was a candidate at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. Peter presented to our committee a paper he was writing on “The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler,” the head of the Nazi S.S. and Gestapo. Peter was an Assistant Professor of History at UCLA and had entered psychoanalytic training. I was in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and on the clinical faculty at UCLA.

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We instantly connected. Since that time, Peter and I have lunch regularly once a week.

We were both born in 1933, Peter in Hamburg, Germany, and I in Brooklyn, New York. Our childhoods were radically and remarkably different. At six weeks, Peter, an only child, moved with his father, a Jewish psychiatrist, and mother, a nurse from a Nazi Lutheran family, to China to escape the Nazi regime. I grew up in a peaceful residential community with my Jewish physician father, Jewish dancer/violinist mother, and four years’ younger brother. Peter’s professional interest in 20^th-century German and European cultural and intellectual history and his pioneering work in psychobiography and psychohistory were an attempt to understand himself as an individual and his place in the world. I grew up in a stable, tranquil residential community in Brooklyn. As a young child I heard very little about “The War,” which seemed like an abstraction until my mother’s brother, a young flight surgeon in the U.S. Army, was killed in a plane crash while preparing to go into combat. From that moment on, I was deeply absorbed with newspaper, radio, and film accounts of the war and the family’s pervasive grief at the loss of my uncle.

We both attended public high schools, Peter in Bakersfield and I in Brooklyn. Peter’s education took place at UC Santa Barbara, the Free University of Berlin, and Berkeley where he did his PhD in History with Carl E. Schorske. He took his second PhD in psychoanalysis at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. I attended Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, receiving BA and MD degrees. His father died when Peter was 20, leaving him to work his way through college and graduate school. He worked as a dishwasher, hotel bellman, desk clerk, burger flipper, counterman, ranch hand, camp counselor, office boy in a law firm, library attendant, eventually in graduate school as a Reader and Teaching Assistant and Associate in Social Science. It took Peter many years to work through the loss of his father and establish his own identity as a professor of history and world-renowned psychoanalyst.

Our lunches have taken place in many restaurants over the years, during which we discuss our clinical work and a wide range of personal and professional topics, including our past analyses and

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self-analyses, family, children, and wives. We cover each other’s practice when one of us is out of town. Our spontaneous weekly agenda ranges from global politics to the petty intrigues of our institute, the American Psychoanalytic Association (ApsaA) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). For some time, we have favored La Bruschetta, a quiet Italian restaurant where the proprietress Suzanna often asks us as we are leaving, “So have you solved more of the world’s problems today?”

Knowing Peter so well for over four decades, I have lived through his setbacks, been his confidant, and seen his vulnerabilities, crises, and successes. I have seen his dark side; I know him as much as we can know anyone other than a patient. He identifies with the persecuted, the disenfranchised, and minorities. These identifications come partially from his immigrant and foster child experiences. From 1965 to 1966, he led the UCLA Grenada Project to prepare African American high school students in Grenada, Mississippi, to succeed in school integration. He was incensed when the L.A. Board of Supervisors wanted to reinstitute corporal punishment in schools, so he organized a public program and led a campaign for his psychoanalytic institute to send a letter of protest to the Board. He was a member of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and is still an advocate of student interests, civil liberties, and First Amendment rights. I have seen him raise issues of inequality and abuse of power in the American Psychoanalytic Association and other forums. I know that he cuts fees to make therapy possible for people who cannot otherwise afford it.

Peter is a builder, and his achievements bear a special kind of creative synthesis. He secured a place for psychohistory at UCLA, pioneered psychoanalytic training for faculty at UCLA and other institutions in California, and created the California Research Psychoanalyst Law of 1977, which has made psychoanalytic practice by academics possible. He was a founder of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UCIPC), which annually brings together at Lake Arrowhead psychoanalytic teachers, researchers, and clinicians from across the state to meet and share their work and ideas. He led and defended the Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) in the American Psychoanalytic Association and as Dean led a successful effort to

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unite two psychoanalytic institutes in Los Angeles. Most recently, Peter’s skills at collaborative management were tested as editor (with Nellie Thompson) of the centenary history of the International Psychoanalytical Association, 100 Years of the IPA (2011), an enterprise of editing 43 chapters, many from non-Anglophone countries and essays by the six living IPA ex-presidents. None of these accomplishments were achieved by Peter alone; he was a synthesizer and creative catalyst. Persistence, resilience, and an emphasis on integrative working collaboration are strong characteristics that he relates to a childhood immersed in Chinese culture. This is also manifested in his research on creative “thought collectives” at the Bauhaus, and the early psychoanalytic group in Zürich’s Burghölzli Hospital.

Peter is chair of the China Committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which is comprised of an international group of Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Australians, Argentines, and Chinese. He has been teaching psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in China for the past decade. It is no coincidence that Peter’s daughter Anna Sophie has chosen to live in China and build a career in filmmaking there. His older son Sam is a Harvard Journalism Fellow specializing in global health. When he is not at Harvard or covering a story in Africa, India, or Latin America, he chooses to live in Berlin, where Peter studied. Last summer, Peter and I visited China for three weeks with our wives. It was a great pleasure to be a co-teacher with him in psychoanalytic seminars in Shanghai and Beijing and meet many of his enthusiastic and sophisticated Chinese students who are now studying and developing psychoanalysis in China. Peter has a cosmopolitan perspective on the world comparable to that of few people I have known.

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