Remembering Victor Wolfenstein (memorial)

Victor and I started our careers at UCLA together in 1965 and initiated our psychoanalytic training at the Southern California

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Psychoanalytic Institute shortly thereafter. We came to know each other well in a psychoanalytic study group on leadership with a number of local analysts and social scientists, including Fawn McKay Brodie, Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, and Alexander George. (If you would like to know about this group, see Peter Loewenberg, “An Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Study Group on Political Leadership in Los Angeles,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, July 1969, 271-72.) Later, there were annual Arrowhead meetings of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, where Vic always presented and often served on the Planning or Program Committees.

Vic had an emotionally hard life. His parents split up when he was five. His mother died of cancer when he was only ten. His father, a socialist idealist, fought and was wounded in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and moved to Paris. So, Vic was largely raised by maternal grandparents and his aunt Martha, an eminent child analyst. Vic was nurtured in a Marxist and psychoanalytic culture which he integrated in various personal and intellectual ways throughout his too-short life. The quality and success of this synthesis was in no small part due to his supportive partner of over four decades, a very smart and peppy history graduate student, whom he affectionately called “Jude.”

I recall the 1979 International Society of Political Psychology conference in Mannheim, Germany, when Vic and Judy were leaving for Paris with their sons Gabe and Moses, where he was anxiously looking forward to re-connecting with his father after 23 years and meeting his three “new” half brothers and sisters from his father’s second marriage.

Vic became a practicing clinical analyst who adjusted his fees to make treatment possible for what people could afford. I know this because I referred to him people without much money. One of them, a grateful scholar of modern Europe, said to me: “Strange to have a Marxist analyst!”

Vic was an inspiring and charismatic teacher, both at UCLA, where he had a large following and received the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award, and at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI), where he regularly co-taught a be-

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loved and exceptionally provocative seminar which is summed up in a report stating that the course “was many things, stirred up many feelings, provoked rage and terror and resentment and growth. Not bad for 8 weeks!”

This takes us to the abrasive, “in your face” side of Victor. People are not divisible. We are not made up of detachable parts. Love is not only about the sweet—if you love a person, you love all of them, including the irritating side because personality is integral. I was Vic’s dean for five years at the Psychoanalytic Institute. I wish to suggest that the rough “edge” many of us experienced with Vic is the sharp edge that made him unique and effective in psychoanalysis, teaching, and politics. With that I want to share with you a brief letter Victor wrote to the SCPI Dean John Peck in June of 1985, with the approval of Judy, who with her inimitable acuity said: “It will cut the treacle!” Vic’s letterhead proudly states:

REGISTERED RESEARCH PSYCHCOANALYST

Dear Dr. Peck:

I regret very much that I will not be able to attend the graduation ceremony this coming Sunday. Although I am not a ceremonial type (I don’t even choose to stand on it very often), I had looked forward to this one. But I am involved in the Sanctuary movement for Central American refugees, especially the people who are fleeing the violence of life and death in El Salvador and Guatamala [sic]. This Sunday a “Freedom Train” begins here and in Phoenix, Arizona, traveling north to Seattle in the one case, east to Northhampton, Mass., in the other. The Sanctuary organization of which I am a member is joining this demonstration for the LA to Santa Barbara segment of the West Coast action. And so, therefore, am I.

Sincerely yours,

It is like a dream—Vic is all there in this one letter: the provocative condescension, the contempt for institutional hierarchies and gratuitous ceremonies, the assured didactic self, and the burning radical politics of social justice. Vic devoted a major part of his creative life to the space where the social and political meets and

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interacts with the personal and psychodynamic. This was the work of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s to the 1960s in explaining fascism. It is precarious ground, fraught with difficulties—but Vic mastered it with determined success. Vic was a brilliant synthesizer of psychoanalysis with Marxism, critical theory, and the social sciences.

Victor, in his work and in his life, articulated a vision of human emancipation. It is particularly fitting that the UCLA Political Science Department is establishing an award in “Dialectical Thinking” in his name. (To donate, checks are to be payable to: the UCLA Foundation. Wolfenstein Award. and sent to: UCLA Political Science Department 4289, Bunche Hall, Box 951472, Los Angeles, CA. 90095-1472.) His widow is donating a part of Victor’s personal library to the newly launched International Psychoanalytic Association training program in Shanghai. How appropriate that Vic, whose life was dedicated to exposing and mitigating exploitation, should have his books enlighten and deepen the understanding of students in one of the most exploited areas of the world.

If, to some degree, this world of the early 21^st century is a more humane place with greater social justice than in the mid-20^th century, when Vic was born, it is due to Victor, his wife, his work, and his vision “that the realm of human freedom can be and ought to be enlarged.” He lived the young Marx’s injunction: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

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