Peter Loewenberg’s Pioneering Road Traveled as a Psychohistorian

I am identified as a psychohistorian or a psychoanalytic historian. I would like to get away from the concept of “applying” psychodynamics to the humanities and social sciences because I have found that the integration of psychodynamic perceptions with historical data takes place the moment the historian encounters the historical event or archival document. The clinical perceptual tools and method of thinking is in the mind of the historian, so he/she has a nuanced awareness of what possibly productive questions to pose or look for in the historical behavior or situation. The psychoanalytic perceptions, usually the affectual and emotional valences, are integrated in the methodological approach to the historical work, as they are in other aspects of life—and in this essay.

In the history graduate program at University of California (UC), Berkeley, I studied European diplomatic history with Raymond J. Sontag, American intellectual history with Henry F. May, and European cultural and intellectual history with Carl Schorske. I encountered my first psychotherapy then. I was depressed by my father’s recent death and in a bad graduate school marriage, not

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sure what to do. Certainly the personal experience and insight gained in analysis was a prime determinant for me advocating a deeper approach to history than treaties breached or economic conflict over colonial markets. I felt the historical explanations were only partial; they did not begin to explain as much as we could when we understood some things about the unconscious, human motivations, and behavior. If psychodynamics enabled us to better comprehend personal motives, conflicts, and behaviors, why settle for “rational interest” explanations in history and politics? I knew that I wanted psychoanalytic training.

Two people who profoundly influenced my life and career in history were Robert K. Webb, the editor of the American Historical Review (AHR), and Nancy Lane, its managing editor. Bob Webb had a broad, open, and tolerant view of what the premier journal of the profession should publish. He was willing to take the interdisciplinary manuscripts of an unknown young historian, send them out to historians as well as to psychoanalytic professionals for evaluation, and publish two essays (“The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler” and “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort”) of this far-out radical maverick in the year 1971. Nancy was a tireless editor who devoted meticulous attention to detail and introduced photographs and illustrations with the texts in the AHR.

One of the insights from my personal analysis was that when I found a flaw or mistake in a mentor’s work, I could sense the Oedipal dynamics of attack and triumph. My first major article in the American Historical Review was a critique of the conceptualizations of a Berkeley teacher of mine who had published on the “normal” adolescence of the young Heinrich Himmler. Later, I would experience both the transference idealization and deprecation by students and patients.

Nachträglichkeit is the term Freud employed for the delayed reactions to trauma in a person, which may also be carried and transmitted over and between generations. I know this from the oral tradition of my family, who recounted the hunger experiences in Germany during the First World War: the boring rutabagas, which were the only staple food for the war years; one orange as a special holiday treat divided in segments among the family; and no coal for heating, so my mother learned to play piano with gloves on. I learned of this from my parents, not only by the stories and reminiscences they shared of the hunger and rare precious once-a-

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year treats like an orange that was segmented and shared by the whole family, but literally in my mother’s body as a fetus. When I wrote a research article on the emotional and physical consequences of prolonged food deprivation in Central Europe during and after World War One, these family memories and other oral histories became pertinent. I continued to study food anxiety in Berlin where I studied on a Fulbright grant during the Soviet blockade. This became the emotional background for my historical research.

The World War I deprivation was imprinted on my parent’s bodies. When she was 60 I accompanied my mother for an eye examination, the ophthalmologist inquired whether she had been in a concentration camp, to which she said “No!” He said that her retina showed damage from malnutrition, which he had only seen in concentration camp victims. Upon consideration she suggested that it must have been the “hunger years” of World War One. A major theme in concentration camp memoir literature is the ever-present hunger and thirst. I can only speculate on how much of the concentration camp hunger regimen was reversal and undoing, turning the passive experiences of childhood starvation into the active infliction of suffering onto innocent others three decades later.

In my 63 years as an analyst I have found that when colleagues reflect back on their long analyses, invariably what we recall is some human departure from prescribed “classical” technique of “abstinence,” a personal event that touched us deeply. I recall a day when there was a sudden storm as I went to my analyst’s office. I was caught in the deluge without a raincoat or umbrella. I lay on his couch with my clothes soaked by cold rain. He suggested I take off my shirt and trousers, then carefully came over to the couch carrying his coat, which he spread over me. In 1966 when I left to do civil rights work in Mississippi, we shook hands at his door and he said: “It takes a good deal of courage!” Regardless of psychoanalytical school or orientation, I believe the curative factor is the quality of the interpersonal relationship between analyst and analysand.

My life in psychoanalysis has been marked by three institutional struggles: one, the legal recognition and legitimation of research psychoanalysis by the state; two, the teaching of psychoanalysis in China; and three, the merger in Los Angeles of two autonomous psychoanalytic institutes into one unified psychoanalytic center. When I applied for institute training, the incoming Dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI) was Samuel Eisenstein (1913-1996). He asked me to his office on a Saturday

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morning. After some discussion, he stunned me by suggesting, “Why don’t we establish a psychoanalytic training scholarship for academics to help young university scholars with their psychoanalytic education?” The first recipient was Professor Albert D. Hutter (1942-2004), a Dickens scholar in the UCLA English Department in 1971.

I was chair of the Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the gatekeeper to psychoanalytic training for academics who wish to learn analysis in institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association, from 1997 to 2001. I was Dean and Director of Education of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI) and of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) from 2001 to 2006. These years accomplished the reunification and merger of a split in institutional psychoanalysis in Southern California 64 years ago.

The research training program of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, the successor to the SCPI, has been emulated widely. In creating the bridge between psychoanalysis and academia, SCPI realized Freud’s 1926 vision of analytic instruction, which “would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material” (Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” Standard Edition, XX, 246). Now the NCP has one of the most successful psychoanalytic academic research training programs.

A problem appeared early with the legal legitimation of the clinical practice of the research students and graduates of California institutes. Academics are not state licensed clinicians. Mental health is as subject to the exclusionary “guild” mentality of crafts as are hairdressers, plumbers, and electricians. I was the first research candidate targeted in the attempt to derail academic psychoanalytic candidates from doing clinical work and to keep them from seeing patients. It is the kind of call you never forget; one day, a psychologist friend phoned with the warm-up that alerts you to trouble: “This is a hard call to make!” He continued: “There has been a complaint filed against you with the Psychology Licensing Board for practicing psychology without a license.” As a matter of recourse, I secured a license as a Marriage and Family Therapist

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(MFT), so that I would have the cover of law. This is a broad clinical license, but it took a year and required sitting for examinations, and MFT was not my identity.

We decided to try to make a place for Research Psychoanalysts in California law. I worked closely with Martin Levine, a professor of law at University of Southern California (USC). His legal drafting skills were indispensable in drafting the law around the objections of the psychology lobby. This fight to legitimize graduates of institutes was a hands-on political education like none other. We encountered many of the special interest groups in state politics, including Afro-Americans (“What will this bill do for Blacks?”) and gays. Art Agnew moved the adoption of AB246 bill while on the Public Health Committee. The most important lobby we had on our side was the University of California Student Lobby. When it came to getting our bill through the Senate and Governor, the adage of Tip O’Neill that “all politics is local politics” was abundantly demonstrated. Senator Walter Stiern secured its unanimous passage. After passage in the Assembly and Senate we needed a contact who had the ear of Governor Jerry Brown. Our man in the Governor’s Office was Leroy Chatfield. When I called Leroy, explained the bill, and asked him to talk to Jerry Brown, he said: “Peter, this sounds like a wonderful idea! I’ll talk to Jerry.”

On September 30, 1977, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., signed the first Research Psychoanalysts Law, which is also the first time in the history of any jurisdiction that psychoanalysis was legitimized by a state. The new law explicitly named the four California institutes as authorized to train psychoanalysts for “teaching, training, or research.” Upon the passage of the law, Anna Freud wrote me: “I think this legal decision is a wonderful thing and will mark an important development in the history of psychoanalysis in America” (Anna Freud to Peter Loewenberg, October 12, 1977, in the possession of the author).

In 1991 a group of research psychoanalysts on the University of California faculty led by Nancy Chodorow and myself proposed the creation of a UC interdisciplinary psychoanalytic consortium (UCIPC). Rather than formal presentations and prepared discussions, we held informal workshops focused on the various interests of the group. The UCIPC is the only place in the university, and perhaps in the world, where social scientists, humanists, psychoanalytic psychiatrists, and bio-behavioral scientists from the university’s five medical schools interact on the common ground of

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psychoanalysis and recruitment for psychoanalytic institute training.

An important part of my identity as an analyst has been teaching psychoanalysis in China, the country I lived in as a young child when my parents fled the Nazis. I was appointed Chair of the China Committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 2007 and chaired the group until 2013. I taught psychoanalytic therapy for the Hospital Authority of Hong Kong from 2003-2005 and in major cities such as Wuhan, Kunming, and Chengdu. Chinese mental health professionals are eager to acquire the best Western talk therapies. The China Committee commenced a full curriculum of psychoanalytic training in Beijing in 2007 and in Shanghai in 2011. As part of the IPA’s China program, German, Norwegian, Argentine, and American analysts have taught and supervised in China since 2007. In May 2019 the Sixth Chinese Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Shanghai with over 1,000 registrants. This is a tremendous accomplishment for an educational effort that was initiated a mere 12 years ago.

My devotion to history and psychoanalysis has made for a most fulfilling and productive career.

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