Letters to Loewenberg from a Distinguished American Historian (festschrift article)

Dear Peter,

January 10, 1995: Reflecting on your essay, “Psychoanalysis, Sexual Morality, and the Clinical Situation,” in Michael S. Roth, ed., Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche (1994), I now felt the full impact of the structure of the work, which revealed the major dimensions of your intellectual position as historian/psychoanalyst—as theorist, practitioner and active citizen. The essay seemed like a compressed summa of your mission in its full maturity. And what a mission it is!

The use of Nietzsche’s stress on individual creativity—with all its dangers—and Mill’s rational universalism as two complementary pillars of the humanistic philosophy within which psychoanalysis addresses its difficult therapeutic task is so clarifying. That is where the psychoanalysts can most profit from the historian, by acquiring an awareness of their place in the liberal philosophical tradition. Your description of the relation between the professional and civic ethic of the analyst—especially in the context of the transference problem—opens windows in turn for the historian. That you bring both these issues—the historical-philosophical and the clinical—into a political and social focus or convergence in the law forces the reader to reflect on the adequacy of our public institutions to deal with the needs of the creative and/or frustrated human being. Your reader too must thus face the tensions between his (our) ideals of freedom and the social need for order: thus an ancient problem in our culture appears in a new light of historically informed psychoanalysis.

Thank you—for Fantasy and Reality in History. I have not read all the essays, but enough to appreciate what an achievement it represents, opening new terrain beyond the pre-occupations of Decoding the Past. Where the earlier work focused largely on political history (with its climactic achievement in the “Nazi Youth Cohort” essay), the new book enriches the study of social phenomena, or the psychosocial aspect of political men. You have both ex-

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panded your command of social theory, and—am I right?— enlarged your psychoanalytic armamentarium well beyond Freud’s own classical theory to include the theories of later psychosocial thinkers (Winnicott and Kohut) that make it possible to address problems never addressed before, like Zhirinovsky as a revenge-seeking hero; or even Gladstone and Bulgaria, with its object relation theory illumination.

The essay that, among the eight I’ve read, really blew me away was “Burghölzli.” Here social science and up-to-date psychoanalysis converge in a timely pioneering piece of cultural history. What makes the analytic achievement the greater is the degree of objectivity which you as a Freudian analyst manifest in an area where quarrels ancient and modern could so easily color judgment. Moreover, it stands as a stimulation for research in the sociology of group creativity in culture. For me, it advances psychohistory in an unexplored terrain—a fitting partner, in your new phase of scholarly development, to the “Nazi Youth Cohort” of yesteryear. Of course, I wish you would make a book of it, because it would revolutionize the history of psychoanalysis. But I can understand why you would wish to open new fields as you have this one. “Zum neuen Ufern.”

June 18, 1996: If there was ever a moment I wished to share with you, this is it! To think of being with your friends at the Fund Fisher Festival to raise a glass to you: how gratifying that would be!

I was especially happy to see that you are being celebrated as a mentor. It is something more than a teacher—or at least requires some very human, affective qualities that some fine teachers do not have. I am proud to consider you my mentor, despite our different places in the hierarchy of seniority. For you have always sustained me, encouraged me by your reception of my work, and by sharing yours, as true mentors do, with me.

Of course, I did find it hard to believe that you have reached the age when you are thus honored. An early start, let’s say, so richly deserved; it will secure your staying young.

October 23, 1997: I can’t tell you how much pleasure—and intellectual illumination (sometimes they are the same)—I have had

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in reading Clio’s Psyche. Of course I went first to your own article, where I was especially taken by the portrait of your parents. Of your father, I had some idea; of your mother, none. I hunger for more. I wonder if the time has not arrived for you to write an autobiography? I blush with curiosity, both historical and personal.

The other pieces too—especially that of Elovitz—brought home to me how decisive your role has been in bonding psychoanalysis and other disciplines. The difference between the east and west coast academic culture is interesting in this respect. At least one factor, I suspect, is the survival of amateurism in the east (in people like Gay and me), while the more professionalized western academic culture demands institutional solutions to intellectual scholarly problems.

September 23, 2003: Thank you for a truly splendid article. In its brilliant contrapositioning of post-modernism and psychoanalysis, it reminded me of one of the seminal concepts of modernism: Baudelauire’s correspondences. For me, who has had great difficulty in understanding post-modernism, your taxonomy of that intellectual movement became clear for the first time. For the younger generation whose culture is post-modern, Freud should become accessible for the first time. For all, Freud will look different, richer, more true.

I wonder whether for you, who have so fostered University of California faculty communication about psychoanalysis in the humanities and social sciences, this article does not represent a reward, a take-home, from years of work with the “others,” one that has empowered you to offer us now a new illumination of Freud’s thought for our time and times to change.

Always yours,

Carl

[Editor’s Note: His contribution to his former doctoral student’s special feature is taken from his handwritten letters to Loewenberg from 1995-2003 and published with his permission.]

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