Mentor, Scholar, Exemplar, Colleague, and Friend

The most fitting way I can express my appreciation for Peter as a mentor, scholar, colleague, and friend is to reflect on three of his papers. My choice of these papers over others is a reflection of the intellectual and personal resonance they hold for me. As Peter himself has noted, the history we write is autobiographical, and the complex reasons we are engaged by particular cultural, social, political, and intellectual movements and historical actors, and indeed form a relationship with these individuals, are also autobiographical. As he has written in Decoding the Past (1983, p. 45), “The education of a psychohistorian is decisively different from that of any other historian because his education deeply involves his inner

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self.” With that in mind, three papers of Peter’s that I especially admire are: “Emotional Problems of Graduate Education”; “The Creation of a Scientific Community: The Burghölzli, 1902-1914”; and “John Muir and the Erotization of Nature.”

I first read “The Emotional Problems of Graduate Education” (Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach, New York: Knopf, 1983) when I was a new graduate student at UCLA, where I had enrolled specifically because I wanted to study psychohistory with Professor Peter Loewenberg. In straightforward language, this essay describes the emotional and psychological perils of graduate education for students and their teachers. The student’s position in this dyad is portrayed frankly: “Now, the stark fact is that the faculty-student relationship, particularly on the graduate level, is not that of equals. It is one of domination and submission.” He continues, “The Professor combines the transference authority of the parent with the actual power and institutional authority of a director of graduate studies. The student is in the almost totally impotent position of dependent child” (pp. 50-51).

All of Peter’s graduate students were keenly aware of this paper, but I do not think I was alone in feeling reassured by it, because the professor we had chosen to study with had described so well the dilemmas of being a graduate student. It was confirmed that we were fortunate by observing that some of our fellow students were working with advisors who were either sadistic or indifferent to their fate. I reread the paper years later after finishing my dissertation and while preparing to begin a new apprenticeship as a psychoanalytic candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. I was struck then by how I had “forgotten” passages where Peter describes the origins of the teacher’s concern for his students: “The teacher’s concern for the student stems unconsciously from two normal basic constructive drives: the reparative and the parental. The desire to repair counteracts the latent destructiveness in us all.” Peter describes the student’s place in the relationship: “The student stands for the damaged parts of himself in the teacher’s own unconscious that are still endangered by aggression and still in need of reparation.” He continues, “To the instructor, the student is his early self. His interest and empathy, his feeling of recognition and identification with the student, are the motives for a relationship of

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humanness, warmth, and freedom” (Ibid, p. 57).

My “forgetting” of this description of the professor’s emotional and psychological investment in his students reflects, I think, my position at the time as a graduate student whose passage towards scholarly adult independence did not allow acknowledgement of my potential importance to the teacher/parent who mentored this experience. That I, as a student, could perhaps play such a role could only be recognized after independence had been achieved and a new collegial relationship had taken its place.

While the creative individual—whether a visual artist, writer, composer, or sculptor—has long fascinated us and been the subject of close study, the dynamics of creative groups are less well-studied and understood. In “The Creation of a Scientific Community: The Burghölzli, 1902-1914” (Fantasy and Reality in History, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Loewenberg delineates the structural, cultural, and human elements that coalesced under the leadership of Eugen Bleuler to nurture and sustain the Burghölzli community. The group’s demise is also recounted, but what sets apart Loewenberg’s analysis of this creative group is his integration of concepts articulated by Ludwig Fleck and D.W. Winnicott to describe the special psychological and intellectual states of mind that acted as an invisible but tensile boundary that separated the Burghölzli community from the uninitiated.

Ludwig Fleck, a Polish immunologist and historian of science, developed the concept of the “thought collective,” accompanied by a “thought style,” that is “the entirety of intellectual preparedness…for one particular way of seeing and acting and no other… The thought style may also be accompanied by a technical and literary style characteristic of the given system of knowledge” (Loewenberg, p. 76). In other words, a “thought collective” may be defined not only by a shared language, but also by a readiness to see and define a new reality.

D.W. Winnicott recognized that the infant’s transitional object was its first creation and a testimony to the emergent capacity for symbol formation and representational thought. But the transitional object is also a spatial concept, because it occupies a space between the infant’s internal perceptions and experiences and those

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being assimilated from the outside world; it is neither inside the child nor completely outside and occupies a space between internal and external reality. “This is the place of play and of the first phase of cultural and scientific creativity…[the Burghölzli] provided a creative space where its workers were protected in an intermediate area of experience, between the inner and the external shared reality. This is the essential precondition of creativity” (Loewenberg, p. 79).

This brief description of Peter’s essay cannot possibly do justice to the richly detailed portrait he draws of the personalities as well as the intellectual and psychological ferment that initially united and sustained the scientific creativity of the Burghölzli. Although rivalry, aggression, and unrecognized transferences and countertransferences among the participants fueled the fissures that led to the community’s dissolution, its legacy acted as a powerful influence in the lives of the “citizens” of this community. Peter’s paper stimulated me to wonder what psychological experiences make an individual open to becoming a member of a creative collective. It occurred to me that Winnicott’s paper, “On the Capacity to be Alone,” is relevant to this question. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that a paper that traces the capacity to be alone to the experience of being alone in the presence of the mother can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics that generate and sustain creative communities. But, I would argue that the capacity to participate in a creative group or be part of a mutually enriching creative relationship rests in part on the capacity to be alone, which in turn can only be generated by a relationship with a good object, the mother. The group may act, so to speak, as the “first reader,” but it is the experience of being alone in the presence of the mother that leads to the first creative act. It remains to be seen whether my speculation that Winnicott’s paper has a contribution to make to understanding creative groups. What is clear, however, is that Peter’s paper has stimulated my playful engagement with Winnicott as I think about creativity and creative individuals.

“John Muir and the Erotization of Nature” (Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4: pp. 365-381, 2000), is a highly personal paper where Peter acknowledged that he brought to “bear empathic countertransference considerations from the devel-

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opment of his own erotization of nature in his effort to understand Muir” (Loewenberg, 2000, p. 365). Peter’s analytically-grounded understanding of the historical and childhood traumas that shaped his inner self serves as a prism for explicating, without pathologizing, Muir’s ecstatic writings on nature. In light of Peter’s description of his attraction to Muir’s writing, I began to think about why I am so engaged by the psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre’s writings. One conclusion I have reached is that when I read her work, I feel understood; she expresses what I often think and feel. In some imponderable way, this has freed me to take pleasure in the act of writing instead of experiencing it as a struggle.

The three papers of Peter’s I have chosen to briefly write about are exemplars of his seamless integration of psychoanalysis and historical scholarship. Each paper resonated for me in an important way: each has given me insight into my own transferences and countertransferences, stimulated my thinking about creativity and revealed anew to me what a remarkable man Peter is.

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