“My Friend Peter Loewenberg” by Josh Hoffs, MD with an introduction by N. Szajnberg, MD Managing Editor
Dr. Josh Hoffs’ piece below will be in Clio’s Psyche and tells us more of a life full-lived. Among other significant achievements for our field, Dr. Loewenberg along with Nellie Thompson of NYPSI edited the centenary history of the International Psychoanalytic Association, 100 years of the IPA (London: Karnac, 2011). As Dean of his Institute, he catalyzed the union of the two LA Institutes. In the psychoanalytic land of fission (see Doug Kirshner’s Unfree Associations), this is like discovering fusion in nuclear science. But there is much more here, including Dr. Loewemberg’s initiatives in China, once his refuge and childhood home.
Please use link below to read: “My Friend Peter Loewenberg” by Josh Hoffs, MD.
My Friend Peter Loewenberg
By Josh Hoffs, MD
Peter Loewenberg 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 SS 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. 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 year younger brother. Peter remembers having a good time as a child in the French Concession of Shanghai until age four. Then the family emigrated to California, at the time of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. In his first year in America, between ages 4 and 5, Peter lived with a foster family because his mother was working as a night nurse and his father was doing a hospital internship. Thereafter his father worked as a physician and psychiatrist and the family lived in San Francisco, in the High Sierras, where Peter acquired his love of mountains and wilderness, and in Bakersfield where he knew Caesar Chavez and picketed for farm labor. Peter’s professional interest in 20th 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 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 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, causing him to work his way through college and graduate school. He worked as a dish washer, 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, also a wide range of personal and professional topics, our past analyses and 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 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 set-backs, been his confidant, and seen his vulnerability, 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 experience. In 1965-66 he led the UCLA Grenada Project to prepare Afro-American high school students in Grenada, Mississippi, to succeed in school integration. He was incensed when the L.A. Board of Supervisors wanted to re-institute corporal punishment in schools. 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. 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, 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. His led and defended the Committee on Research & Special Training (CORST) in the American Psychoanalytic Association; and as Dean led a successful effort to 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 Psychoanalytic Association, 100 years of the IPA (London: Karnac, 2011), an enterprise of editing 43 chapters, many from non-Anglophone countries and essays by the six living IPA ex-presidents. None of these was achieved by Peter alone. He was a synthesizer and creative catalyst. Persistence, resilience, and an emphasis on integrative working collaboration are strong characteristics which 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 the 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 film making 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 few people I have known.
Josh Hoffs MD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst, New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and an Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).