Peter J. Loewenberg (born August 1933 in Hamburg, Germany) is an American historian and psychoanalyst, professor of "European cultural, intellectual, German, Austrian and Swiss history, political Psychology, integrating the identities of an historian and political psychologist with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis" at UCLA.
Biography Loewenberg was born in Hamburg in 1933 when Hitler acceded to power in Germany.Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.), The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, , pp. 2, 25, 28‒29, 34, 36, 409‒10 (including a short biography and bibliography of his works). His father's concern for the safety of his family during Hitler's reign led him to research various countries to move to, eventually settling in Shanghai, China. It is there that Loewenberg spent the first four years of his life. In 1937 his family immigrated to the United States and Peter was raised in Bakersfield, California.Professional and Personal Insights,” Clio’s Psyche, 4:2 (September 1997), 33-36. His father was a university psychiatrist and a humanist who wrote on Kant, Lichtenberg, and Nietzsche. His mother, who had been a socialist activist in the Weimar Republic, was a public health nurse.
Loewenberg traced his parents' activism and sacrifice to his pursuance of a diverse and profound education in 20th-century European cultural history, Austro-German history, and political psychology, as he saw it. "My intense conviction of the value of dual training has a personal, subjective source as well as the power of its subsequent value for my own work as a historian." He was educated at the left-wing University of California, Berkeley and the Free University of Berlin.
Peter Loewenberg was instrumental in lobbying the California legislature to pass the Research Psychoanalyst Law of 1977 Hoffs, Josh. (2012 June 12). My Friend, Peter Loewenberg. International Psychoanalysis Archive Groark, Kevin (2019) Cultural Psychodynamics: Integrating Culture, Society, and Psyche. Current Anthropology, 60(4). Prior to that time, some non-clinician academics were occasionally allowed to study psychoanalysis at US psychoanalytic institutes, as Loewenberg himself had done at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCIPI, now merged into the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles). However, Loewenberg was required to obtain a degree and license in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) in order to practice as a psychoanalyst. With the aid of Martin Levine, a law professor at University of Southern California, among others, the California legislature passed and then-governor Jerry Brown signed the Research Psychoanalyst Law, making provision for limited psychoanalytic practice by non-clinician academics who had completed psychoanalytic training in California.Loewenberg, P. (2020). Peter Loewenberg’s pioneering road traveled as a psychohistorian. Clio’s Psyche, 26(2), 153-158.
With Nancy Chodorow at the University of California at Berkeley and Bob Nemiroff at the University of California at San Diego, Loewenberg was a co-founder of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, and the co-ordinator for their first meeting which consisted of 30 faculty and graduate students from the 10 different campuses of the University of California, in 1993. His view is that psychoanalysis allows the historian "to more effectively move back and forth across the internal boundaries between conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious processes."Professional and Personal Insights, Clio's Psyche, 4:2 (September 1997), 33-36.
Loewenberg is currently an Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was Dean and Chairman of the Education Committee and Director of the Training School of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, 2001–2006.See the autobiographical account by Peter J. Loewenberg, "A Life between Homelands", in Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.), The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians, pp. 114–129.
He served as Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting professor at the University of Vienna in 2006. Also, he is Chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association China Committee and Editor of the IPAC Centenary History (1910–2010).
He has lectured in America, several countries in Europe, Africa, Israel, Hong Kong, China, and Latin America. He won the 1999 Edith Sabshin award for "excellence in teaching psychoanalytic concepts".
Family Loewenberg has three children, two sons and one daughter.
Awards “1999 Edith Sabshin Award” “Social Science Research Council” “American Council of Learned Societies” “National Endowment for the Humanities” “Guggenheim Fellowship” “Austrian Ministry of Education” “Pro Helvetia” “Max Planck Institut fur Geschichte”
Works Loewenberg books published include, "Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996, paperback edition with a new introduction,)." "Fantasy and Reality in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)"
Publications "Austria 1918: Coming to Terms with the National Trauma of Defeat and Fragmentation", Österreich 1918 und die Folgen: Geschichte, Literatur, Theater und Film, Karl Mueller und Hans Wagener, eds., (Wien, Koeln, Weimar: Boehlau Verlag, 2009 “Cultural History and Psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2007), pp. 17–37 ”The Bauhaus as a Creative Play Space: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, 1919 -- 1933", The Annual of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXXIII (2005), pp. 209–226 “A Correspondence on Teaching Emotion and Politics” (with Mark Fisher), Clio's Psyche, 12:3 (December 2005), 113–118 "Lucian and Sigmund Freud,” American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), 89–99. "The IPA in China", International Psychoanalysis: News Magazine of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 17 (December 2008), pp 18–19 "Freud as a Cultural Subversive", The Annual of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jerome Winer and James W. Anderson (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2001), 39:117–130. "Violence and Health: Personal, Social, National, Ethnic and Racial Issues", in Violence and Health (Kobe: World Health Organization, 2000), pp. 360–367 "The Construction of National Identity", in Nancy Ginsburg and Roy Ginsburg, eds., Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 37–63 "In California’s Universities Research Psychoanalysts Prove Their Interdisciplinary Mettle", The American Psychoanalyst, 30:1 (1996), 19–20. "Freud, Schnitzler, and Eyes Wide Shut", in Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, and Glen Perusek, eds., Depth of Field: Film and the Uses of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 255–279 "Remembering Fawn McKay Brodie(1915-1981)", Clio's Psyche:, Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 2006), pp. 1–34 "Freud as a Cultural Historian", The American Psychoanalyst, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 25–35 "Klinische und historische Perspektiven intergenerationaler Vermittlung von Trauma", Psychosozial, 28 Jahrgang, Nr. 102 (2005), Heft 4, 9–17.” "A Correspondence on Teaching Emotion and Politics" (with Mark Fisher), Clio's Psyche, 12:3 (December 2005), 113–118. “Assisted Dying in Contemporary America”, in Andreas Bähr and Hans Medick, eds., Sterben von eigener Hand: Selbsttötung als kulturelle Praxis (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005), pp. 219–38 "Wild Analysis: A New Freud Translation", Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association:, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2005), 973–979 "Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and the Shoah", Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, XXXII (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), pp. 135–147 "Freud, Schnitzler und Eyes Wide Shut", Psyche, 58:12 (Dezember 2004), pp. 1156–1181 "Die soziale Konstruktion der Sexualmoral und die klinische Situation", in Die Kindheit überleben, eds. Thomas Kniesche and Laurence Rickels (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), pp. 3–12 “Der Sozialpsychologisch-psychoanalytische Beitrag Bruno Bettelheims”, Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie, Jg. 11, Nr. 1-3 (2003), pp. 241–244 "The Psychology of Creating the Other in National Identity, Ethnic Enmity, and Racism", in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 243–256 “Wo sind die Emotionen? Oder: Die Psychoanalyse als Proto-Postmoderne”, in Alf Gerlach, Anne-Marie Schlösser, Anna Springer, Hg, Psychoanalyse mit und ohne Couch: Haltung und Methode (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2003), pp. 60–72 "Postmodern Psychoanalytic Theory" (in Chinese), Historiography Quarterly (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing), 4 (2002), 98–104 "Aggression in World War I: The Deepest Part of Sigmund Freud’s Self-Analysis", Conflict and Cooperation: The Individual Between Ideal and Reality, ed. Günther Baechler and Andreas Wenger (Zürich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung Publishing, 2002), pp. 81–92 "Psychoanalitycne Modele Historii: Freud Późneij", in Psyche I Klio: Historia W. Oczah Psychohistoryków, Tomasz Pawelec, ed. and trans. (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskeij, 2002), pp. 111–139 Aggression im Ersten Weltkrieg: Der “tiefste Teil” von Sigmund Freuds Selbst-Ananlyse”, SOWI: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen (Freiburg), 3/2001, pp. 53–62 "Legalizing and Advancing Psychoanalytic Academic Research Training", Clio's Psyche, 8: 1 (June 2001), pp. 1–31 “John Muir and the Erotization of Nature”, Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2: 4 (2000), pp. 365–381 "L'agressivité pendant la Première Guerre mondiale: l' auto-analyse approfondie de Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud de L'interprétation des rêves de L’Homme" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), pp. 55–63 “Psychoanalysis as a Hermeneutic Science”, in Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch, eds., Whose Freud: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 96–115; 130–137 “A Stoic Death: Sigmund Freud, Max Schur, and Assisted Dying in Contemporary America”, in Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle, eds., Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 360–486 “Emotion und Subjektivität: Desiderata der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft aus psychoanalytischer Perspektive,” in P. Nolte, M. Hertling, F.M. Kuhlemann, and H.W. Schmuhl, eds., Perspetiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2000), pp. 58–78 “The Construction of National Identity,” in Nancy Ginsburg and Roy Ginsburg, eds., Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 37–63 “Xenophobie als intrapsychisches Phänomen” in Irene Etzersdorfer and Michel Ley (Hg.), Menschenangst: Die Angst vor dem Fremden (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1999), pp. 113–120 “Herzl Between Fantasy and Reality”, in Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Theodor Herzl (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1999), pp. 3–14.” “The Nation at Arms: Concepts of Nationalism and War in Germany, 1866-1914. Comment”, in Hartmut Lehmann and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., German and American Nationalism in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1999), pp. 263–269