Hans Loewald's Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual

Hans Loewald's Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (1978), along with a companion piece, his final published essay, “Psychoanalysis in Search of Nature: Thoughts on Metapsychology, ‘Metaphysics,’ Projection” (1988), are important contributors to a summation of his thinking. They also offer a blueprint for envisioning the evolution of our understanding of the human psyche over the coming century. In the latter work, an overlooked crystallization of Loewald's many years of thinking about the critical and inextricable interrelationship of psychoanalysis and philosophy, he posits a major realignment of psychoanalytic theory. Here he has engineered his own sort of Copernican, or perhaps I should say “Loewaldian,” shift. Just as Copernicus proclaimed just before his death that the earth is not the center of our universe but rather that the universe is heliocentric, with the earth revolving around and being influenced by its dominant partner, the sun, so did Loewald postulate that the human psyche is no longer the center of the Freudian analytic cosmos. Man is no longer the center of a conscious/unconscious system, but shares these characteristics with a much more primary cosmic natural order. Loewald “marries” psychoanalysis to what I take to be a wider evolutionary model of nature: human nature not apart from nature, with nature as its projection, but as part of a natural evolutionary order in which external influences are taken into the psyche through introjection, identification, and an active process of co-modification of both the external and the internal milieu. These forces, a kind of psychological osmosis, are on this model equal to or greater than the anthropocentric forces of defensive projection that have traditionally been seen as unconsciously relocating the unwanted parts of ourselves out into the great blue yonder. Loewald emphasizes the primacy of unconscious creative-destructive activity in nature quite generally. Human consciousness, rather