Seventy-eight years! True, it's more than the conventionally allotted span. Also true, when it came, death was a merciful relief after many months of suffering. In Hamlet's words, it made an end of heartache not only for the man himself, but for all those who loved him and wished him well. Yet there is none of them to whom his illness and death did not seem to have come far too soon.
Rudolph Loewenstein was one of the large group of psychoanalysts who, from political necessity, left Europe in the decade 1935-1945 to become practitioners and teachers of analysis in this country. Collectively they played a large part in making possible the tremendous growth of psychoanalysis on this side of the Atlantic that has occurred in the past three decades. It was a growth in size together with an excellence in quality that could not conceivably have happened in any other way in so short a time. Without the analysts who came to this country as political refugees, psychoanalysis here would not today be what it is. A few decades later, no doubt. But not today. They made it possible, and of them Dr. Loewenstein was one of the best and most actively influential.
In his case, emigration was an old story by the time he arrived in New York. As an adolescent he was displaced from his native Poland to Switzerland during World War I. As a young man he received his medical and psychoanalytic education in Berlin, and before he was thirty he had moved to Paris to help in the founding of the psychoanalytic society there. He remained in Paris for a mere 15 years before the fall of France drove him from home again, this time to New York, where he remained for his last 30 years.
Dr. Loewenstein's contribution to the psychoanalytic literature and to psychoanalytic education began even before his move to Paris, but he himself always said that his most productive years were those he spent in New York. It was there that the collaboration began with his colleagues Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris. The three met weekly till Kris' untimely death in 1957, after which Loewenstein and Hartmann continued to meet till the death of the latter in 1970. The published results of the collaboration of these three outstanding analysts constitute a unique record in the history of the field. They were collected in a single volume of Psychological Issues in 1964 for easy reference, since they remain, despite the passage of time, documents of major importance to the serious student of psychoanalysis.
Significant as were his contributions to the literature—there are 36 items in the list of his works that appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1973—they were only a part of Dr. Loewenstein's contributions to his chosen profession. He was outstanding as a teacher, especially as a teacher of technique, he had a busy practice, and he served in many capacities in professional organizations. He was president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1950-1952), of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (1957-1958), and of the American Psychoanalytic Association (1959-1961), and he was vice-president of the International Psycho-Analytical Association (1965-1967).
Dr. Loewenstein chose the profession of psychoanalysis when he was barely 20 years old. It remained his chief love throughout a long and active life, and his love was well repaid. Few understood analysis as profoundly as he did. Fewer practiced it with such art.
—Charles Brenner