A Conversation with Peter Loewenberg

AR: Today we're talking with Peter Loewenberg, on psychohistory, on politics, on his professional career. Where shall we begin, Peter? You were born in Vienna?

PL: No, I was born in Hamburg. When I was about six weeks old, my parents fled with me to China. That was in September of 1933, eight months after Hitler's rise to power.

AR: What made your parents so perspicacious about the events in Germany?

PL: My father, who had just completed his psychiatric residency in a large state hospital, lost his job because he was Jewish. He was very alarmed about the Nazi phenomenon; he thought the rearmament was sure to cause another war in Europe. As he put it, “You cannot give a child a violin and tell him not to play with it.” I have a little notebook in which he detailed his quest for a refuge, a place to emigrate. Before he decided on China, he went to Holland and to England to find out where he could practice with a German license; his book lists all the police stations he had to check in with and his visits to different professors and medical authorities. He compiled a list of countries where he could practice—Persia, Ethopia, the Congo, Borneo, Iraq, Tangiers, Arabia. It was quite a list of what we now call underdeveloped countries. He chose China because it was far from Europe and he felt that the war wouldn't spread to the Far East.

AR: So he was aware that things would get bad not only in Germany, but in neighboring countries. Did your mother share his concern?

PL: Yes, she did. She was a public health nurse, a socialist, a Lutheran converted to Judaism. She had lost a baby before I was born, a loss attributable, as family legend has it, to visits by the Nazis to her home. The Nazis apparently were particularly vicious about what they called Rassenschande, intermarriage and sexual relationships between “racial” Jews and non-Jews. I think that these circumstances motivated my parents' early emigration from Germany, that they felt a special peril. We sailed for China on an Italian ship, passing through the Suez Canal. I have a letter from my father to his brother in which he wrote, “We are passing through the land where our forefathers lived in the desert.” I've always wondered that he made no mention at all of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Evidently, my parents weren't Zionists, and settling in Palestine was not a serious option for them. I, on the other hand, being of a generation socialized during World War II, have always had a special interest in and affection for Israel. I spent time as a volunteer on a kibbutz and have gone back there many times. I've taught at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute-Israel Psychiatric Teaching Program in Jerusalem and Haifa. We arrived at the International Settlement of Shanghai, a very international, cosmopolitan city. I spent my first four years there in the French Concession. My father was on the board of public health and taught at the university; my mother, though, didn't practice nursing there. We led a very colonial life, with Chinese nursemaids (amahs), servants, cooks. I went to an American nursery school and learned English. Then, in 1937, the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and we escaped to the United States.

AR: Did your parents have difficulty getting out?

PL: There was some difficulty on the Chinese end. First, my parents had booked passage on the finer “President Hoover,” but it was bombed in the Yangtse River, so the port was closed to American shipping. One of my early childhood memories is of the extreme violence I witnessed while I was standing on our roof garden in Shanghai in the French Quarter and watching the Japanese bombing the city, the fire and smoke, and seeing thousands of refugees pouring in. Finally the French negotiated a cease fire on the river and organized an evacuation. We left on a very crowded French gunboat with just what we could carry. We transferred on the high seas to a larger ship, which stopped at Hong Kong. We had a long wait there; the port was closed because of a cholera epidemic. But eventually we found an American ship and arrived in the United States in September 1937. We docked at Seattle. From there my parents went to San Francisco, where my father had to do a new internship at St. Joseph's, a Catholic hospital. For a couple of years during the war our family lived in the High Sierras, where my father worked with the War Procurement and Assignment Services for Physicians at a railroad hospital in Portola. In 1944, he was transferred to Bakersfield, in the central valley of California, where I went to elementary school and high school.

AR: So you had a typical American adolescence.

PL: Yes. I went to the University of California. Santa Barbara, then to Berkeley. And I studied at the Free University in Berlin.

AR: How was it that you, an ordinary American adolescent, decided to go to the University of Berlin? What was your intellectual development when you got to college?

PL: I studied history, primarily colonial American history. I wrote an honors thesis on George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whom I idealized and still do as a beautiful, cultured, humane person. I am reminded of a letter to his European agent in which he wrote, “I would like to begin viniculture in Monticello, so could you please send me an Italian family, and I would like to start a string quartet, so if possible could they also be musicians?” These are the kind of people he wanted to bring over. Another letter that I cherish was one Jefferson sent to some British officers who had been his guests in Monticello when he was Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War. In response to their thanks, he wrote, “Even though our nations disagree and we're at war, we can relate to each other as human beings.” He was happy to have had them there- a long way from the way we treat enemies these days.

Yes, those men were the best of the Enlightenment. Compare today's world leadership, including that of our own country, with what those three million people on the eastern seaboard produced. The leaders were a highly

educated, prosperous elite— perhaps even elitist. And yet think of Washington's restraint! He chose to be called simply “Mr. President,” no other title.

AR: That was truly a remarkable group of men, the American Revolutionary cohort—Washington, Jefferson, Adams. How do you explain that there was such a group of politicians who were so principled, so cultured, so democratic, so successful that even today, 200 years later, there is only a minimum of revisionism about their roles, their lives, their relationships? Where is that kind of person now?

PL: I think we still have talented people, but I suspect they go into other fields today, not public service. The rewards may lie elsewhere, in the law and business management perhaps.

AR: The colonial cohort, though, clearly did have some of the best talent of its time. Despite your interest in that creative cohort, however, you decided to study in Germany. Was the switch from the American to the European university connected with your own situation?

PL: The psychoanalytic explanation is a narrative explanation, a historical one. The analysand comes to the analyst to find answers: Why have things turned out as they have? Why is my life as it is? The psychoanalytic answer is a historical answer: This is how you came to be as you are. The answer comes in the form of a narrative, which is then constructed by the analyst and the analysand together, a rich, complex fabric of explanation.

AR: You're not interested in history in general. You look for areas of inhibition or conflict for your point of entry.

PL: The focus is on where the conflict or crisis is. The crisis cracks things open, and you can see the latent conflicts that otherwise would not have been available. However, I do hold with Freud that psychoanalysis is “a general psychology”; it is not for only the deviant cases. Historian colleagues have said to me, “By all means, use psychodynamics if you want to explain Heinrich Himmler. But we need rational explanations for people or events that are not deviant.” I think we have something better. Actions, behaviors, and fantasies that have rational explanations are also overdetermined and have unconscious sources as well.

AR: To those historian colleagues, is Thomas Jefferson a less suitable subject for psychohistory than Heinrich Himmler?

PL: That's what they would say. But I disagree. There's a nice piece about Benjamin Franklin written by Richard Bushman, for instance, which explains psychodynamically and developmentally Franklin's ego strengths and adaptive strengths.

AR: So you try to account psychoanalytically not only for deviance but also for special creative talent like Ben Franklin's.

PL: I don't limit psychoanalysis to pathology— piling pathology upon pathology as has been done, for instance, in the study of leadership, rather than focusing on the adaptational ego elements, which are equally amenable to psychodynamic explanation.

AR: Earlier in our conversation you said that you felt that in the history you had been exposed to you were not getting the right answers.

PL: Yes. For instance, if you were to ask a historian how World War I came about, you would get explanations about markets, diplomacy, the dates and the times telegrams were sent, who said what to whom and the exact language, and who made alliance commitments. These kinds of economic-structural-political explanations are all valuable, but they are not enough. They don't explain questions we'd like answered, like the emotions behind the war.

AR: They're only surface explanations.

PL: Yes, his address was in December 1957. I remember that the response of most historians to his address was a condescending, “Well, all this is very nice, but let's get back to the kind of diplomatic history that Langer is really good at.” When I first decided that I wanted to pursue psychoanalytic training I faced tremendous resistance from the History Department. I had a couple of grants to free teaching time to facilitate training, one from the Social Science Research Council to enable historians to get training in other disciplines. When I told my department chair that I had this wonderful research training grant and wanted to take a year off to pursue analytic training, he said, “I don't want you to do it. It's a waste of time and it's not in your best interest or in the interest of the department. I want you to become a great historian.” And he denied my request for a leave. I went back to my office and wrote him a note saying I was sorry but I had to take the grant and was going to train in analysis. I was determined to do it, and I did. Immediately after completing my doctorate, I applied to both Los Angeles institutes—you know there had been a split in 1950. I was accepted at both but chose Southern California Institute because, among other reasons, it had a loan fund. I began my analysis with a $5,000 loan from the institute.

AR: I'm very impressed. Just like your father- active right away and early.

PL: At about that time I became interested in Himmler, both as a bureaucratic, mass murderer and as an aggressor. A teacher of mine had written an essay about how “normal,” how “ordinary,” the adolescence of Heinrich Himmler was. I thought the subject should be approached with more sophistication about what a “normal” adolescence is. I didn't think that Himmler fit the norm. So I studied the manuscript Himmler diaries from his adolescence. From ages 10 to 24 there are very detailed, day-by-day accounts that I set against what I saw in the clinical literature about adolescence- the models of Peter Blos, Gerald Pearson, Erik Erikson, and Anna Freud.

AR: You became a historian interested in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic work. As the first historian to be trained at the institute, did you encounter much resistance?

PL: I did not know at that time of the institute's exclusively medical origins and that they hadn't been congenial to taking research trainees. I had to legitimate and justify my training both at the university and the institute and struggle all the way. Now at UCLA we have a regular course in psychohistory. It's very well received. Every time it's offered, over 100 students enroll; colleagues sit in on it. We have a doctoral program in psychohistory, including a doctoral seminar, and you can take a doctoral degree in psycohistory at UCLA in the history department. We have an interdepartmental political psychology program, which includes the political science, psychology, sociology, and history departments. We have a joint political psychology course in the doctoral program in which I teach the psychodynamics. Graduate students interested in psychohistory often are referred to the institute for analysis at the clinic or privately. After this therapeutic encounter, some of them have gone for full psychoanalytic training in Los Angeles and other cities. There are a number of different programs and two national journals in the field. One, The Psychohistory Review, is published under the auspices of the Group for the Use of Psychology in History, which is an affiliate of the American Historical Association.

AR: There was a tremendous burgeoning of psychohistory several years ago as the field was getting started. Do you have a sense that more recently things have quieted down? What is the trend these days in psychohistorical work?

PL: At the beginning there probably was an excess of enthusiasm and a not always well-grounded or well-thought out use of psychohistory.

AR: What about the Bullitt-Freud book?

PL: That certainly provided a lot of ammunition for those who want to caricature psychoanalysis. But since then there's been a settling down and greater respect for good method. Psychological history requires both a very scrupulous and a good historical method and psychodynamic training to assure that the models of choice and applications carry a good empiricaltheoretical fit imparting a sense of conviction.

AR: What was your first personal exposure to the psychodynamic personality literature?

PL: The first I read of Freud was “The Future of an Illusion.” I read it on a college summer vacation and said, “This is profound. What insight this man has!” I remember being overwhelmed by that piece and then going to the dynamic chapters in Adorno-Horkheimer's The Authoritarian Personality. That book was, of course, in answer to the questions: What is National Socialism? What kinds of personalities does it appeal to? How was it able to change the history of Europe? In that book, Else Frenkel Brunswik and the Adorno group set up some psychodynamic models of authoritarianism. There is a model of an authoritarian personality—I think they called it “Mack”— and one of a democratic personality, “Larry”— ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. We always operate by models, and we shouldn't shy away from generalizations. Many researchers do, though. This is to deny what the clinical enterprise has to offer-building more and more sophisticated models.

AR: Would you consider your approach to the concept of cohort as an attempt to develop a model of a group's childhood that will account for the behavior of the members of that group?

PL: That's right, a picture that takes into full account what psychoanalysis knows about trauma and posttraumatic stress and the sequelae of trauma in development. If we're aware of early childhood and developmental trauma, we have a chance of

understanding individual patients as well as political events. For instance, the commitment of the Central European public today to deflationary hard currency is, I'm sure, attributable to the trauma of the inflation of 1923, which wrecked the middle class of Central Europe. That's a trauma that was imparted through families. Few people are alive any more who were earning wages in 1923, but the trauma of those times made an imprint through childhood socialization.

AR: Clearly, you have two identities: one as a historian and one as a psychoanalyst. Together they form a kind of creative synergy.

PL: In the history of science there has been a tradition of antiquarianism, a recounting of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo in antiquarian terms. A more recent focus has been the process of creativity. In my address to The American I will speak of the psychoanalysts who were most creative in the first decade of this century—Bleuler, Jung, Brill, Binswanger, Abraham.

AR: Would you call them a creative cohort?