The Nevitt Sanford Award is a career achievement award of the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP) conferred for applying psychodynamic theory and political psychology to “practical applications that make a positive difference” in the world. Sanford (1909-1995) was a UC Berkeley psychologist who was co-author of The Authoritarian Personality and the founder of the Wright Institute which trains clinical psychologists, emphasizing the application of psychodynamics to social and political problems.
Peter Loewenberg, the 2010 Sanford awardee, is a psychoanalyst and a UCLA historian and political psychologist. His publications include over 100 research papers and books, including Decoding the Past and Fantasy and Reality in History. Loewenberg applies developmental generational cohort analysis to explain the emotional appeal of Nazism, demonstrating the psychodynamic case that the deprivation and trauma of World War I in central Europe directly created the conditions for Adolf Hitler and World War II.
Loewenberg explores the functioning of creative groups, especially the therapeutic excitement created by Ernst Bleuler from 1902 to 1912 at the Burghölzli Cantonal Hospital in Zürich, where the pioneer psychoanalysts in the new century, (e.g., C.G. Jung, Karl Abraham, A.A. Brill, L. Binswanger, and Sabine Spielrein) were first exposed to psychoanalysis. Another study interprets the Bauhaus, center of modern architecture, design, art education, painting, city planning, and theater in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, 1919-1933, as a secure Winnicottian creative play space. Brilliant innovators such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee worked and taught together to revolutionize building, design, and living.
Lowenberg views the Austro-Marxist concepts advanced by Karl Renner and Otto Bauer of personal ethnic identity and cultural sovereignty as syntonic with psychoanalytic understandings of identity and selfhood. He is impressed by the creative Swiss polity that builds in at every level of political decision making the protection of minority ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural group interests.
Loewenberg, with Martin Levine, chaired the committee that fought to pass the California Research Psychoanalyst Law of 1977, which places academic analysts under the California Medical Board to permit university faculty to acquire full psychoanalytic training and legally practice as psychoanalysts. The law names the four California institutes in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Southern California, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego) as authorized to train academics in psychoanalysis. Anna Freud wrote, “I think this legal decision is a wonderful thing and will mark an important development in the history of psychoanalysis in America.” Loewenberg says, “I am impressed by how in our political system a very small group of neither rich nor influential citizens could seek and successfully obtain a hearing and a law they needed on a complex legal and professional issue.”
Loewenberg applies developmental generational cohort analysis to explain the emotional appeal of Nazism… the deprivation and trauma of World War I…created the conditions for Adolf Hitler and World War II.
The University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UCIPC) was founded in 1993 by Loewenberg, Nancy Chododrow, and Robert Nemiroff to bring together academics who are psychoanalysts from humanistic, social science, and mental health disciplines from the 10 campuses of the University of California to dialogue and exchange viewpoints in stimulating discourse across disciplines. The UCIPC is no longer restricted to UC members and is now administered by the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles. As part of his dedication to bring academia to psychoanalysis and analytic perspectives to teaching, Loewenberg chaired CORST from 1998 to 2001, during the fight to keep CORST APsaA members in the mental health lobbying consortium.
A major achievement of the past decade was the repair of an institutional split in Southern California psychoanalysis. Loewenberg, as SCPI dean and Mark Thompson, LAPSI dean, led the successful effort to reunite the
Joshua Hoffs, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.
two California institutes that had split in 1950 by forming the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Eight years ago they initiated the reunification by combining the two first-year classes. Today the split of 1950 has been undone, if not fully healed. The center now has assets of over $8 million, state approved Ph.D. and psychoanalytic psychotherapy programs, and the most successful interdisciplinary psychoanalytic research training program in the world.
Loewenberg, who spent his first four years in China, has chaired the IPA China Committee since 2005. The committee's dedicated members are: Alf Gerlach (Saarbrücken), Maria Teresa Hooke (Sydney), Tomas Plänkers (Frankfurt). Sverre Varvin (Oslo), and IPA training analyst Irmgard Dettbarn (Beijing). With the collaboration of Chinese mental health administrators, Xiao Zeping in Shanghai and Yang Yunping in Beijing, the China Committee has established an IPA Allied Center in China and begun formal psychoanalytic training in Beijing with a class of nine candidates. In contrast to the West, where most of the candidates are interns and recent graduates beginning their careers, in China there are hospital administrators and professors of psychiatry who are advanced in their mental health careers in analytic training.
With co-editor Nellie Thompson, Loewenberg is editing the IPA Centennial history volume, 100 Years of IPA, which has contributions from the history of each of the 39 IPA societies, most of them non-Anglophone.
Currently Loewenberg is engaged with the psychodynamic implications of face in Chinese culture and its effects on Sino-American diplomacy. He believes the West has much to learn from China in the important realms of interpersonal relations and public tact and sensibility. His research focuses on the humiliating Chinese traumas and exploitation during 150 years of Western imperialism as the context of the diplomatic rupture after the American rocketing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the downing and seizure of an AWACS U.S. surveillance plane in Hainan Island in 2001. His Nevitt Sanford plenary address to the ISPP World Congress in San Francisco this July will be “Face in Chinese-American Diplomatic Relations.”