Peter Loewenberg


Peter J. Loewenberg is a teacher 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

Peter Loewenberg was born during the time that Hitler acceded to power in Germany. 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. He was later raised in Bakersfield, California. 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.
With collaboration between Nancy Chodorow at the University of California at Berkeley and Bob Nemiroff at the University of California at San Diego, Loewenberg was one of the founders 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."
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.
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.” 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".
Loewenberg has three children, two sons and one daughter.

Awards

Loewenberg books published include,
After many works, awards and publications Peter Loewenberg was asked for a self-evaluation. His response was, “In associating to what I think is worth mentioning as uniquely meritorious about my interdisciplinary work, I come up with three things:
  1. Created, lobbied, and fought to passage 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.
  2. A founder of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, which since 1993 has pulled together in annual seminars and workshops all humanists, social scientists, and mental health clinicians dedicated to using psa in their research and teaching.
  3. As Dean of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute led the successful effort to re-unify the two institutes that split in 1950 to form the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.”