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Peter Loewenberg

American historian and psychoanalyst

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Biography

Loewenberg was born in Hamburg in 1933 when 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. In 1937 his family immigrated to the United States and Peter was 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.

Peter Loewenberg was instrumental in lobbying the California legislature to pass the Research Psychoanalyst Law of 1977 Prior to that time, some non-clinician academics were occasionally allowed to study psychoanalysis at US psychoanalytic institutes, as Loewenberg himself had done at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCIPI, now merged into the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles). However, Loewenberg was required to obtain a degree and license in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) in order to practice as a psychoanalyst. With the aid of Martin Levine, a law professor at University of Southern California, among others, the California legislature passed and then-governor Jerry Brown signed the Research Psychoanalyst Law, making provision for limited psychoanalytic practice by non-clinician academics who had completed psychoanalytic training in California.

With Nancy Chodorow at the University of California at Berkeley and Bob Nemiroff at the University of California at San Diego, Loewenberg was a co-founder 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 (1910–2010).

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".

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