Rudolph Loewenstein (psychoanalyst)


Rudolph Maurice Loewenstein was an American psychoanalyst who practiced in Germany, France, and the United States.

Biography

Loewenstein was born in Łódź, Poland, to a Jewish family from the province of Galicia.
After studying medicine in Poland, he moved to Zurich, apparently to flee antisemitism, and began new medical studies, specializing in neurology and studying under Eugen Bleuler. At this time he became acquainted with psychoanalysis. He then moved to Berlin where he was certified as a psychoanalyst after undergoing a training analysis with Hanns Sachs. He became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society in 1925.
At the request of Sigmund Freud, Loewenstein moved to Paris, France in 1925 in order to train new analysts. He was the second licensed psychoanalyst, after Eugenie Sokolnicka, to practice there. He trained most of the first two generations of French analysts, including, notably, Jacques Lacan. He was a founding member and also secretary of the first French psychoanalytic society, the Société psychanalytique de Paris. In 1927, he participated in the creation of the SPP's journal, the ; and in 1928 he and Marie Bonaparte translated Freud's case-study of Dora into French.
In 1930, he became a French citizen and obtained his medical license anew - defending his thesis for a doctorate in medicine in 1935. In 1939, he was mobilized as a doctor in the French army. After the Armistice, he fled to the south of France, and in 1942 left there for the United States, where he settled in New York. There he pursued a distinguished institutional career with the International Psychoanalytic Association, becoming its vice president from 1965 to 1967.
He died in 1976 in New York City.
Loewenstein is known, along with Ernst Kris and Heinz Hartmann, as one of the foremost figures of what has been called Ego psychology.

Literary works