Loewenstein, Rudolph Maurice
LOEWENSTEIN, RUDOLPH MAURICE
LOEWENSTEIN, RUDOLPH MAURICE (1898–1976), psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic theoretician. Loewenstein, who was born in Lodz, Poland, worked in Berlin from 1923 to 1925, and in Paris from 1925 until the outbreak of World War ii, when he served with distinction in the French army. In France, in 1926, along with Marie Bonaparte and René Laforgue, he was one of the major founders of the Societé psychanalytique de Paris. As one of the spp's main teachers, he trained some of the people who would later be regarded as the second generation of leading French psychologists, such as Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan.
Loewenstein settled in the United States in 1943. Together with Heinz *Hartmann and Ernst *Kris, Loewenstein staked out important aspects of psychoanalytic theory as propounded by *Freud, and developed them further, particularly in the field of ego psychology. In 1951 Loewenstein published, in French and English, Christians and Jews: a Psychoanalytic Study. In this he traced the historical and cultural roots of antisemitism. He viewed Christians and Jews as a mutually interdependent pair and suggested that the impossibly difficult ethic of the Christian religion may make the use of the Jew as a scapegoat a necessity for the Christian. Loewenstein collaborated with Princess Marie Bonaparte in translating some of Freud's works into French, and edited a series of psychoanalytic essays, Drives, Affects and Behavior, published in the princess's honor in 1953. He was an early co-editor of the annual Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and served as president of both the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American Psychoanalytic Association. Practice and Precept in Psychoanalytic Technique: Selected Papers of Rudolph M. Loewenstein was published in 1982.
bibliography:
A. Grinstein, Index of Psychoanalytic Writings 3 (1958), s.v.
[Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]