Person
Hans Loewald
German-born American psychoanalyst who studied philosophy with Heidegger before turning to medicine, emigrated to the United States in 1939, and taught for many years at Yale. Working within Freud's framework while recasting it, he held that the ego and its objects take shape together out of an original undifferentiated unity, and in 'On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis' (1960) he located analytic change in the patient's relation with an analyst who holds a picture of who the patient may become. His 'The waning of the Oedipus complex' (1979) presented the Oedipal struggle as a necessary and never finished act of emancipation from one's parents.
Influence
Affinity
- influenced Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden's reading of Loewald's 'The Waning of the Oedipus Complex' recasts the Oedipus complex as a process of taking over and transforming parental authority. Ogden received the Hans Loewald Award in 2014.
- influenced Stephen A. Mitchell
In his last book, Relationality, Mitchell drew on Loewald's account of the original undifferentiated unity of infant and mother. He read Loewald as a bridge between drive theory and relational thinking.
References
- Rediscovering Psychoanalysis: Thinking and Dreaming, Learning and Forgetting2009Evidence for a relation
- Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity2000Evidence for a relation