Hans Loewald
| Hans Loewald | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1906 Colmar |
| Died | 1993 |
| Fields | psychiatry |
| Known for | language Oedipus Complex |
| Influences | Martin Heidegger |
Hans Loewald (1906–1993) was a psychoanalyst and theorist, born in Colmar, then Germany. While apparently a traditional Freudian, Loewald in his thinking is both elegant and quietly revisionist - a radical conservatist.
Loewald's father, who died shortly after his birth, was a Jewish physician with an interest in dermatology and psychiatry; his mother a gifted musician, who played the piano. Loewald did medical training in Germany - where he also studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, who would influence him with his theory of language - before taking a medical degree from Rome University in 1935. He practised psychiatry in Italy until 1939, before moving with his family to the United States. There he became fascinated by Freud’s theory, in which he rooted all the features of his own thinking. He did not want to create a new psychoanalytic terminology, but, although he used Freud’s terms, he gave them radically new meanings.
Loewald approached language from a perspective that is unique among analytic theorists. Unlike Sullivan, Daniel Stern, and Freud, whose understanding of language included a sharp distinction between verbal and preverbal expressions, Loewald states that verbal and preverbal expressions are a form of sensory experience.
He distinguishes between the primary process in which the child experiences only sounds (fantasy), and the secondary process, in which the child gives meaning to these sounds (reality).
Psychopathology is caused by a split between these processes, between fantasy and reality. Mental health entails an open communication and interpenetration between the primary and the secondary process.
Loewald described the experience of the transference as comparable to "an illness, insofar as it is a regressive and unsettling experience, not dissimilar to...the state of being in love". However he considered the ultimate end of analysis the integration of that interior, regressed self into the everyday external world.
Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein to integrate pre-oedipal and oedipal phases, Loewald saw internalisation, when successful, as leading to complete detachment from the original object. Loewald's under-appreciated work on aesthetics and symbolism reflects this Kleinian orientation of bridging the pre-oedipal (paranoid-schizoid) with the oedipal (depressive position) era.
...
Wikipedia