The Essential Loewald

Hans Loewald, with a new Introduction by Jonathan Lear

2000. 579 pages.

Softcover: ISBN 1-55572-104-4.

$34.00 plus $4.75 S&H.

Please ask about instructors' discounts.

From the Introduction:

    This is a story of love and betrayal. As a young man, Loewald was en route to becoming a philosopher.

He had fallen in love with philosophy and, given what we know about transference, there is reason to suspect

that the erotic attachment had spread itself out onto his teacher. Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism was not

simply a personal betrayal—however awful that is—it was the upending of a way of life. For Loewald, there

had to be something wrong with philosophy itself if the greatest practitioner of the age could succumb to such

hateful distortions.
    All of Loewald’s work can be seen as a thinking-through of one idea: namely, that the human psyche is itself

a psychological achievement. The infant does not enter the world a complete psychological entity; she emerges

rather out of a less differentiated field, the infant-mother matrix. By now this is a familiar idea. Perhaps it is too

familiar, for it is so easy for us to live amongst clichés that we do not recognize as such. We think we understand

something because we have heard the phrase so often.
    I am convinced that Loewald will increasingly be recognized as one of the handful of significant psychoanalytic

thinkers after Freud.
—Jonathan Lear, The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago

and the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, New Haven, Connecticut

The following complete works are included in this collection:
Book One
    Papers on Psychoanalysis
Book Two
    Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis
Book Three
    Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual:
    The Freud Lectures at Yale University