Paul Roazen

Paul Roazen (August 14, 1936 Boston – November 3, 2005) was a political scientist who became a preeminent historian of psychoanalysis.

Roazen studied at Harvard University and in Chicago and Oxford. Later he returned to Harvard. The subject of his dissertation was Freud's political thinking. In 1971 he changed to York University in Toronto, where he taught until his early retirement in 1995.

In 1965 Roazen began to interview surviving friends, relatives, colleagues and patients of Sigmund Freud. His first 'big' book Freud and his followers was based on hundreds of hours of material. This was an original approach at the time. Kurt Eissler interviewed pioneers of psychoanalysis but, with the exception of an interview with Wilhelm Reich, they were not published.

Roazen was the first non-psychoanalyst whom Anna Freud allowed to access the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Institute. He was able to see the huge material Ernest Jones had used to write his biography of Freud.

Writings

Author

• Freud: Political and Social Thought, New York, Knopf, 1968,
• Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk, N.Y., Knopf, 1969
• Freud and his followers, New York, Knopf, 1975
• Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision, N.Y., The Free Press, 1976
• Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst’s Life, N.Y., Doubleday, 1985
• Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis, New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1990
• Meeting Freud’s Family, Amherst, University of Mass. Press, 1993
• Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement, with Bluma Swerdloff, Northvale, N.J., Aronson, 1995
• How Freud Worked: First-Hand Accounts of Patients, Northvale, N.J. : J. Aronson, 1995
• Canada’s King: An Essay in Political Psychology, Oakville, Ontario, Mosaic Press, 1998
• Oedipus in Britain: Edward Glover and the Struggle Over Klein (N.Y., Other Press, 2000)
• Political theory and the psychology of the unconscious : Freud, J. S. Mill, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Fromm, Bettelheim and Erikson, London, Open Gate Press, 2000
• The historiography of psychoanalysis, New Brunswick (US) ; London (UK), Transaction Publ., 2001
• The Trauma of Freud: Controversies in Psychoanalysis, New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 2002
• Cultural Foundations of Political Psychology, New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 2003
• On The Freud Watch: Public Memoirs, London, Free Association Books, 2003
• Edoardo Weiss: The House that Freud Built (New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 2005)
• The Doctor and the Diplomat: The Mysterious Collaboration Between Freud and Bullitt on Woodrow Wilson (N.Y., Rowman & Littlefield

Editor

• Victor Tausk: Sexuality, war, and schizophrenia : collected psychoanalytic papers, edited and with an introduction by Paul Roazen ; translations by Eric Mosbacher &others. - New Brunswick, US : Transaction Publishers, 1991

Secondary literature

• Freud under analysis : history, theory, practice ; essays in honour of Paul Roazen, ed. by Todd Dufresne. - Northvale, NJ ; London : Aronson, 1997
• Dufresne, Todd (2007). “Psychoanalysis Eats Its Own: Or, The Heretical Saint Roazen,” in Psychoanalysis and History, ed. J. Forrester, 9(1): 93-109.
• Hans-Jürgen Wirth: „Nachruf auf Paul Roazen“ in: Freie Assoziation - Das Unbewusste in Organisationen und Kultur, 9. Jahrgang, Heft 01/2006 –

See also

• Henri Ellenberger
• Elisabeth Roudinesco