NOTE: This event is free for students and UCLA faculty. For UCLA faculty, please identify yourself as UCLA faculty (a UCLA ID will help) at the door.
Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Charismatic Power, and Political Leadership
May 17, 2018, 8:00 – 10:00 PM
2018 FRANZ ALEXANDER LECTURE
Presented by Peter Loewenberg, PhD
Psychoanalysis is a social science as well as a humanistic hermeneutic and a psychological science. Dr. Loewenberg compares the lives and thought of two great Central European shapers of modern culture, Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939), creator of psychoanalysis, and Max Weber (1864-1920), founder of modern interpretive comparative sociology. Weber was a contemporary of Freud who was the shaper of social science method. He explores their lives and insights on leadership, political power and domination and applies their insights to empirical leadership functions in the current world.
Learning Objectives
As a result of attending this session, participants should be able to:
• Describe the theoretical contributions of Weber and Freud as they apply to leadership, political power, and domination.
• Examine the nature of charismatic leadership in the political process and accepted empirical leadership functions in the current world
• Explain how Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic interface with Freudian psychodynamics
Peter Loewenberg, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of History and Political Psychology at UCLA. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst and former Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He was elected North American Representative on the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) Board. He Chaired the IPA China Committee, 2007-2013. He is the author of many publications, including Decoding the Past: the Psychohistorical Approach (1996) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995). He is Editor (with Nellie Thompson) of 100 Years of the IPA (1910-2010) (2011). He was elected an Honorary Member of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV), was the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna, and received the Nevitt Sanford Award for his professional contributions to the field of Political Psychology. He served as Chair of the Committee on Research and Special Training of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Winner of the first Edith Sabshin Award “for excellence in teaching psychoanalytic concepts” in 1999, he is also the recipient of Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Austrian Ministry of Education, Pro Helvetia, and Max Planck Institute für Geschichte fellowships and many other honors.
