Henry Zvi Lothane (1934--2026) is a Polish-born American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, educator and author. Lothane is currently Clinical Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, specializing in the area of psychotherapy. He is the author of some eighty scholarly articles and reviews on various topics in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the history of psychotherapy, as well as the author of a book on the famous Schreber case, entitled In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry.Lothane, Z. (1992). In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. Hillsdale, NJ/London: The Analytic Press In Defense of Schreber examines the life and work of Daniel Paul Schreber against the background of 19th and early 20th century psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Life and work Lothane was born in Lublin, Poland in 1934, to a Jewish family. With the division of Poland between the Germans and the Soviets in 1939, the family fled to eastern Poland, then under Russian control, where they lived from 1939 to 1941. Shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Lothane’s father volunteered to emigrate to Russia and thus saved the family from annihilation. In 1946, Lothane’s family returned to Lublin, where he attended elementary school. He later attended high school in Lodz until 1950, when the family immigrated to Israel. Lothane graduated from Ohel Shem high school, in Ramat Gan, Israel. Having demonstrated a gift for languages, Lothane worked as a military translator during his service in the Israel Defense Forces. After discharge, Lothane studied at the Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, from which he graduated with an MD in 1960. After completing his internship at the Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikwa in 1962, Lothane began his residency at the Talbieh Psychiatric Hospital, Jerusalem, headed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Professor Heinrich Winnick. In 1963 he emigrated with his wife and daughter to the United States and completed his residency training at the Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester NY, chaired by Prof. John Romano. Lothane was Unit Chief at the Hillside Psychiatric Hospital, in New York, from 1963 to 1969. From 1966 to 1972, Lothane studied psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in New York City.
Since 1969, Lothane has been a member of the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, where he has risen to the rank of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry. In his private practice, Lothane works as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. Beginning in 1994, Lothane has worked for the German consulate in New York as a psychiatric expert, evaluating the restitution claims of Holocaust survivors, including those from Auschwitz (the 70th anniversary of its liberation having recently been celebrated). Lothane is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a member of the American Psychoanalytical Association as well as the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is currently the President of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians.
Lothane's publications span a number of themes in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy. Among the major areas in which Lothane has published are (1) the history of psychoanalysis (including studies of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Daniel Paul Schreber, Sabina Spielrein, and psychoanalysis under Nazism), (2) methodology, clinical technique and contemporary psychoanalysis, (3) love and sex, and (4) "dramatology," an approach to clinical work and technique which Lothane has developed. In many cases, Lothane’s publications bridge more than one of these themes. For example, Lothane frequently draws on his historical research with the goal of correcting misconceptions of Freud in contemporary discussions of psychoanalytic technique.
The Schreber Case Daniel Paul Schreber was a German judge who was admitted to psychiatric hospitals three times (1884, 1893, and 1907) in his life. The second episode, during which he was declared legally insane, became the narrative of a book published in 1903, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Reflections of a Nervous Patient), published in English in 1955 under the title Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.Schreber, Daniel Paul (1903). Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York: New York Review of Books, 2000. . Oddly enough, the English translation omitted the subtitle "In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?", thereby leaving out of the title arguably the central point of the book, namely that Schreber sought to regain his liberty. Thanks to Freud's 1911 book, The Schreber Case,Freud, Sigmund. The Schreber Case, translated by Andrew Webber. Penguin Books, 2002. an analysis of Schreber's book, the latter became a staple of psychoanalytic literature, which highlighted Freud's thesis that Schreber's second episode of mental illness, especially his so-called paranoia, was caused by passive homosexual desires towards his first psychiatrist, Paul Flechsig.
The Schreber case again became famous in 1959 with the publication of the paper "Schreber: Father and Son," by the American psychoanalyst William Guglielmo Niederland.Niederland, W. G., "Schreber: Father and Son". Psychoanalytic Quarterly, April 1959, 28(2), 151-169. Niederland famously argued that Schreber was abused as a boy by his father Moritz by means of sadistic child-rearing practices and the use of torturing orthopedic appliances, to which, according to Niederland, Schreber referred in Chapter XI of his book. Morton Schatzman argued essentially the same thesis as Niederland in his 1973 bestseller Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family.Morton Schatzman: Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family () In contrast, Han Israels' 1989 biography of the Schreber family argued that Moritz Schreber was unfairly demonized in the literature.Han Israels: Schreber: Father and Son. Madison: International Universities Press: 1989
In that same year (1989), Lothane’s first paper on Schreber appeared, focusing on the historical record of the relationship between Schreber and his doctors.Lothane, Z. (1989a), Freud, Flechsig and Weber revisited: an inquiry into methods of interpretation. Psychoanalytic Review, 79:203-262 Lothane’s research was a fundamental revision of the biography and interpretation of the life and work of Daniel Paul Schreber, in part because it was based on new archival and historical research, focusing in particular on the historical gaps left by Freud and Niederland. For example, Freud’s study lacked any mention of Schreber’s mother or of Schreber’s wife, except to the extent Freud speculates about the latter’s role in protecting Schreber from being attracted to men around him. Similarly, Niederland says little about Schreber’s mother and wife, though one might expect each to be very important dramatis personae in Schreber's life-drama, especially from a psychoanalytic point of view. While Freud's and Niederland's works speculated about Schreber's fantasies concerning Flechsig, neither appears to have put much effort into finding out about Schreber's actual dealings with Flechsig, evidence of which is recorded in various archives. Lothane's Schreber research, including the book-length study, In Defense of Schreber,Lothane, Z. (1992). In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. Hillsdale, NJ/London: The Analytic Press, an expanded version of which was published in 2004 in German as Seelenmord und Psychiatrie Zur Rehabilitierung Schrebers (Soul Murder and Psychiatry, Concerning the Rehabilitation of Schrebers, father and son) and some thirty articles and reviews published between 1989 and 2014, added new data and correspondingly new analyses unknown to Freud, Niederland, and other researchers, not only about Schreber himself but about the leading figures in Schreber's life. Perhaps the most original element of Lothane's approach is the respect he shows for Schreber himself, as a worthwhile thinker in his own right and as a teacher imparting important lessons to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.Lothane, Z. (2011). The teachings of honorary professor of psychiatry Daniel Paul Schreber, J.D., to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, or dramatology's challenge to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(6): 775-815
In Defense of Schreber provoked scores of reviews and reactions internationally, ranging from very positive to very negative.In Defense of Schreber was a topic of discussion in a number of international conferences, e.g., Devreese, D. Lothane, Z., Schotte, J (1998). Schreber Revisite Colloque de Cerisy. Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Richard Chessick speaks positively of the book as a correction to "innumerable historical errors": "Lothane in his painstaking historical investigation provides us with a thorough understanding of the status of psychiatry at the time, and with a knowledge of what Schreber had to put up with from his wife and various authority figures."Chessick, R. (1995). In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry by Zvi Lothane. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 49(3), 449-450. Other positive reviews include Eckhart-Horney, M. (1994), Journal of the Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 22(2):356-358; Grotstein, J. S. (1993), Psychoanalytic Review, 80(4):633-639; Kelly, K. (1997), Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66:122-125. Other reviewers were more critical, e.g., Gerd Busse about the 1992 version of the book and Ernst Falzeder about its 2004 revision. Some of Lothane's unique interpretations of the Schreber case appear in the 2011 movie Shock Head Soul, a film about the Schreber case.
Sabina Spielrein Sabina Spielrein was a Russian-Jewish physician and psychoanalyst, the second woman to join Freud's circle in Vienna. In 1904, at the age of 19, Spielrein traveled to Switzerland to study at the University of Zürich. Shortly after her arrival, Spielrein had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital as a patient of director Eugen Bleuler and his deputy C. G. Jung, then 29 years old. Spielrein became a unique inmate, participating in Jung's and Franz Riklin's Word Association experiments, and matriculating as a medical student at the Zürich medical school where, in 1911, she became an MD, writing the first psychoanalytic investigation of a schizophrenic patient as her dissertation. After years of practicing as a psychoanalyst in Europe, Spielrien returned to the Soviet Union in 1923 where she taught psychoanalysis and treated both adults and children, until psychoanalysis was banned under Stalin. After the German invasion in 1942, Spielrein and her two daughters were murdered and buried in a mass grave. Spielrein's collected papers were published in Germany, the most famous of which was on destruction as a cause of becoming, a paper that inspired Freud's theory of the death instinct.Lothane, Zvi (2007b). The snares of seduction in life and in therapy, or what do young [Jewish] girls (Spielrein) seek in their Aryan heroes (Jung), and vice versa? International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 16:12-27, 81-94