One of North America’s leading psychoanalytic theorists and intellectual historians, York Professor Emeritus Paul Roazen (right) has died at his home in Cambridge, Mass. Aged 69, Roazen died on Nov. 3 from complications of Crohn’s disease.
From 1965 to 1971, Roazen taught in the Government Department at Harvard University. He then moved to Toronto and taught political science in York’s Division of Social Science, Faculty of Arts, from 1971 to 1995, when he took early retirement and moved back to Cambridge. He was also an adjunct professor of psychiatry for Boston’s Tufts-New England Medical Center.
The author of 22 books and hundreds of articles, reviews and essays, Roazen focused much of his work on Sigmund Freud and his followers and many of his books have been translated into half-a-dozen or more languages. His latest book, Edoardo Weiss (The House That Freud Built), was published in 2004. Roazen also wrote Canada’s King: An Essay in Political Psychology (Mosaic Press, 1998), a psychological biography of former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
The author of numerous biographies of noted psychoanalysts, Roazen was recognized for disseminating broader knowledge of psychoanalysis to the public domain. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1993. The American Psychoanalytic Association had planned to make him an honorary member at its winter meeting in January (see YFile, Oct. 21 issue).
Roazen was born in Boston in 1936 and received his undergraduate degree in government from Harvard College in 1958. He later studied at the University of Chicago, Oxford University and again at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1965.
He is survived by his two sons, Jules Roazen of New York City and Daniel Heller-Roazen of Princeton, NJ, a brother and a sister. He was divorced from Deborah Heller Roazen.
A partial list of books by Paul Roazen
Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (1990); Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst’s Life (1991); Freud and His Followers (1975, 1992); Meeting Freud’s Family (1993); Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision, Freud Under Analysis: History, Theory, Practice Essays in Honour of Paul Roazen (edited by Todd Dufresne, 1997); Freud: Political and Social Thought (1999); The Historiography of Psychoanalysis (2000); Oedipus in Britain: Edward Glover and the Struggle over Klein (2001); The Trauma of Freud: Controversies in Psychoanalysis (2002); Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions, (with Theodor Reik); and, Cultural Foundations of Political Psychology, Men of Destiny (with Walter Lippmann, 2003).