Loewenstein was born in
Łódź,
Poland (then in the
Russian Empire), to a Jewish family from the province of
Galicia. After graduating from his university studies in Zurich Switzerland from 1917 to 1920, he went to Berlin to study medicine where he received his medical diploma, specializing in neurology and studying under
Eugen Bleuler. At this time he became acquainted with psychoanalysis where he was certified as a psychoanalyst after undergoing a training analysis with
Hanns Sachs. He became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society. (DPG) in 1925. At the request of
Sigmund Freud, Loewenstein moved to Paris, France in 1927 in order to train new analysts. He was the second licensed psychoanalyst, after
Eugenie Sokolnicka, to practice there. He trained most of the first two generations of French analysts, including, notably,
Jacques Lacan (between 1933 and 1939). He was a founding member and also secretary of the first French psychoanalytic society, the
Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). (Some of the other founding members included
René Laforgue,
Marie Bonaparte,
Raymond de Saussure, and
Angelo Hesnard.) In 1927, he participated in the creation of the SPP's journal, the ; and in 1928 he and Marie Bonaparte translated Freud's case-study of
Dora into French. In 1930, he became a French citizen by decree and obtained his medical license anew - defending his thesis for a doctorate in medicine in 1935. In 1939, he was mobilized as a doctor in the French army receiving the Croix-de-Guerre in 1940. After the Armistice, he fled to the south of France, and in 1942 left there with his family for the United States, where he settled in New York. There he pursued a distinguished institutional career with the
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), becoming its vice president from 1965 to 1967. He died in 1976 in
New York City. Loewenstein is known, along with
Ernst Kris and
Heinz Hartmann, as one of the foremost figures of what has been called
Ego psychology. ==Family==