Paul Roazen

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

Roazen received his A.B. at Harvard University in 1958.

He then studied at the University of Chicago and Magdalen College, Oxford, before returning to Harvard for his PhD dissertation, which bore on Freud's political and social thought.

In 1965 Roazen began to interview surviving friends, relatives, colleagues and patients of Sigmund Freud.

After teaching at Harvard as an assistant professor in Government, he taught Social and Political Science at York University in Toronto from 1971 until his early retirement in 1995.

His first 'big' book, 1975's Freud and His Followers, was based on hundreds of hours of interviews with patients and students of Freud.

The resulting portrait of Freud illustrated biases and indiscretions that seemed inconsistent with his stated methods.

This was a path-breaking and influential work, which remains a basic reference for historians of psychoanalysis today.

Roazen was the first non-psychoanalyst whom Anna Freud allowed to access the archives of the British Psychoanalytic Institute.

He was able to see the huge amount of material Ernest Jones had used to write his biography of Freud.

In 1993 Roazen became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2004 he became an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

His papers are collected in the Paul Roazen Collection of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

On November 3, 2005, he died at age 69 at his home in Cambridge from complications of Crohn's disease.

He was survived by two sons, one of whom is professor of comparative literature Daniel Heller-Roazen.

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