Paul Rosenfels

Paul Rosenfels (March 21, 1909 in Chicago – 1985 in New York City) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Rosenfels is known as one of the first American social scientists to publish about homosexuality as part of the human condition, as opposed to his contemporaries who largely defined homosexuality as an illness or deviation.

Paul Rosenfels was born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Oak Park, Illinois.

He had an older brother, Richard, an identical twin brother, Walter, and younger sister, Edith Nash.

His mother was politically liberal.

She served on the Abraham Lincoln Center Board on the South Side of Chicago.

His father, a businessman who supported capitalism, died in 1935.

In terms of family dynamics, Edith believed she was the favorite of their father.

She said he found the boys difficult to deal with, and Richard was preferred by their mother.

Richard earned a PhD in botany.

Paul became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and Walter worked in ad copywriting, where he had more flexibility.

As they grew up, the three brothers realized they were homosexual, but never discussed it openly with their parents.

Only Paul among the brothers married and had a child.

Edith married, became an educator and poet, and had two children.

Rosenfels' first passion was history, and in high school he drafted a book on the causes of war.

In college he met Harold D. Lasswell, who told him that new insights into the psychology of war and the politicians who cause them would in the future be provided by the new science of psychoanalysis.

Convinced that this tool could help him make an important contribution to the welfare of humanity, Rosenfels spent the next decade doing undergraduate work at University of Chicago and earning an M.D. at Rush Medical College; he became board-certified as a psychiatrist.

During this period Rosenfels married Joan Maris, a friend of his sister Edith.

They had a son together: Danny.

Beginning to practice psychiatry, Rosenfels also studied with Franz Alexander, a former student of Sigmund Freud, at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago.

He became licensed as a psychoanalyst.

He served as a Lt. Colonel in the Medical Corps during World War II.

After his return, he taught as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, particularly in psychiatry and law.

Rosenfels rapidly developed a successful private practice and was especially effective in helping women.

He lectured at the University of Chicago on psychiatry and the law.

After achieving these successes, he became more interested in working to develop larger ideas about human nature, rather than be constrained by details of diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses.

Rosenfels began to feel that he did not belong in the academic fraternity.

He was interested in the larger views of philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and David Hume, who held that the most important task for moral philosophers was the founding of a science of human nature.

Rosenfels believed that it was insufficient to focus on the physiology of the nervous system and rejected the idea that concepts such as love and power could not be studied by scientific methods.

After serving in the military, Rosenfels accepted a job as Chief Psychiatrist, Reception-Guidance Center of the Department of Corrections, State of California.

He had to leave as he did not have a medical license in California.

He returned to the Chicago area for a time in his last institutional position, as Chief of the Outpatient Clinic, Forest Hospital, in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Rosenfels left Illinois, returning to California, where he supported himself by working as a cook.

At the same time, he abandoned his effort to fit into the mainstream by suppressing his homosexuality.

After leaving the academic field of psychiatry in the 1940s, he developed some of his own thinking and a larger philosophy.

In the 1940s Rosenfels left Chicago and his family, moving to California.

He moved to New York City in 1962, where he established a private practice.

He devoted himself to developing the foundations of a "science of human nature."

He published Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process in 1971, along with other books discussing psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

In 1973 with Dean Hannotte, he founded the Ninth Street Center in New York City, which provided peer counseling and discussion groups.