Nancy Chodorow, PhD (1944-2025)
We, at the Loewald Center, share our profound sorrow at the passing of our friend and colleague, Nancy Chodorow. She died on Oct 14th, 2025, after a relatively brief but relentless battle with cancer. A renowned sociologist and psychoanalyst, Chodorow was a devoted scholar of Loewald, communicating compellingly about his work and its impact. Her monumental earlier academic work took place in Berkeley, California, before she came to Boston, in 1993, and the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where she practiced and taught psychoanalysis.
After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1966 and receiving her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1975, Chodorow joined UC Berkeley’s Sociology Department in 1986, and was Professor there till retirement. She trained also as a psychoanalyst in the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute during that time, and graduated in 1993.
“Nancy Chodorow” was a household word in the United States in the 1970s, as an intellectual leader during the second wave of feminism. She developed profound insights about women’s desire to mother, and their lives inside and outside their families. Her groundbreaking book was a version of her Ph.D. thesis, “The Reproduction of Mothering: The Sociology of Gender.” There she noted the vital transmission that the mother played in her daughter’s development, thus shifting the Freudian spotlight from the father’s inspiration, and showing its female-to-female internal psychic roots, as not just a response to external social pressure. This proved an example of her attuned Lowaldian appreciation of psychic mechanisms of internalization. A powerful integrative thinker -- not unlike Loewald’s style -- Chodorow effortlessly wove together cultural insights from sociology, and individual in-depth psychic processes. With brilliance, she gave shape to “The American Independent tradition” of intersubjective ego psychology, (2004), as a psychoanalytic way of working engaged by many. Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson she named as forefathers. Her contributions about the plurality of genders and family life were and are invaluable to this era. Chodorow was a prolific and prodigious scholar-clinician, with a talent for mapping theory.
Nancy seized life; her own warm, loving family; music; art; running; hiking; talking, laughing, thinking, sighing, and she was a deep, deep joy as a friend. She was excited for the inauguration of the Loewald Center, and with delight delivered an opening plenary address on the creativity stirred by reading his work, “On the Therapeutic Action of Reading Loewald, Then to Now.”
Words cannot say how greatly we will miss her gifted generativity, flair, wisdom and support.
~ The Hans W. Loewald Center(October 22, 2025)