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. 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.

In 1965 Roazen began to interview surviving friends, relatives, colleagues and patients of Sigmund Freud. His first 'big' book, Freud and His Followers, was based on hundreds of hours of material. 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.

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