Joel Kovel

Joel Stephen Kovel (August 27, 1936 – April 30, 2018) was an American psychiatrist, scholar, human rights activist, and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.

Kovel was born on August 27, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, immigrant Jews, were Louis Kovel (an accountant known for the "Kovel Rule") and Rose Farber. He attended Baldwin Senior High School (New York) in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York. In 1957, he received his B.S. summa cum laude from Yale University. In 1961, he received his M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and in 1977 was a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center Institute, Brooklyn, New York.

From 1977 until 1983, he was Director of Residency Training, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he was also Professor of Psychiatry from 1979 to 1986. From 1980 to 1985, he was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, as well as a frequent contributor to Dialectical Anthropology, a journal founded by his colleague Stanley Diamond. Much of his work during this period focused on Marxism and Sigmund Freud.

In 1986, Kovel abandoned the field of psychiatry. From 1986 to 1987, he was a visiting professor of Political Science and Communications, University of California, San Diego. He also held short-term positions as a Visiting Lecturer at San Diego State University in the spring of 1990 and another visiting professor position at UCSD in Winter 1993.

In 1988, Kovel was appointed Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies, a non-tenured position, at Bard College. In February 2009, he was informed that his position would not be renewed after the contract ended on June 20, 2009, and that he would be moved to emeritus status at that time. Kovel argued in a letter sent to the faculty of Bard College that his contract was not renewed due to his political views. He reiterated his argument in a statement posted on his official website that the "termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism". The college president Leon Botstein responded in a letter sent directly to Kovel by arguing that his termination was not political but part of a larger move by Bard to reduce part-time faculty. Botstein stated: "To take what is self-evidently a result of economic constraint and turn it into a trumped-up case of prejudice and political victimization insults not only your intelligence but the intelligence of your readers." While Kovel called his dismissal illegitimate and vowed to fight the decision, he left Bard permanently per the university's decision in 2009.

Kovel became involved in political activism in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War. He began to study Karl Marx which created a "conflict with his identity as a Freudian psychoanalyst",^{[citation needed]} and led him to characterize himself as a "Marxist psychoanalyst", two categories which he described as "contrary" to each other. He would eventually abandon medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in 1985. He also worked in defense of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

By the late 1980s, he became involved with the environmental movement. He then had a brief career with the Green Party of the United States, under which he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1998 and "sought the party's presidential nomination in Denver in 2000."

Kovel was an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance.