In 1973 with Dean Hannotte, he founded the Ninth Street Center in New York City, which provided peer counseling and discussion groups.
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 the University of Chicago and earning an M.D.
Beginning to practice psychiatry, Rosenfels also studied with Franz Alexander, a former student of Sigmund Freud, at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago.
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 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.
[3] 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.
[3] In 1962 Rosenfels moved to New York City, where he established a private practice that attracted numerous gay men.
In 1973 he, Dean Hannotte, and their students opened The Ninth Street Center on the Lower East Side, an all-volunteer organization devoted to helping unconventional people live creatively in the world.
As the Center slowly matured, its members served a growing community of lesbians, as well as gay men, and straight people.