“Temporality and Futurity in the Analytic Process”

Presenter: Frank Summers, Ph.D.

Discussant: Jonathan Lear, Ph.D

Historically, psychoanalysis has been about understanding past and present. The relative neglect of the patient’s relationship to the future, or futurity, is an important omission because past and present gain their meaning in protention, the anticipated future that motivates the present and evokes the past. The phenomenological insight that the future perfect defines the meaning of human action is used in this paper to shed light on the analytic understanding of symptoms and enrich the theory of therapeutic action. It will be shown that all three temporal modalities influence each other in the transformation of ways of being.

Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP, is President, Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association and Past-President of Psychoanalysis and Social Responsibility. He is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences of Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University and supervising and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Winner of several local and national awards including The Hans Strupp Award for Contributions to Psychoanalysis, and The Distinguished Educator Award of the International Forum of Psychoanalytic Education, Dr. Summers is associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and a member of the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Psychology and The Annual of Psychoanalysis. He is author of numerous journal articles and presentations at national and local meetings as well three books on object relations theories. His fourth book due out in early 2013 is called The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process. Dr. Summers is in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Chicago.
 
Jonathan Lear, Ph.D. is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is also a practicing psychoanalyst and on the faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Recently he was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, an unsolicited grant of 1.6 million dollars to further his research. Before coming to Chicago, Professor Lear taught at Cambridge University where he was a Fellow of Clare College and at Yale University where he was Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities. He is the author of a number of books on ancient Greek philosophy. His psychoanalytic books include: “Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis”, “Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life”, “Freud”, “Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul”, “Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony” and “Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation”. His newest book, “A Case for Irony” was published by Harvard University Press.

Educational Objectives: At the conclusion of the program, participants will be able to: 1) Recognize futurity in the patient’s experience; 2) Recognize and differentiate  the role of all three temporal modalities in the analytic process; and 3) Incorporate the role of futurity in the therapeutic change process.

Target Audience: Psychoanalysts, other interested mental health professionals, and members of the community.