The Future as Instrinsic to the Psyche and Psychoanalytic Therapy

HISTORICALLY, psychoanalysis has addressed time primarily from the perspective of the past. Such a temporal focus was perhaps inevitable given that the psychoanalytic theory of pathogenesis has always emphasized early experience, whether the childhood roots of pathology are conceived as actual events or early fantasy life. By no means does the present article call into question the notion that the patient's early experience is a crucial dimension of the analytic enterprise. It is, however, the thesis here that a temporal orientation focused almost exclusively on the past has limited both the analyst's understanding of the patient and the ability of the analyst to help the patient transcend the quandaries of the past.

The most notable exception to the temporal focus on the past from the classical perspective has been the theoretical work of Hans Loewald. Using ego-psychological language, Loewald (1962) pointed out that the expectations, demands, and prohibitions that become organized into the superego determine the psyche's relationship to the future. Thus, from Loewald's viewpoint, the concept of the superego brings the future into the psychological organization. In a later contribution, Loewald (1972) showed that the objective measure of time as a linearity consisting of past-present-future is not adequate for psychoanalysis, because time is experienced as an interaction of the three temporal modes, rather than a linearity. Despite his recognition that motives can be either forced from the past or attracted by the future, however, Loewald continued the psychoanalytic lineage of looking at the future primarily as affected by the past, while minimizing the influence of the future on the experience of past and present. Although Loewald understood theoretically that temporal experience is an interaction among the three temporal modes, he continued to consider the future primarily as a product of past influence, while giving little attention to the impact of future exper