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[I]t is not just that generosity is constitutive of the generous person’s flourishing (though it is). It is that this flourishing—this generous person’s living generously—shines forth. It is not only good but wondrous that the universe contains generosity within it … It is not only good but wondrous that there should be mourning … grief—an insistence that what happened was not a mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. Jonathan Lear (2022).
The following reminiscence is a history that continues to matter. During the spring quarter of 2025 I was Kohut Visiting Professor at the Committee on Social Thought. For two decades Jonathan and I had taught and learned together in a variety of venues, especially with our longstanding Discussion Group at the Annual Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In anticipation each year we hashed through what to pursue, wondering how best to enter into the life of the readings. For years we were in a close-knit study group through the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, less structured, free flowing, sometimes raucous, always warm, where friends and colleagues openly shared the challenges of being a psychoanalyst. Jonathan loved hearing cases, analysts at work. And now we anticipated a new setting, Jonathan’s beloved University of Chicago and, nested within it, the storied Committee on Social Thought (CST).
From the University online, cross-listed site announcement comes the following quotation, key to what follows here:
This seminar will introduce some of the central concepts of psychoanalysis: Mourning and Melancholia, Repetition and Remembering, Transference, Neurosis, the Unconscious, Identification, Psychodynamics, Eros, Envy, Gratitude, Splitting, Death. The central theme will be how these concepts shed light on human flourishing an