To Read Loewald – Together: An Afterward to Papers Considering Temporality

Abstract

This Afterward to a suite of papers studying and interpreting the work of Hans Loewald (Atsmon, Goldstein, Milch-Reich, Ofer, and Young, all this issue) takes the opportunity to reflect on why Loewald is currently in the air. It considers not only why Loewald, but why Loewald now, and, specifically, why Loewald especially in times of trouble? The meaning of an international Loewald Reading Group cohering during the time of Covid lockdown is emphasized, and the poignancy of the group originating as a way of continuing Lew Aron’s teaching of Loewald, which was tragically cut short, is acknowledged and honored. Finally, the way that Loewald’s writing challenges the reader to unpack a concentration of ideas (on the one hand) while relaxing and inviting them to dream freely and without judgment (on the other) is seen as a living out of the very theoretical precepts he evolved.

Keywords:

• futurity
• language
• Lew Aron
• Loewald
• temporality
• writing

In times of trouble, what are we to do? And what about times of extraordinary trouble, species-threatening trouble, society-coming-apart-at-the-seams level trouble? In recent times of genuine catastrophe, confined as we were in carceral-sounding “lockdown,” living through the legally mandated and oxymoronic-sounding “social distancing,” I guess we had some options.

We could get angry, we could fall apart, we could despair. We could embrace revolution. We could get a dog. We could nurture creative hobbies: my goodness, so much sourdough bread was baked during Covid. We could gain weight, we could get divorced, we could fall in love. We could buy real estate outside of the city. We could take up smoking. So many options. I lived through many of these images and scenarios with my patients during the pandemic. My friends, family, and I lived through them, too. All of us were reaching for some way to either tolerate or make use of this uniquely screwed up time in history. If we were lucky, we found something that did both.

The group of writers featured in this suite had an especially unique idea about how to pass time meaningfully: they could read. And not just read: read Hans Loewald. Together.

In March 2020, as the country went into lockdown, Robin Young had this idea. Faced with a desire for community and intellectual journeying, she posted a call to the IARPP membership, seeking out people with whom she could study Loewald. And she enlisted Seymour Moscovitz, a founder of the newly formed Loewald Center, to join the group in its nascent stages. Moscovitz remains an important North Star for the writers represented in this special section, especially since his Freudian identity and sensibility lend a generative contrast to the mostly Relational others. His marvelous introduction to the papers by Young, Cheryl Goldstein, Shoulamit Milch-Reich and Amir Atsmon, and Gila Ofer (this issue) frames the pieces with a deep respect and affection for both the writers and the scholar under study.

The response to the international call was healthy: just under twenty people from around the world answered. Today, about a dozen individuals from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the eastern and western United States meet weekly to read Loewald, line by line, word for word. It was, and still is, an extremely specific, unique, and original thing to do.

Why Loewald

Hans Loewald is in the air, and not just with this reading group. I’ve thought a lot about what makes him, of all people, so much in the zeitgeist, this man who is taught in many analytic institutes as an ego psychologist, and who appears with a quiet, open expression and in a conservative coat and tie in the black and white photograph that identifies the navy blue classic, “Essential Loewald” (2000). I’ve come up with a few reasons: density, creativity, freedom, futurity, and Lew Aron.

Density, Creativity and Heart

Covid quarantine did not, at its outset, have an expiration date. People simply didn’t know how long it would last. This gives Loewald an edge as a thinker to be studied during lockdown (or, indeed, any time). There is a concentration to his writing that makes it perfect fodder for intensive, close study. Pick up any paper of his: I’d be surprised if you didn’t find it ripe for word-by-word parsing. This takes time. And time, of course, was what was on a lot of people’s hands during the pandemic.

At the same time, there is an enormously creative spirit to his ideas. While much, if not most, dense writing can feel tedious or flat, Loewald’s is the opposite. His imagination can feel unbridled, if not otherworldly (see, among other iterations of his imagination, Loewald’s ideas on spiraling through time (1962); his perspectives on memory (1976); and psychoanalysis-as-art (1975)). Loewald also wrote with a lot of heart: his love and respect for human beings is palpable, and there is a particularly nonjudgmental feel to his ideas. He doesn’t privilege one state of being over another. This is most powerfully evident in the respect he has for both preverbal and verbal experience and expression: one is not better than the other because it comes second.

Freedom

In speaking informally with the writers in this suite, I heard many times that Loewald’s writing “caused us to stop and conjecture, to play and elaborate on its implications.” I would go further, and say that Loewald’s writing not only caused them to think, it allowed them to think. Some writing is delivered as gospel, tries to dazzle, and gives the reader an opaque “do not enter” feeling. Other writing invites readers to lose themselves, to join the creative process that the writer is wrapped up in. The latter style is full of life, honesty, and availability (see, for example, Coen (elaborating the difference between open and closed writing; 2000) and Ogden (on reading creatively, “with” the writer; 2012)). Loewald is firmly, wonderfully in the second camp. His writing gives the reader the freedom to be oneself, to depart from what is being offered in order to find something for oneself. Jonathan Lear puts it this way: “When Loewald’s writing finds a reader, his words may influence the reader’s beliefs, but they also spur the reader to [new] forms of psychic activity” (2012, pp. 167–68).

The way in which Loewald invites readers to be both intellectually fixed on the written words (on the one hand) and to be able to lose themselves in reverie about whatever the words are sparking (on the other), and, indeed, to toggle between these states as we move through the writing, is the living-out of his theories. As such, the readers and writers in this suite didn’t just study Loewald’s theory, they experienced it.

Why Loewald Now

There is both a practicality and a poignancy to forming a reading group in a global pandemic to combat feelings of outright isolation. Reading links us not only to others who we read with, it allows us to be in living relationship with authors themselves, regardless of whether they are still alive (Ogden, supra). And of course, it takes us into different worlds, if only for snatched moments.

Reading also links us to past, present, and future versions of ourselves (see Stern, 2020), sometimes all at once, which makes reading Loewald, who continually emphasized the experience of spiraling through time, particularly meaningful. And again, particularly timely. I don’t know about you, but I have felt a strong desire across my patient hours for a sign—any sign—that there will indeed be a future. Reality is growing more and more brutal as I type (do I even need to count the ways, but I will: Gaza, Israel, climate, Ukraine, Trump, AI, the ongoing assault on women (see Perlman, this issue). I do think that there is an unconscious pull to feel an integration of past, present, and future, so as not to be stuck in the present. Milch-Reich wrote to me that she felt she needed Loewald “at the time of no time.” I can feel what she means.

Just as much, I have felt a human need to collapse into creative suffusion. And this, of course, is what Loewald speaks to best, particularly on the topic of language (Loewald, 1978). Whereas others find language to be a translation from sensory experience to concretized experience, Loewald finds language to be a form of sensory expression. What a relief not to be stuck in secondary process thinking, at any time in history, but especially in our present times.

I’m not sure the reading group was consciously motivated in this regard, but I like to think that this was one of the currents that led them to Loewald. In this vein, I’m struck with the way Moscovitz describes the ensemble of papers “more in musical terms in which themes and variations are orchestrated through four movements … the fluidity of time is evident in this process of ebbing and flowing.” This phrasing brings to mind Loewald’s own experiences of absorbing music in his infancy, laying in a crib listening to his mother playing piano. “Try to imagine the experience of that baby,” Stephen Mitchell writes (Mitchell, 2000, p. 5). How could that baby possibly separate his own feelings from his mother’s, his own inner world from the outer world, the present from the past?

This, this “I am the world and the world is me” feeling, with past and future connected to a present sense of self, is not a confusion. It is a reassurance that there is more than what is simply now.

Finally, one cannot write about “why Loewald now?” without writing about Lew Aron. Fortunate participants in Lew’s legendary study groups will remember that in his very last days of teaching, he was deeply immersed in Loewald. His death cut short what likely would have been a years-long excavation of Loewald’s writing and thinking. For those lucky enough to have been learning with him, the feeling after that last class was as if the needle of a playing record was abruptly lifted up. Silence. One can only imagine the creative and radical ways Lew might have continued to understand and interpret Loewald’s works. I myself wrote a whole paper just after Lew’s death in which I tried to finish a thought he left unfinished in our last class (Altstein, 2019), in part to keep his teaching going, if only in my mind. I suppose that Young had a similar idea when she formed the Loewald Reading Group. She didn’t want that experience to stop, so she decided to keep it going in her own way.

Lucky for us.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Altstein

Rachel Altstein, LP, JD, is co-Editor in Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and teaches psychoanalytic writing at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). She is a member of the Loewald Center’s Program Committee, Beatrice Beebe’s Infant Research Board, and chairs the Educator’s Award for Unpublished Scholarship at NIP. Before entering the psychoanalytic field, she worked as an attorney specializing in prisoners’ rights, criminal defense, and anti-death penalty litigation. She publishes and presents on themes occurring in language and writing, and in the psychoanalytic writing process in particular. She maintains a practice in New York City.