Inventing the Future: Narrativity, Agency, and Dynamic Systems Theory

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Association for Child Psychoanalysis, founded by Marianne Kris, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in this lecture. Kris’s own paper, “The Use of Prediction in a Longitudinal Study” (Kris 1957), is the cornerstone of this lecture, and signals the importance for child analysts to contemplate the time zone of the future as children mature, despite the unreliability of prediction. Inspired by a host of postmodern historians, devotees of the perilous problems inherent in foresight, I modified a methodology they developed to consider these issues from a psychoanalytic practitioner’s perspective. Creating a series of futuristic stories that could happen—each containing the elements of plausibility, surprise, and unpredictability—mirrors Kris’s emphasis on keeping one eye cocked toward the unanticipated unspooling of the developmental process. One important by-product of this work is one’s awareness of how the child analyst conceptualizes his or her child patient’s history. Consciously or preconsciously, how the analyst narrativizes his or her patient’s past and present will influence the kind of future portraits the patients will paint for themselves.