Jonathan Lear, PhD (1948-2025)

The Loewald Center is deeply saddened by the death of Professor Jonathan Lear, John Nef Distinguished Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago. Lear was a brilliant scholar and teacher of Hans Loewald’s work.

After discovering Loewald’s book Papers in Psychoanalysis while teaching at Yale, Lear sought out Loewald and met weekly with him for six years in conversation about psychoanalysis and philosophy. At those meetings, Loewald sparked Lear’s interest in psychoanalysis, leading him to pursue analytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; and Lear brought Loewald back to his “first love,” philosophy. Over the course of his remarkable career, Lear wrote brilliant articles and books that explicated and expanded on Loewald’s thought. He also taught Loewald’s work in a singularly accessible and joyous fashion. He, as much as anyone, drew psychoanalysts to Loewald.

Jonathan took to heart Loewald’s wishes that there should be no Loewaldians; rather, Loewald envisioned that those who studied his work would have an individuating experience by developing their own thought and scholarship. In his writings about Loewald, Jonathan flourished in the contradiction that not being a Loewaldian was essential to engaging Loewald’s thought in the right, Loewaldian, way. Having internalized Loewald’s wishes that there should be no Loewaldians, Jonathan initially was dubious about the creation of a Hans W. Loewald Center. He overcame his reservations and became a great friend of the Center. His plenary address at the Center’s inaugural conference in 2022, “The How of Hans Loewald and the Possibility of a Hans W. Loewald Center,” was an inspirational start to the Center’s intellectual program. We had looked forward to Jonathan continuing to be a prominent contributor to the Center and are grieving that he is gone. At this sad time we are consoled by Jonathan’s own words: “One of psychoanalysis’s deepest insights is that when we take in any teaching, the teacher comes along with it. And he or she tends to remain with us, personalizing what we have learned.”

~ The Hans W. Loewald Center

(October 4, 2025)