June 2025: "Potential Time: The Music of Potential Space"

Presented by: Adam Blum, PsyD Please join us for this second in a series of three Pre-EBOR scientific meetings designed to prepare colleagues for our Fourteenth International Evolving British Object Relations Conference: Live from Seattle: The Music of Psychoanalysis, October 17-19, 2025. In this presentation Adam Blum will consider how we live creatively in time. What does this mean? In an era increasingly hostile to sustained attention, how can psychoanalysis protect and cultivate the temporal conditions we require in order to feel real? Drawing upon Freud’s foundational principle of constancy and Peter Goldberg’s more recent elaborations of framing and transitionality, Blum will introduce potential time as a complementary psychoanalytic dimension to Winnicott’s concept of potential space. Through clinical illustrations and a close listening to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song,” this presentation invites participants to reimagine analytic practice as a shared musical experience—safeguarded and sustained by the analyst’s handling of clinical rhythms, and inspired by a collective faith in psychosensory communion to help us make music out of time. Learning Objectives: Upon completing this scientific meeting, participants will be able to: 1. Describe how the reliable rhythm of the analytic frame slows things down enough to create a tempo in which emotional experience can find form. 2. Explain how the analyst’s handling of time helps patients use time in ways that feel suitable and usable to them. 3. Identify how accompanying patients through difficult stretches of time can make “patience” more bearable and creative living possible.