Journal of Planning Education and Research

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Forgetting to Plan
Howell S. Baum
Journal of Planning Education and Research 1999 19: 2
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X9901900101

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Forgetting to Plan
Howell S. Baum
ABSTRACT
Conventionally, planning for the future de-
pends on collecting information and analyzing
it rationally in order to control contingency.
In reality, contingency persists, and communi-
ties react in ways that defeat planning. Seeing
problems and uncertainty, communities often
retreat to a past they remember in idealized
ways to find gratification they do not expect
from the future. They choose nostalgia or
fantasy rather than looking realistically at
current conditions. Thus communities resist
planning not out of ignorance, but out of
knowledge. They know the past, its satisfac-
tions, and its centrality to their identity, and
they want to maintain it against change.
Hence planning depends on forgetting: forget-
ting a static image of the past in order to re-
member the past as a time of contingency and
to see the past linked in time to the present
and the future.
Howell S. Baum is professor In the Urban Stud-
ies and
Planning Program at the Unzversity of
Maryland College Park; hb36@umall.umd edu
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
I can swim like the others, only I have a better memory than the others. I
have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgot-
ten it, my ability to swim is of no avail, and I cannot swim after all.
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes
The patient is cured in psychoanalysis when, among other things, he contin-
plan for the future knowing he is unable to do so.
ues to
Adam Phillips, On Flirtation
s TWO VIGNETTES
Two vignettes illustrate how communities hold on to memories of the past in
1
ways that hinder planning.
Activists in a historically working-class white ethnic community convened a plan-
ning council to develop a community plan. As in other urban areas, jobs had gone
as manufacturers left or cut back; the quality of schools had declined as the city tax
base dwindled; families with the means to move had left for the suburbs; and low-
income renters were taking the place of long-time blue-collar homeowners. At the
same time, the racial make-up had changed from almost completely white to one-
fourth black. Residents were increasingly poorer, less well educated, less skilled so-
cially or economically, and more dependent on others. The working class was no
longer secure, and their ethnic identity was weakened.
Planning participants acknowledged these changes as the impetus for acting. Yet
they could not imagine another direction for the community. They did not ask
what the best realistically possible future would be. As ethnicity was losing sway,
they talked of promoting ethnic diversity. Facing changes in work and a growing
mismatch between residents and jobs, they struggled to create new blue-collar jobs.
As low-income and black renters replaced working-class white homeowners, they
called for more homeownership and said nothing about the housing needs of the
poor and renters who would inevitably live in the area. These policies represented
pragmatic choices among unappealing alternatives, and it is hard to fault commu-
nity members for not transforming the economy and housing market. Still, they
were more clearly oriented to the past, which they idealized, than toward the future,
which seemed depressingly unpromising.
Interviewing an economic development officer in this community, I asked,
&dquo;You’ve described the exodus of industries from this community over the past two
decades. Now you’re responsible for economic development. Let’s assume you are

successful, and we get back together here in 20 years. What
will we see?&dquo; The officer, a third-generation community
resident, said, &dquo;It will be just the way it was before!&dquo; The
economic development officer spoke for many in expressing
the wish that, somehow, things might once again be as they
had been.
In the Jewish community across town, activists in the
central organization initiated strategic planning to set direc-
tions for the organization and, by extension, the commu-
nity. Though the community and the organization were
economically quite secure, leaders openly worried about de-
clines in ethnic identity similar to those in the working-class
community. As assimilation had become possible, Jews par-
ticipated more in the larger society. Philanthropists gave to
secular causes as well as, or instead of, to the Jewish commu-
nity organization and its agencies. Middle-class people affili-
ated less with Jewish religious or ethnic institutions. Many
married non-Jews and did not raise their children as Jews.
Community leaders were concerned about the continuity of
their community.
Yet planning participants, while lamenting these trends,
aimed to restore an idealized past. They recalled a time
when community was strong, religion mattered, ethnicity
was forceful, and a measure of anti-Semitism reinforced
Jews’ tendencies to identify unconditionally with one an-
other. They did not ask what were the attractions of the
world outside their community, why religion mattered less,
or why Jews were not marrying Jews or raising their children
as part of the community. Instead, they simply advocated
community &dquo;continuity&dquo;-continuity of the distant past, as
if the recent past had not occurred-and they urged people
to resume patterns of worship and socialization associated
with earlier generations. They did not consider how devel-
opments suggested new models for the community or their
organization, and they did not develop realistic strategies for
responding to the trends that concerned them.
In both instances, community planning participants re-
acted to threats to their community by remembering and
trying to restore a version of the past. Neither organization
developed a realistic image of a future that would grow out
of the past while diverging from it. As a result, their plans
diluted strategizing with wishful thinking.
0 PLANNING
Planning is a mental activity that aims to affect the exter-
nal world. Directed toward the future, planning concerns
imaginary events, that, however much one might desire
them, have never taken place, have uncertain precedent, and
might never occur. Given the unpredictability of human
events, people find it reassuring to imagine that the future
repeats the remembered past. Thus, the mental activity es-
sential to planning is always in jeopardy.
Uncertainty reigns in human affairs: We can calculate
reassuringly plausible odds of events, but we cannot elimi-
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3
nate contingency. At the same time, some of our de-
their
sires, deepest ones, remain hidden from us, from our
our
conscious selves: We do not always know what we want.
Moreover, we often want what we know, what we remem-
ber familiarly, rather than anything strange, much less any-
thing ultimately unpredictable.
We know these things, and yet we do not want to know
them. The Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to
understand and govern society offers a defense against this
recognition (see Levine 1985). It assures us learning is the
remedy. While we contemplate the contingent, we can pre-
tend that, if only we can know more, we can overcome its
dominion. Yet, simultaneously, we doubt the efficacy of the
project, and we hold on to our memories. Learning is im-
periled, and realistic planning is improbable.
Learning matters, but it is not a simple matter. What we call
learning depends on forgetting-giving up memories of some
things in order to remember others. We must let go of cer-
tain configurations of remembered events in order to recollect
(re-collect) others. Thus we find new meanings in the past.
Some events seem less important; their links to others dissolve;
perhaps they never existed. Other events come to mind or
seem more important and combine in new ways. Crucially,
this work is neither disinterested nor merely cognitive. It
depends on giving up, and mourning, emotional attach-
ments to memories-remembering the memories as memo-
ries but forgetting them as active, veridical accounts of the
past.
This article examines the essential role of forgetting in
practice. The next two sections describe related obstacles to
planning: contingency and the character of human memory.
The section following analyzes what communities need to
forget and remember in order to plan. The final section dis-
cusses implications for planning practice.
N CONTINGENCY
Contingency is at once the reason for planning and its
nemesis. People will have bad housing, they will be poor,
and noxious substances will sicken them, for example, unless
we can find ways to control events. If we can anticipate the
conditions that will put people out of work-and if we can
manage those conditions-we can keep people employed.
Failing that, if we can identify responses to unemployment
that will put people into good jobs, we can minimize the
costs of economic changes.
A great many human events are sufficiently probable to
let us predict their occurrence. Not only will taxes be due
each year, but the mail will be delivered daily except on
Sundays and holidays and in extreme weather; most stores
will be today where they were yesterday and will sell similar
goods; most firms will act in ways that keep them solvent
and, if possible, turn a profit; and most parents will do the
best they can to raise their children.
These statements are all arguably true; yet one senses they
4
are arrayed in order of diminishing predictive value. They
move from describing virtually all actors or conditions to de-
scribing most or many, and they grow increasingly abstract.
Moreover, the conditions that make it harder to predict spe-
cific events also make it harder to control them. On the one
hand, tradition and economic necessity make it virtually cer-
tain that legislatures will continue to require payment of taxes.
On the other hand, firms’ financial security depends on their
making complicated forecasts and decisions about goals, strate-
gies, resources, demands, and constraints.
In fact, most of the areas of life that matter are like the
latter. Human activity is subject to various influences, im-
perfectly understood, and difficult to control. Crucially,
though we hesitate to acknowledge it, some of the influences
that matter most are accidental, beyond our predicting. De-
cision makers can speculate about what is possible and can
nurture new possibilities, but it is futile to calculate prob-
abilities (Shackle 1958, 1969). Those who recognize uncer-
tainty may reduce or reallocate its costs but cannot avoid its
certainty (Mack 1971; Marris 1996).
Contingency presents us with a paradox. We cannot es-
cape it, but we must significantly reduce our experience of it
to give ourselves the confidence that we can act intention-
ally. Yet we must not so reduce apparent contingency as to
persuade ourselves that little is left within our grasp-that
things are rigged. At its realistic best, planning is an inven-
tive art, concerned with diminishing the domain or at least
the consequences of uncertainty while holding open possi-
bilities for acting. Planning is jeopardized by efforts to see
everything as certain, even-perhaps particularly-certainly
good.22
Sometimes planning is a defense against the discovery of
contingency-irreducible uncertainty, accident-and the
sense of impotence it can engender. In this context, the alli-
ance between planning and the social sciences is not acciden-
tal. The conventional interpretation of this link focuses on the
establishment of academic planning programs (Hoch 1994;
Krueckeberg 1984; Sch6n 1983). As planners sought profes-
sional status, they promoted university training as a substitute
for apprenticeship. Academic culture, in turn, shaped what
future planners were taught and who taught them. Research
universities held the most prestige among institutions of higher
education, and doctorate faculty were the norm. Doctoral
planning programs were established to prepare faculty to teach
planning students. These programs mimicked the dominant
model of the social sciences, which aspired to the precision and
status of natural science research.
Their graduates, few of whom had practiced planning,
became practicing social scientists. Though many were
eclectic and some invoked a lineage in the humanities, most
were evaluated and rewarded for their work as social scien-
tists-perhaps applied, if not basic, researchers, but re-
searchers. They modeled and taught social science. When
they spoke of planning &dquo;methods,&dquo; they meant research
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methods. And future planners learned that research was the
essence of planning (see Baum 1997b).
The teachers, students, and planners were not wrong to
take research seriously: It is good to understand conditions
better. But many assumed the only legitimate way to study
the phenomena of planning was in a manner considered
scientific after an image of the natural sciences: with intel-
lectual, emotional, and moral detachment.3 Moreover, fix-
ing their attention on what science apparently allowed them
to see, they focused on what was easy to measure and quan-
tify, what they could observe from a distance, perhaps
through secondary data, without personal involvement, and
they avoided messy problems. It would be easy, for example,
to measure how many dwelling units within certain geo-
graphic boundaries conformed to the housing code, but it
would be daunting to understand the interplay of assump-
tions, intentions, and actions that produced current condi-
tions or those that might later alter them.
There were good reasons for some interests in so-called
objectivity. The more a researcher is involved with the ob-
jects of study, the harder it is to ascertain whether the re-
searcher is seeing them more or less as they are or is simply
observing his or her own shadow and influence. Yet the am-
bition to exclude all personal influence was so thorough and
unrealistic as to suggest it was a cover for certain fantasies
(see Seeley 1967).
One fantasy involved the external world: The scientific
method could comprehend complexity and control uncer-
tainty. The hope was naively embodied in large-scale model-
ing, built on faith in the capacity of computers to manage
tremendous amounts of information. But the Achilles heel
was irreducible
ignorance about how to understand the per-
verse complexity of the world (Lee 1973). The usual result
was an oversimplification of past conditions and projection
of them onto the future. Black (1990) describes the result in
the Chicago Area Transportation Study:
The staff often talked about the future, but it was
a future that extrapolated the past and main-
tained the status quo they can be reasonably
....
criticized [for getting things wrong] on the issue
of highway versus transit .... The emphasis on
rationality, on trying to be scientific, disposed
the CATS staff to this limited vision .... The fu-
ture came to be seen as inevitable. The staff did
not try to change the future; they did not try to
change policies, because these involved values,
which were beyond the pale (36).
Planning theorists who have recognized such difficulties
have responded in two ways. Some have simply insisted on
trying harder, proposing a &dquo;contingency theory for plan-
ning&dquo; that would give closer attention to contexts and their
constraints (for example, Alexander 1996). Yet the highly
abstract language of such efforts only echoes earlier scien-

tific ambitions without making an advance.
A second approach, which seems to depart from science
and embraces subjectivity, is known as communicative plan-
ning (for example, Forester 1989; Healey 1997; Innes 1997;
Mandelbaum, Mazza, and Burchell 1996; Sager 1994).
Those who take this stance acknowledge limits in what
people may know about the world. They put their hope for
control in what people may tell one another and agree on.
Emphasizing agency, they focus on possibilities for collective
action and play down or overlook structural constraints.4
They argue that, if only people speak honestly and carefully,
they can increase their shared knowledge and create under-
standings, policies, and institutions that expand their con-
trol over the world. Though none of them would unabash-
edly invoke the language of scientific research or modeling,
many share the wish that motivated those pursuits: the de-
sire to reduce uncertainty. In place of the scientific method,
they substitute undistorted communication. Instead of try-
ing to wield a lever over an external world, they bring the
world inside a community of communicators and seek ways
of taming it by taming themselves.
This latter hope is one of several expressions of a second
fantasy motivating interests in &dquo;objectivity.&dquo; Those who put
their faith in science imagine that, if only research were fully
governed by impersonal principles and methods, human
imperfections would be removed, and research could pro-
duce perfect knowledge-infallible and complete. Indi-
vidual cognitive limitations and biases could be overcome.
Some who write about communication do not believe these
limitations and biases can be eliminated, but hope that
good-faith reasoned discussion could reduce their extent and
lead to agreement based on explicit recognition of them.
Still, these reasonable, if not necessarily realizable, hopes
give voice to wishes about other, more unsettling human
imperfections. The intensity of individual and collective
concerns about contingency betrays general anxiety about
the future. People want good housing, a dependable in-
come, and security for their children. And yet people worry
about having so much more; we do not draw sure lines be-
tween necessities and luxuries. And those who have much
can worry as much as those who have little. Having things,
having control over things, offers hope that one might have
control over certain intangibles. The effort to know every-
thing represents a wish for immunity from change and loss.
Beneath that, it expresses a desire for immortality.
There are external challenges to control, success, well-
being, and health-for example, in the economy and in na-
ture. These are adversaries that knowledge and action may
thwart. Yet there are also internal sources of change-in our
bodies, which get sick and age. Many, particularly children
of the Enlightenment, may imagine the body, too, as some-
thing external, that may be controlled. And yet we know
that our body is ourselves, its vicissitudes somehow our do-
ing. The desire to know and control all expresses the fantasy
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5
that we could stop ourselves from dying. We can attribute
death to external sources and bad luck, but we sense we have
impulses that move us toward it. If only we could control
these wishes, we imagine, we could keep ourselves alive.55
In short, contingency frustrates human ambitions. We
can reduce contingency and its costs by
understanding the
world better. Yet we want to know and control more than
we ever can. In particular, we expect scientific research and
planning to contain what will elude human dominion: ag-
gression, desire, envy, fantasies, and the conflicts to which
they give rise. The trouble with simply redoubling normal
scientific and planning efforts is that they will fail to address
some of our most urgent concerns. As Enlightenment
projects, science and planning encourage us to define issues
rationally. For example, we may deal with anxiety about
dying by talking about preventing and treating disease and
spending billions of dollars on biomedical research. Yet no
matter how impressively we succeed in curtailing illness and
lengthening life, we will never eliminate death; our underly-
ing worries will continue to trouble us because we do not
address them. Unless we can accept the limitations in what
we can control, we cannot realistically understand our con-
ditions or plan to improve them.
Thus planning depends on making sense of the world in
ways that simultaneously appreciate contingency and imag-
ine possibilities of acting. However, as the next section
shows, anxiety about contingency influences how we re-
member and learn and hinders realistic planning.
N MEMORY
The familiar quotation from Santayana expresses the
comforting convention that remembering is the key to
learning. If we keep in mind what went before, we can draw
analogies from the past to the present and make probabilis-
tic inferences about the consequences of choices. From
negative and positive examples, we can conquer contingency
and invent a secure future. Yet what we remember is often
an account of failures of memory or apparent failures to
learn from memory. Not only should we have known better,
but, so it seems, we could have known better.
Personal memory is like written history: incomplete and
selective. Carr (1961) distinguishes the facts of history from
facts about the past. The universe of facts about the past
exceeds any capacity to collect or organize. Historians must
assemble these facts selectively. But they do not do so ran-
domly : A fact about the past becomes an historical fact if it
fits into an interpretation that historians consider valid and
significant. Orwell (1961 [ 1949] ) portrayed the worst possi-
bilities, where the Party dispatched deviant facts to the
oblivion of the insidiously named &dquo;memory hole.&dquo; Yet pro-
fessional historians may do similarly, ignoring or rejecting
not just facts that conflict with an interpretation but also
those that are embarrassing or painful.
We do the same in constructing personal memories. It is
6
uncertain whether we have the neurological capacity to re-
member all we have experienced, but we know we have forgot-
ten a great deal. What, for example, did we do during the
365 days of our third year of life? We forget for many rea-
sons. To begin with, our first experiences precede words.
Infants endure an eternity before they learn a language oth-
ers can understand. But then the words are
inadequate to
record the experiences that went before them, in a time
when experience ineffably combined touch, taste, smell,
hearing, and sight. Later in life we rediscover the inadequacy
of language when we have difficulty portraying the beauty of
a scene, conveying our feelings, or remembering our dreams.
Dreams epitomize problems with language. Dreams are
metaphorical, combining images, sounds, and sensations.
Words in dreams are notoriously unreliable, puns or ono-
matopoeia, never what they seem. This is the wordless lan-
guage we originally engaged in as infants and, crucially, the
way we understand the world in the moments before we
find words with which to think, talk, and act. Unconscious
thinking deeply shapes what we see as conscious calculation.
Thus the store of facts about the past accessible to us is
inevitably reduced in several ways beyond any neurological
limitations. Reliance on language forces us to forget experi-
ences that resist words. On top of this, just as professional
historians, we choose to forget experiences that are inconsis-
tent with how we want to think of ourselves-in particular,
experiences that would embarrass us, cause us to feel guilty,
lead us to fear punishment, or otherwise arouse anxiety. In
various ways we repress what we once knew about ourselves,
pushing certain facts from awareness. With respect to our
conscious thinking, we have forgotten things. However, as
with experiences that exceed the potentials of language, we
remember them unconsciously, in ways we do not recog-
nize, and we interpret, evaluate, and act on the world in
their terms.
We forget in other, more subtle ways. We may keep an inci-
dent in mind but re-write its script, altering the plot and the
characters’ moral valences. We may substitute an innocuous or
benign image for what was upending.~ We may condense sev-
eral episodes into one, perhaps covering over a dangerous situ-
ation with one in which we were safe or even heroic, remem-
bering our past in a way that reassures us about our potential
to do and be good. Thus, in many ways we diminish our ac-
cessible memory by what we choose to forget.
Spence (1982), writing of psychoanalytic patients’ efforts
to recall and learn from their experiences, echoes Carr in
distinguishing historical truth from narrative truth. We may
aim for the former, an inclusive veridical account, but we
construct only the latter, a story that makes sense of avail-
able facts and satisfies the pragmatic test of contributing to
effective action. With effort, we may remember more of our
past. But remembering is not a matter of journeying men-
tally to a vault where all the data of our lives are deposited,
ready to be checked out. Rather, it is a way of recategorizing
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some of the available data in terms of current perceptions
(Modell 1990). Memory is transformational, rather than repli-
cative. Though we may seem to know more of our past, we are
re-collecting, re-calling, and re-membering items, not recol-
lecting, recalling, or remembering everything.
These peculiarities of memory are found in groups, orga-
nizations, and communities. Groups may choose a view of
their history that relieves them of responsibility for con-
fronting difficult tasks (Bion 1961). In &dquo;groupthink,&dquo;
members agree on any account of the past that helps them
get along, even when contradictory information is available
(Janis 1982). Organizational cultures often include elabo-
rate accounts of the past; sometimes subordinates contest
an official history with one of their own (Deal and
Kennedy 1982; Frost et al. 1985; Schein 1992). The Chal-
lenger disaster dramatically shows what happens when
members of an organization prefer an idealized memory of
perfection to an accurate one of increasing mistakes
(Schwartz 1990). Societies create monuments to benign
images of the past in efforts to put disruptive versions to
rest (Sturken 1997). In many ways, groups choose to re-
member their past so as to make sense of current conditions
or resolve contemporary conflicts (Halbwachs 1992).
These observations do not assume that collectivities
think with a single mind. Not everyone in an organization
or community, for example, thinks the same, nor is every
member wholly in the group, without autonomy or outside
loyalties. Moreover, formally and informally, collectivities
divide up labor. Differences and conflicts of both percep-
tion and interest abound. Still, there are moments when
many, if not all, members identify with one another and act
on common assumptions, when even those who disagree
find it politically, culturally, or psychologically difficult to
think or act differently.
Sometimes people deliberately deceive others about the
past, but these examples suggest that most inaccuracies fol-
low good-faith efforts to remember things in ways that fit
contemporary desires and anxieties. Still, the result is the
same: Memory is an imperfect instrument for managing
contingency. The obvious flaw is that events and actors
change. Yet a more subtle disability derives from a way that
people use memory to cope with contingency. They choose
to remember things in ways that could not have been oth-
erwise. Conscious memory contains a world without acci-
dents : satisfaction or frustration, success or failure, events
have sure causes of someone’s making. Seeing the past as
determinate serves the purpose of reassuring that the future,
too, can be under control.
s TRAUMA AND NOSTALGIA
Anxiety about contingency encourages people to distort
what they remember and stop time. When the future seems
overwhelming, when security seems contingent on more
than can be controlled, people may hold fast to the past,

stuck onmemories that resist change. Thus, living in the
past, they avoid experiencing a present and cannot learn
from current events.
Trauma offers an example. Psychologically, trauma is
experience that arouses anxiety and overwhelms the ability
to think realistically and act planfully. The experience may
arise from an external event or an inner impulse (such as a
wish to harm someone or a desire to be with someone) that
leads to great disappointment or danger. Trauma is not an
inherent quality of an event but derives from how the event
is experienced. People vary in how they understand, react
to, and cope with what may look like similar conditions
(Cooper 1986; Freud 1977 [1920]; Yorke 1986). Individu-
als may experience trauma, for example, when they face
combat, lose a job, or are forced to move. Communities
may be traumatized by urban renewal, the loss of a major
employer, or natural or environmental disasters (Erikson
1994; Fried 1963; Gans 1982).
When people are traumatized, they try to care for them-
selves in several ways. One is to forget what happened.
They may suppress conscious awareness of the episode and
try to act as if it never occurred. At best, the strategy can be
partly successful. On the one hand, they forget what hap-
pened. But, unconsciously, they continue to remember the
injury, associate it with other things, and then try to avoid
thinking about all related matters or acting in any way that
evokes them. As a result, they narrow their thinking and
action by tacitly ruling these dangerous areas off limits
(Fenichel 1945; A. Freud 1946; S. Freud 1957 [1915];
Klein 1976). Paradoxically, they forget but also remember
in a way they cannot recognize and from which they cannot
learn. Unconsciously, they stay in a past they remember.
Members of a community decimated by flood, for example,
may be in shock, holding only the sketchiest memories of
what happened.
People may find a trauma so incapacitating that they try
to forget it in a different way, by pretending it never hap-
pened and retreating mentally to an earlier, more pleasur-
able period in their lives (A. Freud 1946; S. Freud 1963
[1936]). For example, when a company town is abandoned
by its main employer, residents may focus on documenting
and celebrating the events of an earlier time (Hinsdale,
Lewis, and Waller 1995). They try to push traumatic events
from consciousness, but it is their continuing unconscious
memory that forces them to retreat to an earlier time. They
have stakes in consciously remembering a distorted view of
the past that keeps them from assimilating current events.
Nostalgia is a variation on this second response. What we
commonly call &dquo;nostalgia&dquo; seems to follow upon losses that
are less than traumatic. People find present conditions dis-
appointing, they see little likelihood of improvement, and
they harken back to gratifying memories of the past-the
good old days, the golden age when all was wonderful
(Gabriel 1993; Kaplan 1987; Werman 1977).
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7
The tone of these memories is similar to that of some
trauma victims, but people who experience less severe upset
have greater freedom in ordering their memories. In contrast
an with trauma victims, who are completely absorbed by the
past, people who are nostalgic treat their memories in a
compartmentalized manner. In many ways they act realisti-
cally in the contemporary world, while in one area holding
onto a glorious past. Though cognitively they know times
have changed, emotionally they feel they are in some ways
the same as before.
Comparison with the present is the heart of nostalgia. The
past seems more exalted than its contemporary shadow, but it
is also irrecoverably gone, separated forever from the present
by some watershed event. Hence &dquo;the golden era&dquo; is also &dquo;the
world we have lost.&dquo; In nostalgic memories, the past is not
continuous with the present. This isolation makes it possible
to idealize the past without challenge from other memories,
and it can then compensate for present disappointments.
For example, a community may face hard times when
manufacturers cut back operations, but residents can feel good
about themselves by recalling days when proud immigrants
worked tirelessly in factories to buy homes, raise families, and
establish themselves as Americans. People who feel their lives
are isolated or undistinguished can find apparent community
or specialness in neo-urban developments, theme parks, and
their variations that offer encapsulated experiences of idealized
past moments (Gottdiener 1997; Sorkin 1992). Professionals
who spend their days in nondescript bureaucracies can enjoy
former factory buildings that have been turned into bookstores
or coffee houses with exquisite architectural detail-and with-
out references to the hazardous, poorly compensated working
conditions of those who labored there (Lowenthal 1985).
Disappointment with the present makes future security
uncertain. Trauma instantly coats everything with contin-
gency. In different ways and to different degrees, people re-
spond by trying to forget what has upset them, what is asso-
ciated with that situation, and perhaps what followed it. To
repair the damage, they want to remember events in a way
that assures them conditions will be secure and gratifying.
Nostalgia epitomizes these defenses against contingency in
the ways it avoids a present where things change, as well as
the passage of time itself. People forget certain things in or-
der to remember certain others.
Thus the experience of contingency can foster intentions
to distort memory, such that less realistic information is
available for analysis and action that might reduce contin-
gency and its costs. Moreover, when people imagine they
can bring about what they idealize, make it real simply by
thinking of it, they have no motivation to act. When com-
munities do engage in formal planning, as in the vignettes
above, they may try to project an imaginary past onto the
future through wishful thinking, rather than creating a
workable future through strategic action (Baum 1997a,
1998; Marris 1975).
8
N REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
The problem of individuals and communities stuck in the
past and unable to plan is not that they do not remember
enough, but that they remember too much. They remember
certain experiences too vividly and rigidly. They identify so
strongly with particular good or bad_ memories that much of
their identity is attached to being part of some time in the
past; they cannot imagine themselves otherwise. The remedy
is not to remember everything, or even just to remember
more. It is to remember differently-and to forget.
The challenge is to get free of these memories by con-
structing a new narrative about the past where, whatever
happened, it is confined to the past. The emotional valence
of memories changes as in the idiom that one &dquo;forgives but
does not forget.&dquo; One may remember experiences but forget
some meanings in order to remember new details and mean-
ings. Under these conditions, memories of the past continue
but no longer arouse anxieties or desires that control present
actions. We speak of being &dquo;less attached&dquo; to certain events
or memories: We may continue to recall episodes but, leav-
ing them in the past, consider them less central to our iden-
tity and refer less to them in defining our contemporary re-
lationships.
Yet it is not enough just to insist that a group &dquo;be realis-
tic,&dquo; for there are moments when the past seems real enough
to those who hold fast to it. People will decide to remember
things differently for the same reasons they remembered
them originally: Pragmatically, memories make sense of ev-
eryday experiences and actions. Hence, the strongest motive
for forgetting certain memories and recollecting others is
that the apparent reality described by prevailing memories
conflicts with present realities. Change depends on seeing
costs in adhering to particular memories. For example, bask-
ing in warm thoughts of a community’s golden age may
hinder planning for improving housing stock and schools.
Mourning, Playing, and Working Through
Individuals, organizations, and communities are conserva-
tive, maintaining familiar ways of thinking, social relation-
ships, places, and practices that have given them meaningful
identities. When their identity is injured, when they feel they
have lost control over the relevant world, they seek anchors in
the past and hold fast against the depredations of change.
People experience change-even when it improves their
lives, even when they choose or enact it-as loss. Without
consciously thinking, we react with dual impulses of seeking
to return to a time when we were secure and trying to forget
altogether what has gone. Each is an effort to stop time, to
separate the past from the present. Giving up the past can
seem to mean disavowing oneself, committing existential
suicide. Thus individuals and collectivities try to preserve
themselves by imagining the future will recapitulate the
past. They retreat to fantasies in the unconscious, where
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there is no time, where past, present, and future are indistin-
substitute and wishful
guishable. They nostalgia thinking
for analysis and strategic action.
For example, public housing residents who live in deso-
late, crime-ridden neighborhoods may resist relocation or
demolition and replacement of their projects, even when
they can move into sounder, more attractive housing. They
have worked out relationships and routines with people and
places, and they are wary of new situations over which they
expect little control (Vale 1997; Varady and Walker 1997).
Many residents of the working-class neighborhoods de-
scribed in the first vignette prefer remembering vigorous
early immigrant communities to grappling with economic
and racial changes. Some talk of establishing a museum of
ethnic history. Jewish leaders in the
second vignette invoke
images of that community’s past and call for &dquo;Jewish conti-
nuity&dquo; while giving superficial attention to reasons why
many find other identities more attractive. They resist
changing their institutions to accommodate social and cul-
tural trends that draw members away.
And yet individuals and group do change. They adapt to
new conditions, they give up old ties, and they overcome
injury. They recognize costs to past ways of thinking, and
they see gains in new choices. They succeed in mourning
the loss of past attachments, reconciling them to present
realities. Marris (1975) describes widows’ grieving as a pro-
totypical process:
[G]rief works itself out through a process of re-
formulation, rather than substitution.
Confidence in the original commitment is re-
stored by extracting its essential meaning and
grafting it upon the present. This process in-
volves repeated reassurances of the strength and
inviolability of the original commitment, as
much as a search for the terms on which reat-
tachment would still make life worth living. Un-
til this ambivalent testing of past and future has
retrieved the thread of continuity, it is itself the
only deeply meaningful activity in which the be-
reaved can be engaged (98).
Successfulmourning depends on two related achieve-
ments. simultaneously accepting the passing of
One is
people, things, or conditions while continuing to care for
them. The other is recognizing continuity between the past
and present, setting time in motion again. These accom-
plishments make it possible to learn from the past to think
about the present and to contemplate and take responsibility
for the future.
Psychoanalysts describe this process as &dquo;working through&dquo;
past memories to free up the present (Brenner 1987; Freud
1958 [1914]; Greenacre 1956; Greenson 1965). Those who
are stuck in the past-for example, holding on to the mo-
ment of a trauma or injury or grasping at the last apparently

good time before that-must find ways to reconstruct the
old experience. In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, some-
one assists another in working things through. However,
often, as in mourning the loss of a loved one, individuals
adjust less formally, by talking with friends and relatives and
trying variously to get on with their lives. Even so, people
take themselves through mourning in a way that mirrors the
course of psychoanalysis (Parkin 1981), as if there is a
logic
to changing that the mind tacitly follows. Studies of modifi-
cations of group beliefs (Lewin 1951), rites of passage (Van
Gennep 1960 [1908]), other rituals (Turner 1969), and en-
try into organizations (Baum 1990) all find a similar three-
phase process that individuals and collectivities naturally
follow in changing ideas, roles, or identities.
Lewin’s (1951) simple formulation of group change cap-
tures the essence of the stages. First, people must &dquo;unfreeze&dquo;
old assumptions from past mental and social associations.
Second, they can move to different points-of-view and social
relations. Finally, they can &dquo;freeze&dquo; their thoughts again in
associations that hold them to the new position.
Many formal rituals, particularly in traditional societies,
are divided into three distinct stages, corresponding to these
tasks. They begin by stripping the participants of their ac-
customed identities and roles and then thrust them into a
transitional middle stage that does the work of change. Here
they are exposed to a condition where old statuses and trap-
pings no longer apply and everything is more or less up for
grabs (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 1960 [1908]). They can
leave only by taking a desired new identity. They manage in
this experience because they know it is part of a larger struc-
ture, preceded and certain to be followed by structure.
Moreover, especially in traditional communities, the stages
may be elaborately ritualized and new points of view may be
pre-ordained.
Everyday efforts to change in modern society are less de-
fined. Participation is voluntary. People calculate the costs
and benefits of unfreezing old memories, and they weight
the past much more heavily than the present. If they con-
template change, they assess the likely process. Will it be
painful? Will it harm them irreparably? Will they come out
safely? Will life be better as a result? Individuals and collec-
tivities vary in both their anticipations and their ability and
willingness to tolerate anxiety associated with change (Dia-
mond 1993; Stein 1994). In practice, boundaries between the
tasks of changing are often fuzzy, and participants may move
back and forth among them. They may declare their inten-
tions to change but resist unfreezing an old position until,
somehow, they experience moving safely to a new one. Mov-
ing in one respect may motivate unfreezing in another. Finally,
in contrast with many formal rituals, the length, course, and
outcome of change activities are difficult to predict.
Still, the conditions that enable individuals and collectivi-
tiesto change are the same that make the transitional stage
of formal rituals effective. People need a space that is free of
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9
everyday role obligations, tenets of faith, and time. They
must be able to try out different ways of thinking about and
looking at conditions without feeling that asking questions
and considering unwonted answers is irresponsible, disloyal,
or dangerous. Then they can engage in two activities of
changing.
Learning to Forget to Learn
The first activity is tentatively to adjust to the past. Under
these conditions, people can provisionally take up new ver-
sions of events, remembering them differently, without giv-
ing up old memories. Holding various accounts at once,
they can analyze why they may prefer memories that are
unrealistic or self-defeating. For example, why do residents
of an old coal town continue to act as if the mine is still op-
erating when it closed five years ago?
Yet asking such seemingly straightforward questions may
be difficult because giving up the past is painful. People
need to be able to play with their memories in a special way.
For example, when people are injured, they may symboli-
cally repeat their experience many times in an effort to mas-
ter it. They try to convert a passively experienced injury into
a symbolic mental equivalent over which they have active
mastery, as a way of curing themselves (Freud 1977 [1920];
Klein 1976; Waelder 1933). A shell-shocked soldier, for
example, may repeatedly watch war movies or engage in
competitive physical sports in an effort to find a way to
think of himself as a victor rather than a victim. A commu-
nity abandoned by its major employer may re-enact the sur-
rounding events in public theater in an attempt to direct
and play lead roles in what happened (Hinsdale, Lewis, and
Waller 1995).
Changing depends on the possibility of playing with
memories, mentally picking them up, turning them over,
putting them down, picking them up again and looking at
them from a different aspect, grouping them together in
new combinations, and so forth until one knows them dif-
ferently. When people feel that imagining new accounts of
the past does not unmoor them or betray anyone, they can
choose new memories. What if the town’s major employer
really has been gone for five years?
When people feel free to select their memories, they can
engage in the second task of changing, to live hypothetically
in the future. A transitional space allows people to experi-
ment with the imaginary consequences of thinking or acting
as if something unreal or not yet real were real. People can
consider possibilities that are realistic but unprecedented
when they feel free to think without having to follow with
commitments to action. They can play with roles that give
them control and situations that bestow dignity. What if the
town asked the state economic development agency to help
people leave for opportunities elsewhere? What if residents
raised funds to send their children away to college? What if
they tried to get a new federal prison built in the town?
10
Thus learning to accept past events as real so as to act re-
alistically toward the future in the present depends on re-
membering and forgetting. We may recall new details about
the past, and they may overshadow others we gradually lose
track of. But, centrally, we must forget memories as present
events and leave them to be rediscovered in the past tense.
We must forget that people, places, and things are as they
were. We must remember that things have changed, that
changes have brought injuries and losses. We must forget
that we will somehow perish if we lose certain things. We
must remember that we cared so deeply about them that we
wished to keep them with us forever.
There is an old joke, where someone tells another, &dquo;Don’t
think about elephants.&dquo; Remembering and forgetting are
linked in this paradoxical way. Their relationship is not di-
rect, linear, unidirectional, or fully conscious. There are no
even exchanges where, for example, community members
agree to forget something in order to remember something
else. Forgetting and remembering are intricately linked mo-
ments in a high-stakes struggle over how to interpret the
past and the present. It is possible to prepare the stage for
their play, but it is difficult to script the action or be sure of
the denouement.
0 PLANNING TO FORGET TO PLAN
Planning is an effort to help groups realistically assess
their conditions and choose future actions that could im-
prove them. The two vignettes show that remembering and
forgetting have practical consequences for planning. Contin-
gency always puts planning at risk; the future will elude our
full mental grasp. In addition, the peculiarities of human
memory, our anxieties about contingency, and our invest-
ments in forgetting certain things while remembering others
make it difficult to confront contingency with our strongest
mental armamentarium.
Communities find it hard to surrender the past. Even
while apparently engaging in planning, members may recall
another era and imagine that remembering it will keep it
alive or resurrect it. Fanciful thinking easily displaces analy-
sis. Communities may go through elaborate planning pro-
cesses only ritualistically, assuming that the effort will magi-
cally put the past into the future.
They may seem to look at present conditions, but do so
with a pseudo-realistic mania-constantly preparing and
holding meetings, obsessively collecting and analyzing data,
continually composing problem statements, cataloging
needs, inventorying resources, looking at every detail-do-
ing everything but facing facts, placing them in realistic per-
spectives, constructing and comparing big pictures, and
making difficult, unavoidably imperfect choices. The prod-
uct may be a plan that is intricately detailed but, neverthe-
less, disconnected from implementation. Indeed, it may be
unimplementable, and its unimplementability may tacitly
reassure community members that a realistic but disappoint-
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ing future will not take the place of the idealized past.
Mourning, playing, and working through are processes by
which individuals and collectivities try to give up the past
they love and struggle with a disquieting present to create a
future in which they might realistically hope. They suggest
principles for designing planning processes.
The Aims of Planning
Planning should enable a community to imagine its best
possible futures. Another way to say this is that planning
should help a community experience itself in time. In this
project, members must be able to balance imagination and
reality without yielding either.
Planning should help them reconstruct a community
ideal-an image of themselves as they would like to be-to
motivate the remembering and forgetting that will let them
wrest the future from the past. Individuals and groups alike
normally form tacit idealized self-portraits, representing the
best they can imagine themselves: virtuous, powerful, special,
and loved.The positive function of these ideals, with their
admixture of fantasy and realism, is to assert that one is worth
something, to define ways of being valued, and to motivate
efforts to improve, to become more like the ideal. An ideal
becomes problematic when people believe it requires them to
make themselves perfect and they find all real accomplish-
ments flawed. Then they become depressed and give up all
effort or turn to fantasy to perfect themselves by acts of imagi-
nation. Neither avenue engages the external world. Thus indi-
viduals and groups live with the challenge of shaping an ideal
that calls them to become noble and yet allows them to admire
themselves in what they can accomplish.
In this effort, communities must remember their past to
be good enough to justify faith in an ideal and to motivate
planning. They must also remember the past realistically
enough to differentiate events in it and to see those events as
the products of both deliberate actions and contingency.
Then they can think of themselves as trying to choose the
past, as responsible for their intentions, though not necessar-
ily what followed. Thinking in this way, they can see them-
selves in the past, but not wholly of the past. They can find
themselves as actors in time-not just the past, but, now,
the future. They can begin to move back and forth between
a good-enough portrayal of themselves in the past and a re-
alizable ideal for the future-one that calls them for great
things but allows them to approach greatness strategically,
incrementally, and fallibly.88
In other words, planning should help community mem-
bers recognize their human complexity-acknowledging the
ambiguity and multiplicity of their motivations and reasons,
including those knowable, those known, those unknown,
those unknowable, and those that, whatever the knowledge,
imagination, and effort, remain outside their control-their
own accidents waiting to happen. Community members
must learn to reconcile themselves to planning in the face of

the impossibility of doing so with full success. Contingency,
in others’ actions and their own that elude their grasp, will
foil planning, but it is the reason for making the attempt.
Telling a Story
Planning is an effort to tell a story about the future. Of-
ten the text is explicit and its drafting deliberate, as with a
plan (Mandelbaum 1990, 1991). As an account of the fu-
ture, a plan can be neither true nor false, though it may be
confirmed by subsequent events. As a declaration of inten-
tions, it may be written in good faith, and it may be realized
later on; this is the ambition of planning. In these respects,
plans are pragmatic documents (see Krieger 1981).
Written plans normally codify conversations about the
past, present, and future. Scarce time, money, and attention
limit the length of plans, and they inevitably exclude much.
Their authors emphasize what seemed most important at
the end, and they draft documents that take coherence at
the expense of accuracy. Plans rarely report ideas that were
rejected, much less those ignored, and they usually offer no
record of the discussion that preceded the conclusions. The
conclusions, lucidly presented, seem to stand on their own,
bolstered by statements about the people or places whose
interests they putatively serve, but separated from any testi-
mony regarding how their advocates came to believe them.
The stylistic norm for plans is to claim truth for an account
beyond those who subscribe to it.
The proclaimed purpose of plans is to motivate action, to
find an audience and encourage it to realize a vision. The
pragmatic test of a plan is whether it can convert readers
into collaborators. What kind of account of past, present,
and future could have this effect? It must help construct nar-
rative truth-a plausibly coherent account of the past that is
linked to the future and offers freedom to shape it (Spence
1982).~ It should portray the past as a domain of contingent
possibilities, where people tried to bring about certain con-
ditions, but where they might have made other choices,
where the results reflected not only their choices and efforts,
but also those of others as well as brute contingency, and
where things might have been different under other, even
kindred circumstances (Mandelbaum 1985). And it should
acknowledge the possibility of understanding the past in
different, divergent ways.
Constructing a narrative in this way can enable a commu-
nity to experience the past vitally for the first time. Mem-
bers can take it as an object for reflection, find themselves in
it, imagine alternative positions for themselves, and see vari-
ous ways of remembering themselves. In gaining freedom in
the past-specifically, in becoming able to reject certain nar-
ratives-they come into freedom in the future. Members
can contribute consciously to a community ideal, and they
can imagine ways to realize it.
Most written plans are too distilled to be powerful in
these ways. They offer readers a belief without engaging
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11
them as believers. They present a single narrative without
acknowledging alternatives or choices and without arguing
why one might be superior to another. Simply, they deny
contingency. Part of the explanation is that planners, misun-
derstanding professionalism, assume their credibility de-
pends on pretending to know everything. They may imag-
ine they can influence future affairs if only they assert a
single story to be unimpeachable truth (Benveniste 1989).
Interested parties may push planners to cast things in a spe-
cific light. These are all expressions of the wish to see a uni-
verse without contingency.
Planners must help community members understand and
give voice to these fantasies in order to resist them. Sometimes
planning processes do engage participants in confronting
themselves, contesting stories about their past and possibilities.
In these cases, a written plan is complemented orally by a rich
and efficacious aggregation of stories, arguments, and frag-
ments that comprise a fittingly complex narrative about the
community. A published document may give planning formal
authority, while the oral plan gives it force. Planners should
encourage such conversations, in which community members
can reveal and discover their desires, fears, doubts, and am-
bivalence about changing. Written documents can more or
less represent these intentions, but planners must take the dis-
cussions as a central part of the plan.
Planning for the Future
Planners, as partisans of the Enlightenment, promote
planning that is change-oriented, rational, logical, and com-
prehensive. Most speak unambiguously of change as im-
provement (see Lasch 1991). Yet change depends on stabil-
ity. People more or less willingly change when they see
themselves, nevertheless, continuing past attachments.
These connections maintain their sense of identity. Planners
often treat planning as if it involved a straightforward cogni-
tive process, imagining alternative futures. However, think-
ing about future possibilities must struggle against inclina-
tions to repeat the past.
Hence a planning process must create a transitional space,
between past and future, where participants can share the
illusion of being apart from time.&dquo; They need to imagine
stepping away from past memories without feeling they have
lost their identity or betrayed the objects of memory. They
need freedom from everyday responsibilities without feeling
irresponsible. They must be able to imagine alternative fu-
tures without feeling obligated to enact any of them. By
stepping out of time they can re-enter it with new possibili-
ties. Planners should secure the process with rules that en-
courage, allow, and protect such serious play without imme-
diate serious consequences. 11
In contemplating a new future, community members do
more than simply declare the past no longer matters. It will
continue to matter, but differently. Planners must let people
try to forget parts of the past and remember others. They
12
need to mourn for what they decide to give up. They must
talk about what they care about in the past, how they loved
it, how it made their lives meaningful, how it made them
feel special, and how they don’t want to give it up. And they
must talk about how they want to give it up, how they will
miss it, how they will feel guilty about surrendering it, how
they will be angry at themselves for letting go of something
they care deeply about, and yet how they must let go, be-
cause it is really gone, because holding on holds them back,
because it is an illusion, and for any other reasons. And they
must talk, once more, about how they will remember what
they are giving up, in a different way.
Thus planning must let people argue with themselves and
be inconsistent. Planners who insist that participants be ra-
tional or that discussions follow a logical order elicit only
superficial participation. Told to be rational, people assume
they have been told not to be themselves. They may feel
relieved: Planning will not require them to reveal or risk
what matters. They may let planners believe they have par-
ticipated, but they will not have planned.
Conflict arises when people disagree with one another
about what things are or who should get what. Conflict also
arises when people disagree with themselves, when they are
of two (or more) minds about something. Marris (1975)
notes, for example, that when community members are am-
bivalent about changing, unconsciously they may form op-
posing groups and do battle. The conflict may turn on sub-
stantive issues, perhaps of considerable importance, but the
sides tacitly represent different stances toward change. One
argues for leaping into the future, whereas another insists on
holding onto the past. Each represents part of a community
mind with respect to remembering and forgetting. If they
can resolve their differences, one effect will be to give up the
past sufficiently to approach the future. Planners who try to
suppress conflict or to resolve it on the basis only of substan-
tive issues can sabotage the work of grieving. Planners
should not only expect conflict, but encourage it when it is
part of mourning. Negotiations that produce agreements
can help groups work through common losses of past rela-
tionships.l2
When communities do decide to change, they want to
change only a little. Cognitively, they can take in only so
much of the world at once (Miller 1975). Practically, they
can affect only a small
part of what they see. Centrally,
people can tolerate only a little change without feeling lost.
Emotionally, human beings are incrementalists. Yet compre-
hensiveness is a tenet of planners’ faith: If something should
change, everything connected to it should change, at once.
Sometimes planners’ thinking is aesthetic: The parts of a
picture should fit together. Other times, their reasoning is
empirical: The parts of a society work together. However,
what planners often leave out is the humans in the build-
ings, places, or institutions. They must change for land use
(that is, how they use land) to change. Many planners think
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about comprehensiveness too narrowly, and comprehensive
change, whatever its virtues, seems too easy. Planners can
help communities change by helping them keep many
things the same.
A planner has instrumental roles in encouraging talk and
reflection. In addition, participants thrust a planner into
symbolic roles. To them, the planner is the one who stirs
things up, talks about change, and urges them to give up
what gratifies them. Community members may do battle
with planners as a way of expressing mixed feelings about
changing: If only they could beat down the planner who
represents an untested future, they wouldn’t have to give up
the past. At the same time, they may associate the planner
with the past, for example, as the symbolic agent of the
changes that eroded past glories. In a convoluted way, by
engaging the planner in conflict, they continue to keep
themselves in the past they want to remember. Planners
need to recognize when communities fight them as a way of
managing their anxiety about changing. They should help
people discuss their fears as a way to see past them toward
the future.
One might protest that the planning proposed here is im-
practical. Who would tolerate seeming free-for-all in public
meetings? What would happen if hundreds of people each
claimed to have part of an oral plan? Wouldn’t talk about
the past just open up avoidable conflicts and divert attention
from current conditions? Wouldn’t all the experimental talk
of a transitional space just help people avoid thinking seri-
ously about practical action? How are planning commis-
sions, legislatures, and administrators supposed to make de-
cisions out of all this?
These are good questions. The vignettes at the beginning
argue that the easy answers are bad answers because they are
not practical. Communities often have difficulty thinking
about the future. Written plans frequently represent agree-
ments about superficial matters that do not touch the prob-
lems bothering people. We have examined many of the rea-
sons-normal human reasons. Taking them seriously does
not quickly lead to simple accommodations. Yet these con-
cerns are not utopian. We can find encouraging examples in
disparate places-participatory planning, alternative dispute
resolution, and organizational consultation, for instance
(Diamond 1993; Forester 1989; Medoff and Sklar 1994;
Stein 1994; Susskind and Cruikshank 1987; Weisbord et al.
1992). The impracticality of many planning practices
obliges us to search on.
Author’s Note- John Forester, Sanda Kaufman, Martm Krzeger, and Seymour
Mandelbaum have helped clarify the ideas here.

NOTES
1. Baum (1997a, 1998) describes these Balumore, Maryland, cases of the
Southeast Planning Council and The Associated, respectively.
2. Seymour Mandelbaum helped clarify these issues.
3. Mitroff (1974) provides an excellent study of the practice of natural
science, which contrasts with ideal norms in being highly subjective.
4. To varying degrees, they recognize that external, political economic,
structures limit individual or community action. Few say much about
internal structures—personality and cognitive processes—and how they
limit action possibilities.
5. Freud (1977 [1920]) postulated the existence of a death instinct. Death,
he observed, is the end of biological life—not just its termination, but
also its aim. He suggested the life course is a contest between life-
sustaining impulses and the death instinct, in which the latter is
ultimately the victor. His formulation can be considered metaphorical,
but it captures the sense of being responsible for personal setbacks as well
as one’s eventual demise. See Brown (1959).
6. Freud (1962 [1899]) gave the name "screen memories" to innocuous
images of past episodes that people unconsciously construct to conceal
other, anxiety-provoking memories from consciousness. The clarity of
screen memories insidiously confuses us into thinking we are remember-
ing something when, in reality, we are forgetting other things.
7. Children draw these idealized pictures, called the ego ideal, from what
they remember of the earliest, seemingly unblemished moments of life,
seeing themselves as perfect, omnipotent, omnicompetent, omniscient,
and the center of a loving world (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1985; Freud 1959
[1921],1962 [1923]). Adults carry a modification of it into their
endeavors. For example, they may idealize themselves as part of an
organization (Schwartz 1990) or community (Baum 1997a).
8. "Future search conferences," for example, begin a planning process by
helping participants construct a common history (Weisbord et al. 1992).
9. Carr (1961) writes, "To enable man to understand the society of the past
and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual
function of history" (69). Mandelbaum (1977, 1980, 1984, 1991) has
articulated a view of the pragmatic uses of history in planning.
10. This discussion draws on Winnicott’s (1953, 1967) concept of the
transitional object. The prototype is the infant’s blanket, which
symbolizes the relationship with the mother. Manipulating the
blanket—holding it, putting it aside, picking it up again—allows a
child to contemplate alternative relationships with the mother. The
transitional object creates an ontologically ambiguous space that allows
experimentation with new positions without giving up old ones. A
planning process can provide a similar space for illusions.
11. John Forester notes that the purpose of ground rules in mediated
negotiation and consensus building is to create such transitional space.
12. In planning by The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of
Baltimore, community groups disagreed about the authority of
different memories and the legitimacy of alternative futures. Planners
tried to suppress conflict in order to plan harmoniously. Instead, the
conflicts, undiscussed and unaddressed, persisted, and the organization
could not plan realistically (Baum 1997a). Forester (1994) shows the
importance of explicitly addressing traumas and grievances.
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