Jonathan Lear gave the Contemporary Civilization Course-wide Lecture on Friday April 17, 2009 in the Miller Theatre. Though geared at CC students and their faculty, the lecture was open to all. Professor Lear's lecture, entitled Freud, On Getting Stuck and Not Fitting In, addressed Freud in the larger CC context and connected his ideas with the text read by students in CC—Plato's Republic.

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He works primarily on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates to the present. He also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and he serves on the Faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He most recently authored Freud (2005) and Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006).