Present, past, and future - Conjugating George Herbert Mead's perspective on time

Time is of utmost importance in the writings of George Herbert Mead, the Am erican pragmatist philosopher and social psychologist. Yet, despite Mead's prominence as the primary source of the symbolic interactionist approach to sociology, most social scientists are unfamiliar with his perspective on t emporality. We describe his analysis of the present, the past, and the futu re emphasizing that, for Mead, people live in the present, and that their i nterpretations of the past and the future are shaped by the present. In add ition, we consider the implications of his perspective for our understandin g of the self, interaction, and society.