Description: This lecture takes up the question of what a social psychoanalysis might look like in the clinic, in our psychoanalytic institutions, and in our society. Drawing on some earlier psychoanalysts’ concepts that have connected the social world and the psychic world, this program will introduce the concept of normative unconscious processes, which addresses the ways that racism, heterosexism, classism, and other social inequalities are unconsciously replicated in the clinic. The talk then explores how therapists can resist unconsciously replicating such cultural inequalities and look outside the clinic at how cultural inequalities manifest in the wider circles of contemporary institutional and sociocultural life. Here, too, we will explore how we, as citizens and therapists, both unconsciously replicate and can resist replicating harmful, unequal relations. We will think together about how to address the places in our different subjective and communal worlds where harm has been done, and engage together on how to make repairs.

About the Presenter: Lynne Layton, PhD is a graduate and supervising psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a Corresponding Member of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and co-editor of 3 books: Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of Self; Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis; and Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. From 2004-2017, she was co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and she is currently an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is a past-President of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility and founder of Reflective Spaces/Material Places-Boston, a group of psychodynamic therapists committed to community mental health and social justice. She is the author (with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis) of the 2020 book Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, winner of a 2021 book award from the American Academy and Board of Psychoanalysis.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define and give examples of clinical enactments of normative unconscious processes.
2. Analyze the way that neoliberal institutions and ideologies shape subjective practices and create particular kinds of symptoms, with which therapists can either unconsciously collude—or, instead, analyze.
3. Describe how intersections of gender, race, and class hierarchies are unconsciously enacted in their institutions and propose ideas for institutional transformation.

Related Readings:

1. Layton, L. (2014). Some psychic effects of neoliberalism: Narcissism, disavowal, perversion. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 19(2), 164-178.
2. Layton, L. (2019). Transgenerational hauntings: Toward a social psychoanalysis and an ethic of disillusionment. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 29, 105-121.
3. Layton, L. (2020). Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, character, and normative unconscious processes (M. Leavy-Sperounis, Ed.). Routledge.

CE & CME Information