Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes

Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Pierre Bourdieu, and Marie Langer are among those activists, clinicians, and academics who have called for a social psychoanalysis. For over thirty years, Lynne Layton has heeded this call and produced a body of work that examines unconscious process as it operates both in the social world and in the clinic.In this volume of Layton’s most important papers, she expands on earlier theorists’ ideas of social character by exploring how dominant ideologies and culturally mandated, hierarchical identity prescriptions are lived in individual and relational conflict. Through clinical and cultural examples, Layton describes how enactments of what she calls ‘normative unconscious processes’ reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender, and class both inside and outside the clinic, and at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels.Clinicians, academics, and activists alike will find here a deeper understanding of the power of unconscious process, and are called on to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled.

About the Author

Lynne Layton , Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She supervises at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and teaches social psychoanalysis in the Department of Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory , and co-editor of 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 2004–2018, she was co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. She is Past-President of Section IX of Division 39, 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.

Marianna Leavy-Sperounis received her Psy.D. from The George Washington University, Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and B.A. from Oberlin College. She completed her predoctoral internship at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School and currently serves as a board member of Section IX (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility) of Division 39 (Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. Prior to clinical training, she worked as a community organizer in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on the 2008 Obama campaign in Colorado; she also served as a political appointee to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.