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

Description

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. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents Editor’s introduction: Social psychoanalysis: centering power dynamics and affirming our interdependence Author’s general introduction: Toward a social psychoanalysis: culture, character, and normative unconscious processes Section I What is social psychoanalysis? 1 Dreams of America/American dreams (2004) 2 Notes toward a nonconformist clinical practice: response to Philip Cushman’s “Between Arrogance and a Dead-End: Gadamer and the Heidegger/Foucault Dilemma” (2005) 3 Attacks on linking: the unconscious pull to dissociate individuals from their social context (2006) 4 What divides the subject? Psychoanalytic reflections on subjectivity, subjection, and resistance (2008) 5 Relational theory in socio-historical context: implications for technique (adapted from Layton, 2013, 2018) 6 Psychoanalysis and politics: historicizing subjectivity (2013) Section II Normative unconscious processes 7 The psychopolitics of bisexuality (2000) 8 Relational no more: defensive autonomy in middle-class women (2004) 9 That place gives me the heebie jeebies (2004, 2006) 10 Class in the clinic: enacting distinction (adapted from Layton, 2014a) 11 Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes (adapted from Layton, 2006, 2017) Section III Neoliberal subjectivities and contemporary U.S. life 12 Who’s responsible? Our mutual implication in each other’s suffering (adapted from Layton, 2009) 13 Irrational exuberance: neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth (2010) 14 Yale, fail, jail: sadomasochistic individual, large-group, and institutional effects of neoliberalism (Adapted from Layton, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016) 15 Something to do with a girl named Marla Singer: capitalism, narcissism, and therapeutic discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club (adapted from Layton, 2011, 2017) 16 Transgenerational hauntings: toward a social psychoanalysis and an ethic of dis-illusionment (2019) References Index