Routledge Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

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. Review Now that ‘the political turn’ in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has been added to ‘the relational turn’, it is nothing short of wonderful and liberating to read this panoptic collection of Lynne Layton’s work. For those of us struggling to realise the potential of our field, Lynne is the outstanding writer on how the social and the clinical interweave. We sit at her feet. She is also the go-to theorist on how psychoanalysis can still function as the best and most alert approach to critiques of the sorry political state of ‘the West’. Lynne’s compassion, dedication, and knowledge of the relevant history are exemplary. Students and more seasoned practitioners, in clinic and in academy, will want to keep the book close at hand. Andrew Samuels is founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility,UK and author of The Political Psyche In Towards a Social Psychoanalysis, Layton demonstrates her formidable scholarship, her incisive cultural critique, her clinical acumen, and her activist spirit. Over the last few decades, Layton has been devoted to integrating psychoanalysis with social justice. This book represents the pinnacle of that work. This is a profound query into, and rewriting of, the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, in search of cultural and political engagement. Highly readable and sophisticated, the book is interdisciplinary in scope and always immediate in its address to human suffering. In these dark times, this is essential reading. Layton inspires us to action and ameliorates our isolation and despair. Sue Grand is faculty in the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis and author of The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical & Cultural Perspective Toward a Social Psychoanalysis is an exciting and much needed contribution to the current awakening to the task of theorizing the social and political unconscious as embraced by the founders of psychoanalysis. Packed with wonderful insights, this masterful work offers an accessible and stimulating guide through the complex matrix of contemporary social theory and relational psychoanalysis, enabling a confrontation with the urgent problems of race, class and gender as they affect patients in psychotherapy and society as a whole. Clinicians and academics alike will find this book indispensable. Jessica Benjamin, author of Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third Lynne Layton’s brilliant essays hold the key to understanding how we have become the people we are in this society and to begin to imagine the people we might yet become in a more just and decent world. Challenging longstanding therapeutic models that divorce the psychic from the social, she connects the contours of our seemingly private and personal passions to the public pro