Lynne Layton

Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes.

The author surveys various views of racial and ethnic identity, and proposes a model of thinking about identity aimed at capturing both its oppressive and its facilitating character. To further elaborate the dual nature of identity, she discusses the way that inequities in the social world, and the ideologies that sustain them, produce narcissistic wounds that are then enacted consciously and unconsciously by both patient and therapist. A variety of such enactments are presented in a summary of the author’s work with an Asian American patient, during which she began to recognize unconscious racial and cultural underpinnings of some of the ways she has thought about certain “basics” of psychoanalytic practice: dependence, independence, happiness, and love.

Who's Responsible? Our Mutual Implication in Each Other's Suffering

In this paper, I examine the social and psychological roots of what I call neoliberal subjectivity, a version of contemporary subjectivity marked by a repudiation of vulnerability that has arisen from the social, economic, and political milieu of the past 30 years. The defense mechanisms involved in such a repudiation cause a decline in empathic capacities and in the capacity to experience ourselves as responsible and accountable for the suffering of others. I look at the way conflicts in the area of accountability and responsibility are lived both within our patients and within the interaction between patient and analyst. I argue that contemporary definitions of empathy normalize the repudiation of vulnerability and thereby foster an experience of empathy in which one can sustain a safe distance from the suffering other and not hold oneself accountable. A two-way version of empathy that counters neoliberal trends requires that we examine the ways we seek refuge in identifications that distance us from vulnerability, and it requires us to recognize the harm we inflict when we do so.

Some psychic effects of neoliberalism: Narcissism, disavowal, perversion

Neoliberalisms promote the development of certain versions of subjectivity, certain character structures, defenses, transferences, and countertransferences. Foucauldian theories go only so far in being able to account for the way neoliberal versions of subjectivity are lived. The paper elaborates on the individual, group, and relational effects of social repudiations of vulnerability and dependency needs and describes the perverse effects of the widespread disavowal of the interdependence of privileged and marginalized populations.

Working Nine to Nine: The New Women of Prime Time

Contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory has posited two psychic structures typical of the heterosexual familys gender arrangements: male defensive autonomy and female relational submissiveness. This essay looks at recent television shows that normalize defensive autonomy in women. These shows, and the young women they reach, are products of a “stalled” feminist revolution and an impoverished cultural imaginary that offers its subjects, male and female, only these two split positions.

Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Therapeutic Discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club

David Fincher’s Fight Club well represents the violent effects of capitalism on psychic structure. While offering a critique of the violence wrought by commodity capitalism and technical rationality, and while empathizing with the pain suffered by the narcissistic character structure it fosters, the film simultaneously presents a narrative whose form mimics the damaging effects of capitalism on the male psyche. The film offers two different solutions to the main character’s suffering: self-help therapy groups and Fight Club. The chapter argues that the incoherence introduced by a narrative rupture that separates the presentation of the two solutions—a rupture blamed on the film’s female protagonist—represents the site of unconscious conflict. Although the film makes it clear that the protagonist’s pain is a result of the meaninglessness of his relationships and the immorality of his job, the film yet proffers re-masculinization as a solution. In so doing, the film suggests that narcissistic wounds are best treated by shoring up male narcissism.

Psychoanalysis and politics: Historicising subjectivity

In this paper, I compare three different views of the relation between subjectivity and modernity: one proposed by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a second by theorists of institutionalised individualisation, and a third by writers in the Foucaultian tradition of studies of the history of governmentalities. The theorists were chosen because they represent very different understandings of the relation between contemporary history and subjectivity. My purpose is to ground psychoanalytic theory about what humans need in history and so to question what it means to talk ahistorically about what humans need in order to thrive psychologically. Only in so doing can one assess the relation between psychoanalysis and progressive politics. I conclude that while psychoanalysis is a discourse of its time, it can also function as a counter-discourse and can help us understand the effects on subjectivity of a more than thirty year history in the West of repudiating dependency needs and denying interdependence.

Editor’s introduction to special section on the psychosocial effects of neoliberalism, part II

After a brief description of neoliberalism, this introduction contends that the articles in the special section on the psychosocial effects of neoliberalism contribute novel ways of thinking about (1) how neoliberalism is lived among different populations; (2) what kinds of fantasies and psychic damage neoliberal policies promote; and (3) what conscious and unconscious forms of collusion and resistance accompany its emergence.

Dialectical Constructivism in Historical Context: Expertise and the Subject of Late Modernity

In this paper, I bring relational theory, particularly the work of Irwin Hoffman, into conversation with the work of several sociologists who have explored subjective experience in late modernity. The work of these sociologists suggests that even what we consider to be our existential condition is inextricable from socio-historical circumstance. The work also suggests why relational theory and practice might, at this historical juncture, feel so compelling and so true to so many of us. An important focus of the sociologists’ work is the role played by expertise in the development of late modern subjectivity. Hoffmans thoughts on analytic authority are brought into relation with complementary and contrasting sociological views on experts and expertise.

Editors’ introduction to ‘Reflections on the Revolutions of our Time’

The journal editors introduce a new thread of short pieces that will reflect on current political events. The thread begins with two short pieces on Trumpism.

On Moralism and Ethics: Associations to Henry Abelove’s “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans”

ABSTRACT Henry Abelove (1986) writes that Freud was troubled by what he saw as moralistic leanings pervading the theory and practice of early American psychoanalysis. Drawing on Erikson’s (1976) distinction between moralism and ethics, my associations to Abelove’s still very timely paper explore the psychological “deals” we all tend to make between moralism and ethics. I begin with Freud’s less than progressive views of female homosexuality. I then focus on the way that what I have called normative unconscious processes enter contemporary theory and practice. I draw attention to a continued presence in our theories of a straight/gay binary (which, according to Abelove, Freud contested), and I give an example of the effects of an unconscious adherence to neoliberal cultural norms. I conclude with the suggestion that, although fraught, it is nonetheless crucial to think about what is “the good.”