Beginning with Fromm's assertion of a "social unconscious" and vignettes from the 50s and 60s that illustrate how clinical interpretations can contribute to reproducing a sexist status quo, the presentation demonstrates how unconscious psychosocial processes permeate identity formation and clinical work. Examples of racist, sexist, and classist enactments in the clinic demonstrate the workings of normative unconscious processes that sustain cultural and power inequalities. Such enactments are not considered "mistakes," but rather demonstrate the way identities of both patients and therapists are formed by cultural demands to split off and project ways of being human deemed not "proper" to occupying their given social position. The talk concludes with thoughts about contemporary social forces that contribute to white middle-class subject formation and white middle-class symptoms, focusing again on unconscious collusions that stem from both culture and clinic.
Lynne Layton, Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology, Part-Time, Harvard Medical School. Holding a Ph.D. in psychology as well as comparative literature, she has taught courses on gender, popular culture and on culture and psychoanalysis for Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies and Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. Currently, she teaches and supervises at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory (Analytic Press, 2004), co-editor, with Susan Fairfield and Carolyn Stack, of Bringing the Plague. Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2002), and co-editor, with Nancy Caro Hollander and Susan Gutwill of Psychoanalysis, Class, andPolitics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Routledge, 2006). She is Past-President of Section IX, Division 39 (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility) and co-founder of Reflective Spaces/Material Places-Boston.