Book Announcement by Lynne Layton (USA)
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 that 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, edited by Marianna Leavy-Sperounis for Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series, Layton 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, she 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, both to reproduce and to contest systemic inequalities. As Layton traces the contributions and shortcomings of contemporary psychoanalysis, she calls on readers to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled.
Lynne Layton, PhD is a psychoanalyst on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School, supervises at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics, and Past-President of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility.
Lynne Layton, PhD
Brookline, MA
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