Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting

Psychoanalysis, class & politics: Encounters in the clinical setting. Edited by Lynne Layton, Nancy Hollander & Susan Gutwill. London & New York: Routledge .
Table of contents

• What Psychoanalysis, Culture And Society Mean To Me
• Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting
• Book Details
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In this globalized and mass-media saturated world, we now build our identities in relation to identities circulating in other cultures as well. This can have both constricting and liberating effect, sometimes both at once. The influence of US popular culture abroad often creates new social problems for example, eating disorders among women whose cultures introduce US television and its norms of female beauty , but at other specific times and places, it has offered liberatory possibilities for example, the way some Eastern and other Western youth cultures used US and UK popular music in the 60s and 70s to protest coercive norms in their own cultures and as a basis for their own indigenous music.

In several of my papers , c, a , I have given examples of how patient and therapist collude in normative unconscious enactments that perpetuate racism, sexism, heterosexism and class inequality. It has become one of my main interests to understand how what I know about the interplay between psyche and society plays itself out in the unconscious dynamics of patient and therapist in the clinic. In the history of psychoanalytic theorizing, even within that small body of work that does investigate the relation between psyche and society, clinical applications have been a fairly neglected research domain.

In one example of enactments of normative unconscious processes Layton, b , I discussed the pull on the patient and therapist alike to uphold the US cultural norm that insists we separate the psychic from the social. In my experience, most of the dominant discourses in US life, including most psychoanalytic theories and practices, sustain the fantasy that the two are separate.

My own contribution b described work with a patient who brought in a dream about a politician and then became uncomfortable when her associations led her to talk about her politics. Both she and I discovered a resistance to letting the political in; we both felt a strong pull to interpret the content of the dream in terms of early family conflict, a pull that interfered with and nearly shut down a passion rarely glimpsed in this patient-indeed, her lack of passion was one of her primary complaints on entering therapy.

As I said above, within mainstream psychoanalysis it is still controversial to consider culture as a mediating influence in the development of the psyche. I went to psychology graduate school in the early to late 80s and at that time my department was psychoanalytic, as was the hospital in which I did my internship. Unfortunately, sociology is not terribly open to psychoanalysis either, and there is nothing in the US that approximates the psycho-social studies programmes that exist, for example, in the UK. Psychoanalysis in the US thrives predominantly in literature departments which largely consider only Freud and Lacan and in psychoanalytic institutes, where, ironically, there has been an explosion of new theories and models at the very moment when psychoanalysis has lost its cultural cachet and its professional dominance in psychiatry departments.

I shall conclude by discussing some of my work in this area, another arena in which I investigate the relation between the psychic and the social. Much of the work in cultural studies focuses on the way media create identifications, structure subjectivities and pull for particular kinds of unconscious fantasies that, as with the normative unconscious processes I discussed above, tend to affirm a capitalist or a racist or a sexist status quo.

In trying to understand what has been going on politically and psychically in the US during the right wing backlash that has dominated the past six years, I have been most struck by the way that need, dependency and vulnerability have become increasingly marked as shameful-at the same time that fears about an out of control world are daily stoked by media and government alike. When I think about the way such vulnerabilities are expressed in the clinic, one of the few places left in the US where one has permission to express them without shame, I find that, for many people, the two primary defenses against exposure of vulnerability are either withdrawal or retaliation.

While I do not think that one can apply concepts of individual psychology to group psychology in any linear fashion, I do think that one thing we are witnessing in the US today is what I have elsewhere called Layton c a politics of attack and withdrawal.

The politics of attack are clearly seen in the virulent and hate-filled backlash against the gains made by the social movements of the last half of the twentieth century: The politics of withdrawal are seen in the general apathy of the voting population, but most troublingly perhaps in privileged, liberal circles. Peltz talks about the absence of a containing function of contemporary government, and she argues that this promotes a culture in which one manically denies one's need for the other and for caretaking.

In what ways might our clinical theory and practice collude with a culture that promotes a terrified and terribly lonely version of independence? While I certainly think that psychoanalytic practitioners value interdependence as an ideal of mental health, I also think that the fact that we exclude cultural considerations from the clinic forces upon us perhaps a too narrow vision of interdependence, one limited to the private sphere of family and close friends.

So what I have begun to think about, drawing again on contemporary cultural theory and art, are the ways in which we are mutually implicated in each other's lives, joys and pains. At the same time, for Skeggs's subjects, becoming respectable also means dis-identifying with the ways the female working class subject is typically figured in upper-class valuations-as slutty, less moral in general and wanting in sophistication and taste.

In the norms of dominant culture, it is the middle class female who holds the claim on respectability that this particular group of working class females covet and attempt to re-define in their favour. Yet, as Skeggs shows, they never quite feel capable of securely possessing respectability.

The book's essays provide interesting sociological data on the transfer of domestic services from low-to high-income cultures. These examples of the way that subordinate and dominant identities are built in relation to one another also exemplify the way that, within a given culture, we become implicated in each other's vulnerabilities and pain. That part of identity that one uses defensively to, in Bourdieu's words, achieve distinction, is the very part that one learns to wield against others Bourdieu, As I think more about how, for example, one group's repudiation of dependency might psychologically affect those lower on the social totem pole, those who are called upon to shield those above from knowing how dependent they are, I become aware of the fact that, as Butler has said, it is our vulnerabilities that bind us one to the other-both in joy and pain.

In conclusion, I am arguing that many of the psychological problems that clinicians treat are a result of social inequalities. While identity categories can be deployed in ways that facilitate growth, social inequalities such as sexism, racism and classism cause wounds that split the psyche, creating shameful vulnerabilities that we defend against by wielding identity as a weapon against others.

In my view, it is both difficult to recognize and to acknowledge the fact that we are all mutually implicated in each other's identity wounds, that we are both victims of inequality and perpetrators of it. Until we are able to do this, however, both in the clinic and in the culture at large, we will continue to perpetuate conditions of inequality.

The process of identity formation in social conditions of inequality results in the splitting off of part of what it means to be human. As all identities are formed in relation to other identities circulating within a culture, the splits implicate us in each other's suffering. She has taught culture and psychoanalysis for Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Who's That Girl?

Encounters in the Clinical Setting Routledge, Layton Lynne, , What psychoanalysis, culture and society mean to me. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

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Journal List Mens Sana Monogr v. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Abstract The paper reviews some ways that the social and psychic have been understood in psychoanalysis and argues that a model for understanding the relation between the psychic and the social must account both for the ways that we internalize oppressive norms as well as the ways we resist them. Internalisation of Norms, Psychic Resistance and Challenge to Social Norms The models I've laid out thus far tend to select either the social or the psychic as their prime mover. Social Hierarchies Pull for Splitting The problems that I see as both social and individual problems are often the sequelae of the way that hierarchies of gender, race, class, sexuality operate in any given culture.

Clinical Theory and Practice, Cultural Interdependence In what ways might our clinical theory and practice collude with a culture that promotes a terrified and terribly lonely version of independence? Concluding Remarks In conclusion, I am arguing that many of the psychological problems that clinicians treat are a result of social inequalities. Take Home Message The process of identity formation in social conditions of inequality results in the splitting off of part of what it means to be human. Questions That This Paper Raises How do we account for the intersection of society and individual subjectivity?

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Book Details

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