Abstract
This review will not be able to do justice to the depth, scope and texture of Lynne Layton’s exciting work. She will be mostly unknown to readers of this journal despite the fact that she has been writing on themes and issues that are closely aligned with the radical heart of group analysis, and has been doing so for over 40 years. One reason for her invisibility has to do with the disdain that British psychoanalysis views the relational versions of psychoanalysis that have blossomed on the North American continent—characterizing its ethos as superficial and too ‘nice’ (chapter 1). Another reason is that her version of psychoanalysis is highly politicized, and so is readily dismissed and denigrated as not ‘proper’ psychoanalysis (editor’s introduction).
Her name rightly belongs alongside other psychoanalytic icons such as Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler, because even whilst she draws on their insights (and not only theirs), the originality of her contributions are surely the equal of theirs. But even this is to reduce her stature, positioning her as a ‘feminist psychoanalyst’, rather than simply a psychoanalyst.
But she is more than ‘simply’ a North American relational psychoanalyst; she is also an academic, and most importantly, she is also an activist. Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, (the editor of this collection of papers) names Lynne Layton a ‘clinician-scholar-activist’. It is the last term in this trinity that makes her stand out from the crowd—psychoanalytic as well as group analytic—and gives her work its unique voice and moral authority. Her continued activism would be frowned on by the psychotherapy umbrella body here in the UK; recently, the Chair of the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy condemned psychotherapists taking part and getting arrested in climate change protests—deeming their activity to be a disciplinary matter as they would have brought the profession into disrepute. In contrast, for Layton the work of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is in itself a form of activism—a notion that is anathema to the conservative mainstreams in the UK and USA. For her, therapeutic work consists of ‘reconnecting patients with their histories and restoring the broken social link in a way that counters institutionalized individualization and neoliberal denials of embeddedness’ (p.70).
In this series of essays written over a period of 20 years, I found a fellow traveller, albeit a traveller who is much ahead of me. Her project over the years has been to build and develop a ‘Social Psychoanalysis’, a psychoanalysis that does not think it a virtue to leave the sociological and political outside the door of the clinic; a psychoanalysis that does not reduce the social and political to symbolic expressions of intrapsychic dynamics. Her psychoanalysis is profoundly psychosocial. I say profound, because the more usual usage of the term is psychosocial is thin, in that it starts with interactions between a pre-existing social and a pre-existing psychological. Layton’s understanding is deeper and akin to that of Norbert Elias in which what comes to be called social and psychological are themselves precipitations of power relational processes. She pays particular attention to the ways that neoliberalism produces subjectivities that are readily subjugated and commodified.
She says ‘a social psychoanalysis must not only account for the psychological damage wrought on oppressed (and dominant) populations but also work in whatever ways it can to dismantle the institutions that sustain that oppression’ (xxxix). For her ‘any psychoanalytic theory that divorces individual dynamics from social inequality and historical reality . . . shores up the status quo’ (p. 21).
Lynne Layton started out as an academic, beginning with studies in comparative literature at a time when Marxist notions were to the fore. She participated in feminist and anti-capitalist activism, and was drawn to the ideas of Stuart Hall, the Frankfurt School, Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci, and others from ‘the left’ of the political spectrum. She taught at Harvard and was influenced by ‘anti-capitalist Gramsci-inspired work’ as well as by the critical theories she encountered in academia—such as Althusser, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and Intersectionalist Feminist Theories. She then trained as a psychoanalyst at a time when Kohut and Kernberg’s theories were in the forefront. But, she says, ‘I did not find a psychoanalytic theory that felt ‘true’ to me until I encountered relational psychoanalytic theory’ (xxvii).
Her relationship to this home though, is also a critical one: she constantly challenges and questions the decontextualization and depoliticization that is prevalent in the field. She says, and I agree, that cultural, social and political contexts ‘are not add-ons to psychodynamics: they constitute psychodynamics’ (p.19). Here she is close to Foulkes and his dictum that the individual is social through and through. In one of the essays, she uses Bion’s concept of ‘attacks on linking’ to think about and explain why psychoanalysis has found it necessary to create a rupture between the social and psychological, and suggests variously that the reasons are ideological.
Key to her endeavour is her notion of ‘Normative Unconscious Processes’, which not only is akin to the group analytic notion of the Social Unconscious, it is (in my view) a richer and more radical notion because it retains the political at its centre, and in so doing is ever mindful of the workings of power and power-relations in the clinic. Normative unconscious processes are mechanisms that both normalize and reproduce power differentials in society as well as the clinic.
Normative unconscious processes are the lived effects on identity formation of unequal power arrangements and dominant ideologies that split and differentially value straight from gay, rich from poor, masculine from feminine, white from black and brown. Social hierarchies of sex(ism), class(ism), race(ism), heterosex(ism) mandate what one will have to split off to attain a ‘proper’ identity. (p.xxxii)
Layton’s writing is always engaging, clear and thoughtful. She does not lecture the reader nor talk down to them. She continually grounds her thinking in clinical material, and so makes concrete and accessible what might otherwise be too abstract and theoretical. Therapists are not immune to being driven by normative unconscious processes; the fact that they are unconscious, means that they/we are not aware of how we reproduce and reinforce social norms in our practice. Layton uses case material from her practice to show the occasions that she has fallen foul of it, and once she becomes aware, how she deals with it.
The book is structured into three sections, each consisting of a number of revised versions of previously published papers. The titles of the essays give a hint as to the scope of Layton’s range of interests.
Section 1 What is social psychoanalysis?: ‘Dreams of America/American Dreams’; ‘Toward a nonconformist clinical practice’; ‘Attacks on Linking: the unconscious pull to dissociate individuals from their social context’; ‘What divides the subject? Psychoanalytic reflections on subjectivity, subjection and resistance’; ‘Relational theory in socio-historical context’; ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics: historicizing subjectivity’.
Section 2 Normative Unconscious Processes: ‘The psychopolitics of bisexuality’; ‘Relational no more: defensive autonomy in middle-class women’; ‘That place gives me the jeebie jeebies’; ‘Class in the clinic: enacting distinction’; ‘Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes’.
Section 3 Neoliberal subjectivities and contemporary U.S. life: ‘Who’s responsible? Our mutual implication in each other’s suffering’; Irrational exuberance: neoliberal subjectivity and the perversion of truth’; ‘Yale, Fail, Jail: . . . institutional effects of neoliberalism’; ‘Something to do with a girl named Marla Singer: capitalism, narcissism, and the therapeutic discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club’; ‘Transgenerational hauntings: toward a social psychoanalysis and an ethic of dis-illusionment’.
This collection of essays is a condensation of a life’s work, a life work in the service of developing ‘a nonconformist, politically resistant clinical theory and practice’ (p.28). It surely is a must-read for all psychotherapists, and particularly Foulkesian group analysts; however, it is a book to be read slowly so that it may be properly savoured and its intricacies digested.
