TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne T1 - Passion, Responsibility, and >Wild Geese< Creating a Context for the Absence of Conscious Intentions JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 09 (1999), pp. 307-318. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne T1 - The play's the thing how the essential processes of therapy are seen most clearly in child therapy JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 233-254. N2 - Drawing on anecdotes that illustrate some European fantasies about the U.S.A. and its citizens, this paper suggests that what's American about American psychoanalysis has to do with differing cultural perspectives on human nature and on the relation of self to other. Via the European prejudices and stereotypes conveyed in the anecdotes, the essay delineates certain enviable things about what the U.S. stands for, such as persistent demands for equality and relatively greater possibilities for social mobility, as well as certain unenviable things, such as a superficial niceness and a tendency to deny the individual's embeddedness in social contexts. The paper puts relational analytic theory in its socio-historic context, praising its deconstruction of analytic authority while questioning the way it for the most part maintains the analytic tradition of grounding the individual in no larger social context than that of the family. Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne T1 - Trans-Generational Hauntings: Toward a Social Psychoanalysis and an Ethic of Dis-Illusionment. Typescript of a Keynote Address at the Spring Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New Orleans April 21, 2018, 25 pp. Y1 - 2018 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne T1 - Social Psychoanalysis: From Theory to Practice JF - Frosh, S., Vyrgioti, M., Walsh, J. (Eds.): The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies, Cham (Palgrave Macmillan) 2023, pp. 1-19. [Online ISBN 978-3-030-61510-9] [doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_61-2] N2 - While many psychosocial theorists have drawn on psychoanalysis to explore conscious and unconscious connections between the psychic and the social, most such efforts have been in the realm of >applied psychoanalysis,< that is, the exploration of unconscious process in group relations, institutions, cultures, historical eras. Few, but increasingly more psychosocial psychoanalytic writers are taking up how socially shaped unconscious processes emerge and are worked with in the clinic.– In this chapter, I review some of the psychosocial psychoanalytic theory that has informed clinical work, including the work of Fanon, Fromm, liberation psychologists, psychoanalytic feminist theorists, and critical race theorists. My focus is on how concepts that bridge the psychic and the social, without reducing one to the other, have found their way into clinical theory and practice.– The chapter surveys a few different conceptualizations of what is meant by clinical social psychoanalysis and then focuses more specifically on what I have called >normative unconscious processes,< my own attempt conceptually to bridge these domains. Extending Fromm’s concepts of social unconscious and social character, I argue that a properly psychosocial psychoanalysis must account for the ways that patients’ and therapists’ intersectional social locations (e.g., class, race, gender, sexuality), as they are lived and enacted within particular power relations and histories, unconsciously and consciously emerge in the clinic, at times reproducing, and at times countering what Fromm called the >pathology of normalcy.< Given the current conjuncture, particular attention will be paid to neoliberal subject formations as they are met with in the clinic. The chapter concludes with a review of recent clinical papers that offer ways to counter the reproduction of normative unconscious processes. Y1 - 2023 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne T1 - Erich Fromm: Ancestor of Social Psychoanalytic Practice JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Routledge, Vol. 44 (No. 1, 2024), pp. 026-036. N2 - Erich Fromm offered two key psychoanalytic concepts that bridge the psychic and the social: social unconscious and social character. In his view, these concepts are not only critical for understanding socio-historical phenomena but also ought to inform psychoanalytic clinical practice such that it might resist unconsciously encouraging patients to adapt to inequitable social conditions. This essay pays tribute to Fromm’s thinking while elaborating some of the differences between Fromm’s understanding of social unconscious/social character and my own. I argue that >social unconscious< does not quite capture the dynamic and conflictual nature of unconscious process, the ongoing conflict that social demands for conformity create in subject formation. To address that conflict, I propose the bridging concept of normative unconscious processes, processes that are always in conflict with counter-normative resistances. Points of both conflict and dissociation are precisely where analysts can challenge the psychic effects of oppressive social norms. Further, while agreeing with Fromm that analyzing social character ought to be central to clinical work, I argue that various and overlapping systemic oppressions – e.g. racism, heterosexism, classism – create, in any given society, multiple social characters and not just one dominant type. In agreement with Fromm’s argument that analysts themselves need to reckon with their own social character, I stress the importance for all of us to be as aware as possible of our own identity investments and social locations within unequal and overlapping power hierarchies. Y1 - 2024 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Layton, Lynne A1 - Bertone, Katherine Logan T1 - Negative maternal attributions, projective identification, and the intergenerational transmission of violent relational patterns JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 731-739. Y1 - 1998 ER -