Conclusions: Psychosocial Studies — A Therapeutic Project? (original) (raw)

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes

Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 2021

A distinctly experiential approach to social psychoanalysis Locating This review has been thought through, worked and reworked, and ultimately written on the stolen land of the Pamunkey Confederacy. This statement may seem hollow when written, but, in fact, in the best political vein of Lynne Layton's oeuvre, it is a statement that exercises what Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, the editor of the book, reminds us Layton has termed "an ethics of disillusionment"-one that fundamentally takes umbrage with the demand to attack social linking. While Layton's work in this anthology does not explicitly take up the importance of land acknowledgements, it outlines the most pernicious effects, materially and psychically, caused by individual and collective disavowal of social conditions, including neoliberalism and capitalism, especially in clinical work. From this vantage point, then, proceeding with any work done on stolen land feels not only to be a counter revolutionary force, but also, an explicit departure from the promise made by Layton's scholarship: to move us closer to a decidedly social Psychoanalysis. As a clinician, scholar and activist who has been interested in a social psychoanalysis as a political necessity of my very being as a queer, immigrant, Arab Lebanese woman, I receive this anthology from Layton and Leavy-Sperounis as a recentering call for each of us individually, but more importantly, as a collective profession. Notably, this includes a call to commit to an ethics of disillusionment, at the heart of which is a commitment to disrupt all potentiality for disavowal. This orientation is the purview of a social psychoanalysis, made all the more clear by the urgency in which Layton writes, and the searing clarity of Layton and Leavy-Sperounis' introductions. As Leavy-Sperounis reminds us immediately: "in sustainable, progressive organizing, as in social psychoanalysis, unequal power relations must be constantly questioned, histories and struggles for power must be remembered and repeatedly named, our fundamental states of vulnerability must be honored and nurtured, a vast network of interdependent relationships (including strong links and weak links) must be cultivated to sustain the solidarity needed to withstand setbacks and attacks, and that all of this must be fortified by an active refusal to comply with social and economic policies that further erode out threadbare social contract…" (p. xxi) I will disclose that I write this review not at arm's length from the authors, but as someone who is a close and willing contributor to their work and their comradeship. I disclose this out of an ethical duty to our field and to the reader, but also, to accurately describe what this review aims to do. That is, rather than summarize what the reader may find in the 300+ pages of the book, I write in conversation with the dynamic ideas. More so, I write with a hope to galvanize in service of the most fervent call to the field, to individual practitioners, and to cultural theorists and thinkers: a social psychoanalysis is a truthful account of reality rather than a distortion that shores up white supremacist reviewed by lara sheehi,

What Psychoanalysis, Culture And Society Mean To Me

Mens Sana Monographs, 2007

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. The author proposes that we build our identities in relation to other identities circulating in our culture and that cultural hierarchies of sexism, racism, classism push us to split off part of what it means to be human, thereby creating painful individual and relational repetition compulsions. These "normative unconscious processes" replicate the unjust social norms that cause psychic pain in the first place. The paper concludes with thoughts about contemporary US culture, in which the government has abdicated responsibility toward its most vulnerable citizens and has thus rendered vulnerability and dependence shameful states.

In the thick of culture: systemic and psychoanalytic ideas

2018

This document is the published version of 'In the thick of culture: Systemic and psychoanalytic ideas'. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Karnac Books. You are encouraged to consult the remainder of this publication if you wish to cite from it. , , I' (" ii'" .II: •1• .