An Interview with Lynne Layton,Harvard Medical School

Ideas Lying Around: Social Psychoanalysis

Interviewed by Kieran Keohane and Maggie O’Neill, 23 February 2021.

Economy and Society Research Centre, (Cork and Waterford), and the Sociological Association of Ireland’s Research Salon.

KK Kieran Keohane

LL Lynne Layton

MO’N Maggie O’Neill

KK

I might begin by just asking you if you can tell us a little bit about your biography, who you are and where you’re coming from?

LL

I'm glad you asked where I'm coming from because I tend to start recently, as I'm getting more and more aware of the world around me, with a land acknowledgement. I live in a settler colonial country, and I am coming to you from Brookline, MA, which is on occupied Massachusett land. I like to start with my social locations, as a way for everyone to know where we’re all coming from, where we're all located socially. So, I am cisgender, I have a ‘50s and ‘60s upbringing, which will be part of our later conversation. I'm nominally heterosexual, on that continuum. My class location is quite conflicted because I was middle class but sometimes going downward. My parents are from different class locations. I have a Jewish immigrant background and just this very morning, oddly enough, I remembered that I've been told that I am part Irish. My grandmother, my father's mother, was allegedly Irish, and came from Dublin, Irish-Jewish. I know nothing about her or her history. She died when I was seven, and it just wasn't spoken about. But yeah, I'm allegedly part Irish. I've never been in Ireland. Also, it’s just odd that it came to me this morning.

I went to College in the ‘60s and was part of the burgeoning feminist second wave movement and the student anti-war left. I then went to Graduate School in Comparative Literature and worked a little bit in that area. I was interested more in popular culture and literary theory, so worked a little bit in that area. I was teaching in Women's Studies at Harvard and Social Studies at Harvard, but I went back to school in Psychology for a number of reasons that I will not go into. Actually, I always wanted to be a psychoanalyst and comp lit professor, it was the comp lit professor part that didn't really work out. And I always was influenced very much in my upbringing by popular culture, so I was thrilled to be able to teach popular culture theory and practices. Possibly the highlight of my life was the three or four years that I not so long ago spent as a singer in a band, which came to an abrupt and sad end.

I've always been politically active and currently, for reasons probably quite understandable, I've been very active in electoral politics as well as social movement politics. The last thing I'd say biographically that can connect with my work, or having become a psychoanalyst, is that I was pretty early on aware that there was something unconscious going on in my life, because there was a rather large gap between my feminist commitments and what I started doing in my life, like getting married when I was 22, and how anxious I was about pursuing a career, you know, to be on my own. So, I knew there was something going on and just when I encountered psychoanalysis, it really helped me understand that it came from that real gap between, what I was spouting as a feminist and what I was doing in my life.

KK

Thank you Lynne. Just to explore that a little bit more, one of the remarkable things that I see in your career is this spanning of scholarship, you mentioned a background in social sciences, and clinical practice. Because a lot of the ways in which psychoanalysis has been taken up in the Academy is, as it were, as an intellectual discourse. But there are few people who do that and combine it with professional clinical practice. I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit, and talk about your intellectual influences? You talk about the cultural milieu, but I've had the pleasure of just recently reading your book and I see so many names from different fields and from different traditions. So, I wonder if you could just locate yourself a little bit with reference to some of those compass points, let's say, on your horizon.

LL

Absolutely. I think that if I'm going to overall say what my interest is and what drew me to certain thinkers in academia, it was whatever work spoke to the role of unconscious process in reproducing particular kinds of subjectivity. Work that speaks to how the outside gets inside, in a non-reductionist way that neither reduces the psychic to the social or the social to the psychic. And I started where I was most wounded, which is sexism. I started with gender theory and feminist commitments, as I said, reading second wave feminism, Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein. And later third wave feminism, poststructuralist feminism, queer theory, Black feminisms, and including Critical Race Theory and work on intersectionality. These are the things that spoke to me. So, as I said, I always was interested in being both a psychoanalyst and a comparative literature professor. The psychoanalytic feminism of the ‘80s really spoke to me. And early on I encountered Nancy Chodorow’s work in the ‘70s, and then later, Jessica Benjamin's work, and then as I became a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, I did work with those folks who I most admired on a journal called Gender and Psychoanalysis (currently called Studies in Gender and Sexuality), working to try to deconstruct heteronormativity in psychoanalytic theory and practices. And then I guess the other thing that drew me, if I'm speaking to my influences, is class and reproduction of class because, as I said, there was a lot of class conflict actually in my family. My mother was of a different class than my father. Great disappointment from her parents, that she married him.

I was part of the Telos Collective, Frankfurt School theory, when I was a graduate student at Washington University, and so I encountered Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, not so much Erich Fromm; he was kind of out at the time. Russell Jacoby had done a hatchet job on the so-called neo-Freudians. Also, because I love popular culture and could not relate to Frankfurt School popular culture theory, I got really into British Cultural Studies, and the work of Stuart Hall. So that was a major influence, pop culture theorists Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, I can't even remember all the names, but those folks spoke to me in terms of how much popular culture was a part of my politicization and my vitality, my connection to life and to my body. And then later, I was introduced to various theories about ideology and how ideology comes from the outside and gets rooted on the inside in subjectivity. So, reading Althusser, I've never become a Lacanian, but I do appreciate some of the theory. Roland Barthes, Gramsci was very important to me, mostly via Stuart Hall's work, and Laclau and Mouffe's work. And then one of my most fabulous reading experiences was reading Bourdieu’s book Distinction. That whole concept of the habitus, and how class gets on the inside, and so much more, was really important to me. And then when I started training in psychoanalysis, it was really the beginning of relational psychoanalytic theory. And whereas many other psychoanalytic theories do not speak to me, partly because of the sexism, relational theory really spoke to me, and there was always a group of folks in the Relational School that were left-wing and working on feminism and anti-racism, so that was a really important influence for me. Several organizations, the Psycho-Social Network, it's called something different now, in the UK, and the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, have been very important spaces for me. A group that I was not too long-ago President of, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, part of the American Psychological Association, and just really, you know, people who work in Critical Psychology, like Janice Haaken, Valerie Walkerdine, were also really important influences on me. And right now, I'm immersing myself in Afro-pessimist literature, also because they, too, are speaking to what kind of subjectivity, white subjectivity, is dominant and how it gets reproduced. So, I've most recently been reading Sylvia Wynter, and Frank Wilderson.

MO’N

I think somewhere I read a description of you as clinician, feminist, academic, and seeker of social justice. And it was so instructive to hear your account of you locating yourself in these traditions. Because there was immediate resonance for me with what I know about your work, and Stuart Hall's notion of a kind of conjunctural analysis you could drill down into a particular moment. And I think the focus on history, and the importance of working through the past, is so embedded in your work. I really love the latest book, in relation to that interweaving of biography and that very deep psychoanalytic recognition of the social and political origins of psychic suffering. And so that balance that you just described that you're not reducing the psychic to the social, or the social to the psychic, but through this very deft conjunction analysis you're speaking of suffering, and those intersecting oppressions and inequalities, within that sense of history and the vital importance of working through the past for human well-being.

LL

What I see as my contribution to clinical work is my attempt to take these intellectual traditions that we were just talking about, which most clinicians do not get to encounter, and to describe what I've called normative unconscious processes, which is my linking concept of how, one of the ways, certainly not the only way, the outside gets inside. The things that cause pain in the first place, results of sexism, of racism, of classism, tend to get unconsciously reproduced, even as they're being resisted against. I tried to capture both the resistance and the overtaking by these processes and talk about how therapists and patients can collude in reproducing these unequal hierarchies in the clinic.

The gender book that I wrote was an attempt to speak both to clinicians and to academics about gender and sexuality, about how they’re lived, and again the unconscious conflicts. Because I felt like much of the poststructuralist and queer theories that I was reading were not really recognizing suffering and pain that you speak to, Maggie. There were celebrations, at the time, of fragmentation, and I'm working in the clinic and I'm seeing the results of fragmentation, and they usually come from abuse, and not from the pleasurable decentering that I was reading about. So, I was speaking to academics about what I saw happening in the clinic, but also again, trying to speak to clinicians about all this material that was coming out in academia that was so important, all the socio-historical material that they were not encountering in curricula. Becoming a psychologist in the United States is, I'm sad to say, very mind numbing and the curriculum very much reproduces a certain kind of subjectivity and the field becomes more technicist as we go along. Manual driven, under neoliberalism worse and worse but even when I went in the early 80s it was pretty bad, totally taking the individual out of social context, even when it thought it was talking about the biopsychosocial; it was such a mechanistic description of the biopsychosocial. So that's what I’d say about my work in general.

I do see it as a social justice project. Thank you for speaking to that. And I'd say, more recently, well, I've always been an activist as well, but over the last several years, most of my activist work has been around anti-racist activism in the institutions that I find myself in, psychoanalytic and otherwise. And I've been part of a reparations campaign for the last few years. Part of the reason I locate myself on Massachusett land is my awareness, growing awareness, of land theft, both from Native Americans and African Americans. Tomorrow there's going to be hearings on a Reparations Bill in our legislature, which supporters have been trying to get voted out of Committee since 1989, but there's actually a real chance this year that it will get voted out of Committee. And then I've been very involved in electoral work because we had a fascist government, just barely escaped, and maybe haven’t escaped, but you know, we'll see.

MO’N

Thanks Lynne. So that brings us to your latest book, Towards a Social Psychoanalysis. It would be wonderful if you would talk a little bit to that and just share some of the important aspects of that book, in terms of what you would like the book to do. I'm thinking about your call in the chapter, ‘Yale or jail’, about the importance of stimulating creative thinking and strategies to bring about progressive social change. How we do that in full recognition of the dynamics of neoliberalism and narcissism, and your description of sadomasochistic dynamics and social defences. It really got me thinking about our positioning, Kieran, and myself, in the Department, in the University, and what it means to be an academic, and the responsibility you have really for working with students and working with each other, in relational ways. It would be wonderful if you would talk to the book and particularly that hopeful message. And maybe also say a little bit about this notion of the ethic of disillusionment.

LL

OK, well I think I'll go back just for a moment to your having evoked the concept of the current conjuncture. That's always what I'm trying to understand, and I think what I tried to do in the introductory chapter is locate the points in my life where a neoliberal subjectivity was being produced, called for, sometimes resisted, that I didn't recognize at the time, but only was able to recognize in retrospect, by doing again a lot of reading outside of my field, in academia, always in academia, because the word ‘neoliberalism’ does not appear, really, in the popular presses here in the United States. So, I'm always trying to understand what's happening in my world. The book is divided into a few different sections, but in each section it's done chronologically, so by the end of each section I'm talking about neoliberalism, because the papers, by that time, post 2007 or 8, were written when I really started to grasp the topic.

So, in the first part I'm trying to do a lot of psychosocial historical work, trying to understand even why I'm drawn to relational psychoanalytic theory. What about it is of the moment, drawing on Giddens’ work and Ulrich Beck and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim's work on institutionalized individualization. And then the whole middle section is what I was talking about before, about normative unconscious processes, how class and race and gender inequalities can be reproduced in the clinic. And then that third part is really the papers that are devoted to neoliberalism, where I draw on lots of different theorists at different times, because they speak to me, like John Rodger talking about amoral familism as one of the two responses to the trauma of loss of any kind of holding environment, any kind of caretaking environment in the United States. Starting with Reagan and moving rapidly on both the Democrat, and Republican side, a total abandonment of the population. And we see what the effects have been. We saw it in the beginnings of COVID, when everyone was left on their own, there was no government response to COVID. Every state Governor was competing against every other Governor. And it's the same thing right now. The vaccine rollout has been completely insane. So, I'm always trying to look at how neoliberalism gets mediated in subjectivity, but also in groups. In, the article you're speaking to, ‘Yale, fail, jail’, I try to look at different groups in the United States; there's a clear racist component to neoliberalism in the United States. It really took off in some ways as a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. I read fairly recently that the majority of white people have not voted for a Democrat since 1964, which predates neoliberalism, and this has everything to do with the passage of civil rights legislation. So, to try to understand the current conjuncture here, and what kind of subjectivities are being pulled for, I think you really have to understand our history of racism, which is what I speak to in the last chapter, the lies that we tell ourselves about our history. You know in this recent impeachment trial, even the House Democrats, and I understand why they did it, but they talk about the Big Lie being that the election was stolen. But there's a bigger lie behind that big lie. And that bigger lie is that the whole concept that the election is stolen is to invalidate Black and Brown voters, and I imagine that they simply didn't feel they could be calling the Republicans racist, so they leave that part out.

I listened to a webinar on neoliberalism some time ago, by some young activists, and they talked about this being a zero-gravity moment, where everything is thrown up into the air, and it's very unclear how it's going to land. Is it going to land in a culture of care, and recognition of interdependence, or is it going to land in a souped-up version of neoliberalism? The United States, I can only speak to the United States, is so divided that it's very unclear where it will land, but I will say that Joe Biden is looking more and more like a New Deal, FDR kind of guy, and talking that way, and talking about a caretaking world. So, I am hopeful about our future, but cautiously, cautiously.

KK

Thank you, Lynne. That's been a marvellous introduction. First, this idea of neoliberalism as a traumagenic kind of culture, which you chart really well, and you show all the deformations of personality and subjectivity and character, and so on. And we've seen that come to explosive forms lately. If we see all the damage done to late modern subjectivity, what might we look at that would show us the return of care, caregiving, the ethic of care, and so on, as the grounds for a better future? We look forward to exploring that hopefulness a little bit more with you in the future.