Erich Fromm: Ancestor of Social Psychoanalytic Practice

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Fromm
• social unconscious
• social character
• normative unconscious processes
• social psychoanalysis
• neoliberalism

In the 1970s, while a graduate student in comparative literature, I was part of an editorial collective on the sociology journal, Telos. Part of the journal’s mission was to bring Frankfurt School Critical Theory to a U.S. and English-speaking audience. Our collective read fairly widely in Critical Theory, and we read as well some contemporary works in psychoanalysis, e.g., Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) Reproduction of Mothering. Notably, we did not read Erich Fromm. This was in no small part due to the fact that, by 1975, Russell Jacoby, who was on the Telos editorial board, had published Social Amnesia (1975). As McLaughlin (2017, pp. 425–427) has noted, this book took Marcuse’s side in the Fromm-Marcuse debate of the 1950s and effectively derided Fromm’s thinking, including his work on social character. Marcuse, McLaughlin writes, had dismissed Fromm as a conformist and as neither a “real Freudian or a genuine Marxist, nor a serious philosopher” (p. 425). A result of these dismissals was that Fromm virtually disappeared from New Left activist and academic sociological circles.

It was only in the late 1990s, when I had already become a psychoanalytic therapist in analytic training, drawn to the philosophy of the relational psychoanalytic school, that I began to read Fromm. I should be clear, though, that I was not reading Fromm in any of my institute psychoanalysis courses. We read Sullivan, yes, but not Fromm. I read Fromm after having developed my own critique of psychoanalysis and psychology as disciplines and practices that seemed ideologically committed to separating the psychic from the social. When I did finally read him, Escape from Freedom (1941) became a key text in my early 2000s social studies courses on culture and psychoanalysis. But, even then, I did not teach Fromm in my institute classes on culture and psychoanalysis; in an effort to avert candidate resistance against thinking about the relevance of the social to clinical work, I tried to make these courses as clinically-focused as possible. A number of socially-focused clinical papers had by that time appeared in the literature, and I was not at that point familiar with Fromm writings that directly dealt with clinical work.

That said, I believe that when I read the Fromm-Marcuse debate, by which time I was both a clinician as well as a psychoanalytic theorist, I was quite clear that Fromm had won the debate hands down and that Jacoby’s work had done a great disservice to the fields of sociology and clinical psychoanalysis alike. Like Frie (2014), I am happy here to have the chance to pay my respects and my debt to Fromm as an ancestor of the field of social psychoanalysis (see also, Layton, 2022). Along with Frantz Fanon, another key ancestor of social psychoanalysis, Fromm made very clear throughout his writings that political liberation is not possible without radical transformations of consciousness. Thus, as McLaughlin (2017) has argued, while sociology must come to terms with the fact that it is not only about structures but about people, psychoanalysis must come to terms with the fact that it is not only about people, but about structures (pp. 430–432). Fromm’s great contribution, he concludes, and I agree, is to address psychoanalysis’

core nightmare, namely, that many clinicians operate in the belief (at least implicitly) that it is possible to heal the world without dealing head on, and in political and structural ways, with the enormous inequality, market fundamentalism, xenophobia, patriarchal structures, and militaristic and colonial-racist realities and histories that shape people’s lives. (p. 432)

For clinical psychoanalysis, the “trick” is how to work with patients in a way that neither reduces the psychic to the social nor the social to the psychic, how to “hover in between” (Rose, 1986) and respect a patient’s singularity.

Fromm offered two concepts that mediate between the psychic and the social: “social unconscious” and “social character.” In brief, the former consists of everything we repress in order not to be aware “of social contradictions, socially-produced suffering, of the failure of authority, of feelings of malaise and dissatisfaction” (1962, p. 131). In other words, the social unconscious is constituted by all that a given socio-economic formation and its ideological apparatuses, including language, do in order to keep counter-hegemonic thoughts and practices from coming to consciousness. And the reason Fromm thought we “moderns” repress such awareness and feelings was fear – not fear of castration or annihilation, but fear of social isolation and ostracism (1962, p. 126), a fear of losing social approval and a sense of belonging, of losing love. In my experience as a relational psychoanalytic clinician, I find that Fromm’s conviction about what motivates repression – or, in my psychosocial framework, disavowal, that is, the active process of refusing to know what you know – rings true.

Social character emerges in relation to what a socio-economic formation offers to meet the psychic needs of the population in such a way that people will act to preserve the status quo. As Foster (2017, p. 3) describes Fromm’s concept:

Social character engenders an alignment of individual desire and social imperatives by ensuring that individuals need or “want” to do what they “have” to do, and hence derive gratification from acting according to social and cultural expectations.

Fromm’s theory is not deterministic. Alongside the construct of social unconscious, he speaks of a wider human unconscious that seeks liberation and contains all the possibilities for being human. And he argues that when a socio-economic formation no longer meets the psychic needs of a population, the social character begins to change. When the society appears to meet those needs, however, its people tend to act, feel, think as they are supposed to act, feel, and think in order to sustain social and economic inequities.

For a clinical social psychoanalysis, what is perhaps most revolutionary in Fromm’s theory is his contention that the analyst’s task is to analyze what he called the “pathology of normalcy” (1970, p. 29). Critiquing the then dominant school of psychoanalysis, ego psychology, for fostering an ethic of adaptation to a dysfunctional status quo, he called on analysts to engage in “a radical critique of their society, its overt and especially its hidden norms and principles” (1970, p. 3). Today, more and more social psychoanalytic practitioners are elaborating what it might require to answer that call and truly transform psychoanalytic theory and technique (see, for example, Gaztambide, 2019; Hollander, 2017; Sheehi, 2020; Stephens, 2020).

In my work over the past few decades (Layton, 2004c; Layton, with Leavy-Sperounis, 2020), I have also elaborated concepts intended to bridge the psychic and the social and to offer technical hints for how clinicians might deconstruct the pathologies of normalcy. Although, upon finally reading Fromm, I did recognize the affinities between our ideas, I am not sure I was conscious of a direct influence. More conscious for me were the evolving ideas of the relational psychoanalytic school, which, of course, had deep clinical and theoretical ties to the interpersonal school that Fromm helped to found. When I said earlier that Fromm won the Fromm/Marcuse debate hands down, I had in mind the fact that Fromm’s relational ontology of human development (versus libido theory) had by the 90s become the dominant way of thinking not only in U.S. psychoanalysis, but in many academic disciplines. To elaborate my own social psychoanalytic bridging concept, I drew on (1) relational ontology, (2) on the relational analytic principle – perhaps first elaborated by Ferenczi (1949) – that in any treatment there are two unconsciouses at work in the consulting room (and the corollary that patients may be more aware than their analysts about what the analyst is up to), and, finally, on (3) the concept of “enactment.”

I first called this bridging concept a heterosexist unconscious (Layton & Bertone, 1998) but came finally to refer instead to “normative unconscious processes” (Layton, 2002). This concept was meant to interrogate critically a culture’s dominant social norms, describe how they shape both consciousness and the unconscious, and reckon with how, in the clinic, dominant norms that work to sustain social inequalities and cultural hierarchies are often unconsciously reproduced rather than analyzed. I suggested that the process of bringing about adaptation is an active, not a passive, process: not only, as Fromm asserted, do pathologies of normalcy generally go unanalyzed in mainstream psychoanalysis; they are quite actively supported and reproduced (via interpretations, normative transferences and countertransferences, etc). Most importantly, I have argued that the unconscious reproduction of normativity is largely due to a particular normative resistance in the field of clinical psychoanalysis: the fact that most practitioners disavow, and have been trained to disavow, the psychic effects of their and their patients’ location in intersecting and oppressive social hierarchies. As Funk (1994, p. 6) has emphasized, in Fromm’s view, the social character of the analyst is as key as that of the patient: the less analysts are aware of their own social character, the more likely that patient and therapist will be caught up in replicating the pathologies of normalcy.

The evolution of what I came to call these processes that reproduce social inequalities speaks perhaps to some of the central differences between my views and Fromm’s conceptions of social unconscious and social character. Influenced by feminist, gay, and lesbian psychoanalytic theorists who, in the 1990s, had begun to look at the effects of unconscious heterosexism on clinical theory and practice, one of my women’s studies students and I came upon a male analyst’s clinical vignette that struck us as exemplifying some of the ways that heterosexism can be unconsciously enacted in treatment (Layton & Bertone, 1998). For example, we found that, when unaware of the psychic effects of the different social locations inhabited by therapist and clinician, male clinicians may well unconsciously encourage female patients to understand their sexual desire primarily in the frame of male desire for them. We spoke then of a “heterosexist unconscious” that works to reproduce the painful effects of societal heterosexism in the clinic.

Poststructuralist and queer feminist academic work of the 1990s clarified how binary constructs such as masculine/feminine and straight/gay held within them prescribed and proscribed ways of being, thinking, and feeling. Further, such work showed how those binary constructs were not granted equivalent cultural value; on the contrary, they exist in hierarchic relation such that one of the pair is held to be superior to the other. For example, men are held to be rational (superior), women emotional (inferior). Psychoanalytic feminists recognized that these binaries were reproduced in individuals via culturally mandated splitting processes, i.e., one is encouraged to split off those ways of being, thinking, and feeling that are not deemed “proper” by one’s culture (e.g., Benjamin, 1988; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991). Such work spoke as well to some of the mechanisms by which social characters and social defenses come into being. Chodorow (1978) and Benjamin (1988) were two of the earliest second wave feminist psychoanalytic thinkers to suggest that normative femininity and masculinity were marked by complementary psychic splitting processes: dominant masculinity is marked by defensive autonomy and omnipotence, a denial of one’s embeddedness in relationship. Dominant femininity, the devalued member of the pair, is marked by submission, splitting off of assertive strivings, and a fear of rocking relational boats. Benjamin specifically focused on the heterosexual relational implications of these normative splitting processes. It occurred to me (Layton, 1988) that the sex/gender structures described by Chodorow and Benjamin, normative for those of us who grew up in white middle-class families of the 1950s, were, in fact, two different versions of narcissistic character, each with its own accompanying social defenses. Therapists who might consciously or unconsciously affirm these deformations of character were, in my view, supporting and shoring up these versions of narcissism (Layton, 2011).

Like Fromm, most of the predominantly male Marxist theorists of ideology in the postwar period suggested that capitalist societies produce “a” dominant social character (e.g., Althusser, 1971). Academic and activist feminists who took up these theories, however, quickly pointed to the different, if complementary, unconscious character effects that sexism and heterosexism, intersecting with capitalism, produced (e.g., Mulvey, 1975). Thus, from the outset, my own understanding of “social character” was complicated by an awareness that different locations within sex and gender hierarchies produce different psychic effects. It took some time before I recognized that those dominant gender formations were not only gendered and sexed, but also raced and classed.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s some relational clinicians had begun to write about how racism could be unconsciously reproduced and/or resisted in the clinic (Altman, 2000; Leary, 1997). This literature, along with academic literature on the intersectional construction of identities (e.g., Combahee River Collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1989) reinforced my sense that different social locations proffer different normative versions of social character that are marked by different conscious and unconscious psychic effects and social defenses. Such subcultural versions are of course constructed in relation and opposition to what we might call dominant versions – white, male, upper-class; nonetheless, they are unique enough to resist subsumption under a unifying concept like “social character.” As the Combahee River Collective statement (1977) argues, racism, heterosexism, classism are overlapping oppressions that shape identities; thus, the pathologies of normalcy are manifold. If we are not to reproduce the effects of oppressive systems, analysts must become as aware as possible of how overlapping oppressions have shaped both their and their patients’ unconscious. This body of work led me to drop the term “heterosexist unconscious” and begin to use the more inclusive term, normative unconscious processes (Layton, 2002, 2006a). The change in terminology was meant to capture two things: first, that a “substance” term like “social unconscious” cannot really account for the dynamic nature of unconscious processes that reproduce normative structures and systems, and, second, that what is normatively shaping unconscious process in one social location will generally differ from what is normatively shaping unconscious process in a different social location—even as these locations are deeply and relationally inter-implicated.

Finally, like Fromm, my theory of subject formation is not socially determinist, but my views in this domain are indebted less to Fromm than to Gramsci’s (1971) and Hall’s (1980) conviction that subjectivity and social life are marked by a constant struggle over meaning between dominant and subordinate cultural forces. Against many poststructuralist theories, I have argued that subjectivity is never exhausted by subjection to cultural norms; the psychic hegemony that normative unconscious processes seek to achieve is traumatic and is always contested by counter-normative conscious and unconscious processes (Layton, 2004c). What is split off to conform to social norms does not disappear; it pushes for expression in symptoms and relational repetition compulsions. To be more concrete, and in reference to what I see in clinical work, when we are culturally encouraged to form our character by splitting off such human capacities as assertion or dependence, resistances will more than likely emerge, and that is one place where clinicians can ally with patients to contest the deformations of social character.

Neoliberalism and social character

In the 2000s, movements like Occupy revealed the growing disparity in income between the very rich and everyone else, a state of affairs brought about by several decades of neoliberal policies and politics. Once I began reading about neoliberalism, the free market fundamentalism forged in a partnership among corporations, financial institutions, and government and marked by a whittling away of the social safety net, I realized that some of what I was seeing in the clinic and in my classrooms were in fact psychic effects of this now dominant form of racial capitalism. Again, it was clear that these psychic effects showed up differently in different social locations. For example, it seemed that 1960s mainstream white feminist demands for greater workplace opportunities had largely been met, at least for white educated women, but because the structure of the workplace had not changed to accommodate formerly “relational” females who were still responsible for caretaking, the cost of success was pressure to conform to the psychic structure of defensive autonomy previously demanded only of white men (Layton, 2004a, 2004d). The sense that defensive autonomy had become a hallmark of neoliberal social character made me think more deeply about what Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) have called the Big History in which patient and therapist alike are embedded. And it made me think more deeply about class. There I re-met Fromm.

Fromm and other Marxists had of course always centered their social analyses on class relations (Fromm, 1941, 1984). The way that identity formation had been taken up both in academia and in psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 1990s, however, largely elided class. Indeed, in her introduction to the 2005 special issue of Sociology on Class, Culture and Identity, Lawler (2005) noted that in the 80s and early 90s, as neoliberalism and income inequality were on the rise, research on class and research on other identity categories, for example, race, tended to develop separately. The title of the 1991 volume Bringing Class Back In (McNall et al., 1991) suggests, however, that even outside of sociological work on identity, class had fallen off most sociologists’ research agendas. Clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, of course, have historically largely ignored class altogether. This is yet another normative disavowal, given that we all “know” that, in practice, these professions discriminate between those who can afford private, long-term treatment and those for whom only low-cost and/or short treatments are available.

One route to the reintegration of class into sociological agendas, as well as into my own clinical work, came via Bourdieu’s (1984) work on Distinction. Here and elsewhere Bourdieu elaborated the concept of habitus, another concept that mediates the psychic and the social and that also suggests that social characters might differ depending on class location and, within class, on class fraction. Indeed, habitus entails the bodily schemas, largely unconscious, that mark different class fractions and their different social, cultural, and political predilections. Like social character, habitus works in such a way that people feel they are freely choosing to think and feel precisely what the dominant culture needs them to think and feel. In Bourdieu’s work, habitus is marked by a drive toward distinction, that is, in their tastes and thoughts class fractions seek to distinguish themselves as much as possible from those class fractions closest to need. In a paper on the role of emotion in distinction (Layton, 2004b), written before I had really reckoned with the psychic effects of neoliberalism, I drew on case vignettes and some interviews with friends and colleagues to speak to the ways that a central component of middle-class identity formation was distinction from and even contempt toward those who were dependent and poor. Distinction is another mechanism by which social character is formed.

Nowhere has the impulse toward distinguishing oneself from the poor, needy, and vulnerable been more visible than in the competitive, sadomasochistic relations fostered by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was and still is not a term one finds in most mainstream discourse, let alone in psychology or psychoanalytic discourse. But some of the academic literature that I began to read on neoliberalism did in fact speak to its psychological effects. du Gay (2004), for example, described “homo economicus,” the “entrepreneurial selves” that the neoliberal withdrawal of provision of care requires. In neoliberalism, every aspect of private life is, as Read (2009) says, “charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; [everything] can be seen as an investment” (p. 31). In the early 1990s, long before I had ever heard the word “neoliberalism,” I had come upon a horrifying example of the way neoliberal economic calculations had already penetrated into the everyday life of the white middle class: on the cover of a local magazine, a large picture of a baby was accompanied by a caption that read “Is Having Children Cost-Effective?”. I began then to be aware of how many of my middle- and upper-middle-class patients would talk about maximizing effectiveness and optimizing just about everything. Most of them seemed to feel virtuous when they ran themselves ragged and were ashamed and anxious about just sitting around and experiencing what used to be called “downtime.” When achievement is experienced as a demand for manic activity (Peltz, 2005), downtime – the split off alternative – is experienced as shameful laziness. Neoliberalism thus exacerbates tendencies to adopt a manic defense against need, which intensifies what Bourdieu (1984) so well described as a middle-class habitus built on distinction. The neoliberal reconceptualization of the individual rationalizes the radical split between those who have a chance of making it in the system and those who do not and cannot: social divisions, produced by neoliberal policies themselves, become understood not as system failures but as “failures of individual choice and responsibility” (Hamann, 2009, p. 50). This reassignment of blame encourages distinctions to be made between the deserving and the “undeserving” poor.

An excellent illustration of how such distinction finds its way into white middle-class character formation appears in an episode of the sketch comedy Portlandia (Krisel, 2012). Here, at a breakfast table, a mom and dad are trying to teach a young white boy how important it is to his future prospects that he do well in his private pre-school admission interview. The parents have trademarked his name and first show him a chart that sketches out what he will achieve if he gets into the pre-school: an ivy league education and enough money to buy anything he wants. Then they put up a chart showing what will happen to him if he doesn’t get in: a public school that looks like a prison, where he will be surrounded by riff-raff; community college, where only dumb people go; a future of drug addiction and shooting birds and squirrels for dinner. The boy looks increasingly depressed, hanging his head below the kitchen table. Just after making his dehumanizing comment about community college students, the father tells the boy to “never judge.” Although the boy is unable to repeat what the parents have tried to teach him, he nods assent when asked if he likes the first chart better. The parents agree that they do, too. The episode renders visual and visceral the (de)formation of social character, the creation of the pathologies of normalcy. Grover’s increasing discomfort, however, also reveals the seeds of psychosocial conflict, and thus points to where a clinician might begin to challenge the pathologies of normalcy.

Silva’s (2013) sociological study of white and Black working-class young adults offers another example of the kind of character and relationality bred by neoliberalism. Silva found that, for her interviewees, neoliberalism had bred a mistrust in all social systems: in family, in friendship and love relationships, in government and other institutions. For these subjects, adulthood was marked not by work and love but by pride in their capacities to have overcome abuse of all kinds, to have overcome drug and alcohol addiction – in short, to have individually overcome their individual demons. The social sources of their suffering remained hidden. These subjects’ self-conceptions made me cringe and should make all therapists wary about the cultural work being done by “therapy discourse,” that is, the “common sense” understanding of social problems as individual problems (see, for example, Furedi, 2004). Rather than affirm therapy discourse, the work of analytic treatment should be to trace those sources of suffering to a society that has abandoned its most vulnerable.

After having read widely about the psychic effects of neoliberalism, it was remarkable to me to discover Fromm’s (1947) work on the marketing personality, which, long before neoliberalism had taken hold, well described some of the key features of neoliberal subjectivity. These features, apparently already visible in postwar consumer capitalist character formation, include awareness that self-esteem is dependent on one’s salability in the market (p. 42); an encouragement to “brand” the self (p. 40)—also a key feature of entrepreneurial selves; a capacity to change oneself in accord with changes in market demands; and a pervasive emptiness. In both the marketing and the neoliberal character orientation, humans come to treat themselves and others as commodities.

While I largely saw white middle- and upper-middle-class patients in my practice, I also tried to understand what the large group psychic effects of neoliberalism might be, particularly the effects of de-industrialization, downsizing, outsourcing, the privatizing of public goods like education and healthcare, drastic reductions in social welfare, and an ethos in which vulnerability is figured as shameful. I hypothesized that the government abandonment of the whole population, while traumatic for all, brought about two characteristic large-group responses (Layton, 2006b, Layton, with Leavy-Sperounis, 2020, Chs. 12,13,14). On the right, and often among the working and middle-class populations that have suffered most from neoliberal policies, we find retaliations against groups deemed lower on the social scale and more vulnerable (e.g., against immigrants and African-Americans – although attacks are often couched in complaints that such groups are actually less vulnerable than their accusers, that they are “cutting in line” and unfairly getting everything [Hochschild, 2016]). Among the so-called 1% and those close to that segment of the population, a more characteristic response has been “amoral familism,” defined by John Rodger (2003) as a tendency to withdraw into private life and extend care and empathy largely to one’s family and other intimates. These large-group generalizations, focused primarily on effects of socio-economic conditions, perhaps brought my work closest to Fromm’s way of understanding social character. My own analysis, however, fell short for having dropped/disavowed crucial dimensions of the ways that race and gender articulate with the class relations of neoliberalism (Layton, 2023).

Clinical implications

As all of this suggests, I think that it would be fruitful to link Fromm’s crucial concept of social character with all that we have come to know about how the psychic effects of social systems differ depending on social location; I also think that it is important to elaborate the mechanisms by which such character formations are brought into being. Binkley (2011) and Foster (2017) have powerfully described the psychic work neoliberal individuals have had to do to rid themselves of comfort with dependency and to become entrepreneurial selves independent of systems of care. These views have important ramifications for psychoanalytic work. As Fromm has argued, in-depth psychoanalytic treatment has to analyze the prevailing social character that serves the socioeconomic system but does not serve individual or collective psychic liberation. Neoliberalism is the prevailing socioeconomic system. Again, however, views like those of Binkley and Foster tend not to reckon with how systemic racism and heterosexism articulate with class inequality to form different versions of neoliberal selves. I believe that clinical work that aims to analyze the pathologies of neoliberal normalcy will require an understanding of history and the current conjuncture, and will need to undertake an intersectional analysis of normative unconscious processes circulating in patient, therapist, and in the relationship between them. In conclusion, I offer examples of clinical work that I think accomplishes these aims.

As a preface to the first example, I offer an anecdote about a significant disavowal that impeded my own capacity to undertake the kind of work Fromm encouraged analysts to undertake. In 2018, I was part of a cross-racial group of therapists that, at one gathering, met to talk about how we understand the relation between our social and our clinical activism. As we went around the room briefly introducing ourselves by speaking to why we had come to this meeting, just about every white therapist said they had come because they have found it difficult to connect their social activism to their clinical work. The therapists of color seemed shocked but not surprised; for them, the connections were lived and obvious. It was only then, years into arguing that the separation of the psychic and the social is a problem for our field, that I realized that this separation, which I had long attributed to an effect of bourgeois ideology, is also, and quite significantly, an effect of racism. Indeed, the racism in myself, in our field, in our entire U.S. history, and in social character seems to me to have been more deeply disavowed than has classism and heterosexism.

The work of Black clinicians crucially challenges such disavowals. For example, writing within the frame of a long history of racist enactments and systemic racism in the U.S., Michelle Stephens (2020) elaborates on how white therapist and Black patient dyads might work clinically with DuBois’s notion of double consciousness. Drawing on interpersonalist Bromberg’s (1996) theory that health requires the capacity to stand in the spaces of multiple (and at times conflicting) self-states, Stephens calls on white clinicians working with people of color first to tolerate “the internal conflict generated by the realization of the other’s racialized projections onto the self” (p. 215), projections that often stir up disavowed “not-me” states in white people, and that then lead to white guilt. White guilt reactions in turn can lead Black patients to feel rage; impasse ensues. Stephens argues that if white clinicians can hold the projections as part of ourselves, “get next to ourselves,” we might be able to move beyond the internal conflict and do better analytic work. In my view, white people will not be able to get next to ourselves if we cannot first face the truth about the long history of racism in U.S. history. Getting next to ourselves also requires the kind of double consciousness called for by George Yancy (2012) in his book, Look! A White! Yancy asks white people to look at ourselves as Black people might see us, to turn the white gaze on ourselves. Thus, double consciousness requires white people to reflect on how what we say and do is an effect of our embeddedness in racist systems/histories, and, therefore, is prone normatively to reinforce systemic racism. The social character of most white people in the U.S. is deeply inflected by white superiority/racialized distinction. Stephens’ work draws attention specifically to how histories of racialization and racism are unconsciously repeated in therapy relationships – and how to get beyond such repetition.

Nancy Hollander’s (2017) work with a white middle-class patient is an excellent and rare example of a social psychoanalysis that takes into account all of the contextual factors that bear on the pathology of neoliberal racist normalcy. Hollander’s patient, a lawyer in a firm that demands of its employees extremely long work hours, is feeling displaced in her small child’s affections by the child’s Latina nanny. After working through with the patient family issues and family-centric transference and countertransference issues, Hollander has an uncanny feeling that something has gone missing in the frame. This feeling arises when the patient says something that reminds Hollander that the patient is paying the nanny less than minimum wage and was requiring of her “excessively long work days and nights” (p. 645). Hollander realizes then that she and the patient, both white and middle-class, have left the nanny’s subjectivity out of the frame, instead displacing onto the nanny “emotional states of insecurity and vulnerability” (p. 646). Expanding the frame to include the wider social world, Hollander notes that they have “not talked much about the nanny’s personal life and experience” (p. 645). As she wonders with the patient what that might mean, the patient speaks of feeling guilty about violating her own social values by paying the nanny low wages, while acknowledging that doing so has also given her some gratification. The patient then recognizes how much anxiety she has been feeling about her firm’s downsizing policies. As Hollander suggests, the patient’s inability to challenge the policies has led her to displace her anxiety and to enact the sadomasochistic relations that are hallmarks of neoliberalism.

I have argued (Layton, with Leavy-Sperounis, 2020, p. 270) that this relational scenario offers a complex example of a normative unconscious perverse repetition of U.S. race/class history, enacted now within a neoliberal context. The patient, whose identity has been forged within the articulation of white feminism and capitalism that I spoke of earlier, is unable to tolerate the dehumanizing conditions of her workplace; enacting a rather normative kind of white, middle-class entitled disavowal, she instead creates intolerable conditions for the nanny. Further, when we place this enactment, as Hollander does, in the broader context of the large-scale immigration of mostly Black and brown female caregivers from the Global South to the Global North, we see just how patient and therapist are caught in a larger racist and classist neoliberal, globalized history that demands of those who can that they become defensively autonomous entrepreneurial selves in a precarious employment world. As Hollander concludes, leaving the nanny’s story out of the frame may make the analysis look successful, but what it actually does is reproduce a neoliberal entrepreneurial subject that projects vulnerability outside of the self and onto the nonwhite, lower-class “other.” Hollander well illustrates here how we might work to connect the singularity of the individual with social character and the Big History in which both we and our patients are caught and implicated. Indeed, Hollander’s vignette clearly reveals that technical clinical choices that focus on the individual as psychosocial, as embedded in history, are quite different from those that focus on the sovereign individual as separate from the social. To analyze the social character that Hollander’s vignette illuminates requires precisely what Hollander has spoken to: reckoning with a patient and therapist caught in a particular intersection of class, gender, and race within a larger context of neoliberal racial capitalism.

Conclusion

I end with a question that this essay might well raise in the minds of those who feel that “a” normative social character should be the focus of both psychoanalysis and social critique. And that question is: have I made the case for the importance of differentiating social character along identity dimensions and social locations of class, race, gender, and sexuality? Does what I am proposing as a way to complicate social character obscure or enhance Fromm’s concept (and its later elaborations both clinical and sociological, e.g., Foster, 2017; Funk, 1994, 1998). Funk (1998, p. 222) writes,

I want to emphasize that for Fromm it is the orientation and the traits shared with others that assume decisive importance according to their dynamic nature and weight. This focus on common traits and orientations is just the opposite of our normal ways of looking at people and also opposite to the way psychoanalysis looks at patients.

My contention is that, yes, there are shared orientations and traits, but I worry that the way these have been conceived in Fromm’s work on social character, as well as in so many other discourses, conflates “man,” indeed white man, with “human.” Class difference was an essential factor in Fromm’s attempts to understand, for example, what led to white working-class and petty bourgeois Germans’ embrace of Hitler and fascism, but I conclude by suggesting that fully to understand social character(s), we must also engage intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and specific national histories, especially if we aspire to be a multicultural, anticapitalist, antiracist, and antisexist democracy.

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Notes on contributors

Lynne Layton

Lynne Layton has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and in Clinical Psychology. She is a graduate and supervising psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a Corresponding Member of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and co-editor of 3 books: Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of Self; Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis; and Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. From 2004–2018, she was co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and she is currently an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is a past-President of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility and founder of Reflective Spaces/Material Places-Boston, a group of psychodynamic therapists committed to community mental health and social justice. She is the author of the 2020 book Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, winner of a 2021 book award from the American Academy and Board of Psychoanalysis.