Psychoanalysis in the Interregnum

ABSTRACT

I argue here that to emerge from crisis and bring about institutional and individual transformation, psychoanalysis and psychology must acknowledge and integrate into its theory and practices the crucial role that unequal social systems play in subject formation. The cost of not doing so is to perpetuate the systemic ills that directly and indirectly are responsible for most of our social and individual suffering. With regard, in particular, to the racial reckoning that many of our white-dominated institutions and white practitioners have undertaken in the past few years, I argue that disavowal of the systemic has taken the form of impeding anti-Black antiracism work by substituting in its place “diversity” initiatives that deny power differentials and merely celebrate differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Black racism
• disavowal
• diversity
• normative unconscious processes
• systemic racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynne Layton

Lynne Layton is on the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee, co-founder of Reflective Spaces/Material Places-Boston, and is a psychoanalyst on the racial equity task force at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is a Corresponding Member of the Psychiatry Department of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and has taught Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, and the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and, with Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes.