Virtual event
Neoliberalism is ubiquitous and has infiltrated all aspects of life in the United States. In spaces like analytic institutes, normative unconscious processes lead to normalizating resistance to the radical change demanded by neoliberal suffering. In this talk, Lynne explores the ways in which this unfolds in analytic institutes and Beth examines such enactments in carceral ones. Lynne and Beth will discuss the ways in which clinicians in both institutions are vulnerable to practicing in ways that reenact and reinforce the structural sources of suffering from which our clients/patients turn to us for relief--and ways in which clinicians can resist.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will be able to recognize the way that neoliberal institutions and ideologies shape subjective practices and create particular kinds of symptoms, with which therapists can either unconsciously collude—or analyze.
Participants will be able to describe the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States and its relationship to neoliberalism.
Participants will be able to address how systemic inequalities of gender, race, and class are unconsciously enacted in their institutions--and propose ideas for institutional transformation.
Elizabeth (Beth) Kita is a clinical social worker who lives and works in San Francisco, California. She obtained her MSW from UC Berkeley and PhD from Smith College, and became interested in psychoanalysis when its ideas helped her to better understand her work in a state prison. In her private practice, Beth works with people contending with complex trauma. Her practice in a public clinic has also focused on treating complex trauma, but with people who are incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, particularly those who’ve returned home after serving life sentences.
Lynne Layton is the daughter of lower middle-class Jewish parents who grew up in an antisemitic small town where they barely passed for white. Seeking to pass better and escape antisemitism, they chose to raise their children in an exclusively Jewish, segregated neighborhood. Socialized to be a nurse or teacher who would marry and be subordinate to a nice Jewish doctor, she turned to psychoanalysis to heal from wounds of sexism. Lynne writes about how the hierarchical norms of systemic racism, heterosexism and classism become rooted in a relational unconscious and enacted in both clinic and culture. She is the author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis. Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (2020).
References
Cullors, P. (2018). Abolition and reparations: Histories of resistance, transformative justice, and accountability. Harvard Law Review 132, pp. 1684 – 1694.
Fonagy, P., Roth, A., & Higgitt, A. (2005). Psychodynamic psychotherapies: Evidence-based practice and clinical wisdom. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 69(1), 1-58.
Gordon-Brown, C., Holmes, N., Kita, E., and Layton, L. (2022) Psychoanalytic spaces as implicated spaces. In: Kabasakalian-McKay, R. and Mark, D. Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and Relational Psychoanalysis. New York City, NY: Routledge, pp. 78-99. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003265146
Kita, E. (2019). “They hate me now but where was everyone when I needed them?”: Mass incarceration, projective identification, and social work praxis. Psychoanalytic Social Work 26(1), pp. 25-49.
Layton, L. (with Leavy-Sperounis, M.) (2020) Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes. New York City, NY: Routledge.