Social Psychoanalysis and an Ethic of Repair

About this lecture

The program begins with a talk on what a social psychoanalysis might look like in the clinic and draws on some earlier psychoanalysts’ concepts that have connected the social world and the psychic world without reducing one to the other. Exploring identity formation in cultural contexts and within various power hierarchies, Dr. Layton introduces the concept of normative unconscious processes, a concept connecting the psychic and the social that specifically addresses the ways that racism, heterosexism, classism and other social inequalities are unconsciously enacted in the clinic and culture. We will then explore how therapists can resist unconsciously replicating such cultural inequalities. We will than take up the ways cultural inequalities are unconsciously reproduced in the wider circles of contemporary institutional and sociocultural life. In this part of the program, Dr. Layton, Dr. Nichols, and Dr. Connolly discuss the psychological case for reparations for slavery and its afterlives. Our conversations here, too, explore how we, as citizens and therapists, both unconsciously replicate and can resist replicating harmful, unequal relations. We will think together about how to address the places in our different subjective and communal worlds where harm has been done–and engage together on how to make repair.

DR. LYNNE LAYTON

Dr. Lynne Layton supervises and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) and is part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She has taught Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute and is Past-President of Section IX, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, which won a 2021 book award from the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis. Lynne is on the Grassroots Reparations Campaign organizing committee and on the racial equity task force of MIP.

DR. MEDRIA CONNOLLY

Dr. Medria Connolly is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Connolly worked for many years as a consultant to a Los Angeles-based treatment program for adolescents in the juvenile justice system and in a high school-based health clinic in Watts. Her long-time work in these community contributed to her recognition that individual, family and small group interventions are too limited in scope to alter the structural inequities confronting historically victimized groups, especially African Americans. This recognition led to the embrace of a prospective national intervention, i.e. reparations, to address the underlying psychosocial challenges and promote racial healing. Dr. Connolly also trained in the Tavistock model of group relations work and works as an organizational consultant to facilitate leadership, team building, communication and collaboration within diverse groups.

DR. BRYAN NICHOLS

Dr. Nichols is a Los Angeles based Clinical Psychologist with a practice focusing on teens, families, adults & couples. He was also a long-time consultant with a Community Based Organization where he was the Supervising Psychologist for an L. A. City gang prevention and intervention program. His work in both his practice and the community has led to the recent development of societal, “macro level” ideas about how to remediate persistent issues of bias that infect and undermine interracial relationships and the multi-disciplinary collaborations required to effectively implement community based psycho-educational interventions.