Lynne Layton

Bio: Lynne Layton is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Psychoanalytic theory & Subjectivity. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 36 publications receiving 933 citations.

Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes.

Abstract: The author surveys various views of racial and ethnic identity, and proposes a model of thinking about identity aimed at capturing both its oppressive and its facilitating character. To further elaborate the dual nature of identity, she discusses the way that inequities in the social world, and the ideologies that sustain them, produce narcissistic wounds that are then enacted consciously and unconsciously by both patient and therapist. A variety of such enactments are presented in a summary of the author's work with an Asian American patient, during which she began to recognize unconscious racial and cultural underpinnings of some of the ways she has thought about certain "basics" of psychoanalytic practice: dependence, independence, happiness, and love.

Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?: Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory

Abstract: Drescher, Foreword. Introduction. Beyond Narcissism: Toward a Negotiation Model of Gender Identity. Gender Benders/Gender Binders: A Psychoanalytic Look at Contemporary Popular Culture. Who's That Girl? Madonna. Trauma, Gender Identity, and Sexuality: Discourses of Fragmentation. Blue Velvet: A Parable of Male Development. What Is a Man? Postmodern Challenges to Clinical Practice. A Deconstruction of Kohut's Concept of Self. Performance Theory, Act 3: The Doer Behind the Deed Gets Depressed.

Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting

Abstract: Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting - Introduction Lynne Layton, Nancy Caro Hollander, and Susan Gutwill, Working Directly with Political, Social and Cultural Material in the Therapy Session Andrew Samuels, Money, Love, and Hate: Contradiction and Paradox in Psychoanalysis Muriel Dimen, That Place Gives Me the Heebie Jeebies Lynne Layton, The Manic Society Rachael Peltz, Despair and Hope in a Culture of Denial Nancy Caro Hollander and Susan Gutwill, Class and Splitting in the Clinical Setting: The Ideological Dance in the Transference and Countertransference Susan Gutwill and Nancy Caro Hollander, Attacks on Linking: The Unconscious Pull to Dissociate Individuals from their Social Context Lynne Layton, The Normative Unconscious and the Political Contexts of Change in Psychotherapy Gary Walls, Racism, Classism, Psychosis and Self-image in the Analysis of a Woman Gary Walls, The Beheading of America: Reclaiming Our Minds Maureen Katz, Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Bystander in Times of Terror Nancy Caro Hollander, Is Politics the Last Taboo in Psychoanalysis? A Roundtable Discussion Neil Altman, Jessica Benjamin, Ted Jacobs, and Paul Wachtel, Moderated by Amanda Hirsch Geffner Response to Roundtable: Something's Gone Missing Muriel Dimen, Response to Roundtable: Politics and/or/in/for Psychoanalysis Andrew Samuels, Response to Roundtable: What Dare We (Not) Do? Psychoanalysis: A Voice in Politics? Cleonie White, Political Identity: A Personal Postscript Amanda Hirsch Geffner

Who's Responsible? Our Mutual Implication in Each Other's Suffering

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the social and psychological roots of what I call neoliberal subjectivity, a version of contemporary subjectivity marked by a repudiation of vulnerability that has arisen from the social, economic, and political milieu of the past 30 years. The defense mechanisms involved in such a repudiation cause a decline in empathic capacities and in the capacity to experience ourselves as responsible and accountable for the suffering of others. I look at the way conflicts in the area of accountability and responsibility are lived both within our patients and within the interaction between patient and analyst. I argue that contemporary definitions of empathy normalize the repudiation of vulnerability and thereby foster an experience of empathy in which one can sustain a safe distance from the suffering other and not hold oneself accountable. A two-way version of empathy that counters neoliberal trends requires that we examine the ways we seek refuge in identifications that distance us from vu...

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics