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Perhaps at the core of Lynne Layton’s book Toward a Social Psychoanalysis, is her assertion of the need “to see American psychoanalysis recognize that gender, race, class, and sexual orientation are not add-ons to psychodynamics: they constitute psychodynamics” (p. 19). Layton is redressing a version of psychoanalysis that “became insular, medical, and clinical [and] surrendered the general cultural terrain that Freud had staked out” (Jacoby, 1986, p. xi) when psychoanalysis eventually came to prominence in the United States. That version of psychoanalysis largely ignored gender, race, class, sexual orientation, (factors which constitute psychodynamics, but also politics), in line with American values that privileged straight, middle- and upper-class white men. The intra-psychic was favored to the exclusion of the socio-cultural and political, which were rarely discussed and treated either as inconvenient add-ons at best or met with outright hostility and rejection at worst. The importance of a social psychoanalysis is unequivocally demonstrated in Layton’s acknowledgment that “any psychoanalytic theory that divorces individual dynamics from social inequality and historical reality in some sense shores up the status quo” (p. 21) and is at risk of creating healthier narcissists.
This is where I resonate most with Layton’s exceptional book. As a clinician of color from a lower-class background who works predominantly with marginalized individuals, ignoring a social psychoanalysis would be, for both me and my patients, unethical and akin to malpractice. Many clinicians of color, queer clinicians, or other clinicians representing non-dominant identity categories, privately understand the importance of and work from the perspective of a social psychoanalysis, but have often been unable to publicly explore this work for fear of ostracization, misunderstanding, or a lack of support. Many clinicians of color commonly understand that matters related to racial and socio-econom