Lynne Layton and Marianna Leavy-Sperounis

Dec 18, 2020

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis

Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes

Routledge 2020

In this episode, J.J. Mull interviews Lynne Layton and Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, author and editor respectively of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, published in 2020 by Routledge as a part of their Relational Perspectives Book Series. This text takes part in an intellectual and political lineage that has called for a more radical understanding of psychoanalysis, encompassing a diverse range of thinkers from Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieau to Eric Fromm and Marie Langer. In this compilation of Layton’s work, we’re given a framework for understanding the intersection between structural forces (gender oppression, racial capitalism, white supremacy, etc.) and the clinical encounter. Over the course of this conversation, Layton and Leavy-Sperounis give an account of the ways in which neoliberalism, capitalism, and other systems of domination give rise to particular kinds of subjective possibilities and gesture towards what psychoanalysis as a field might have to learn from contemporary struggles and insurrections.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu. 

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J. J. Mull

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com.
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