ENACTING IDENTITY

Normative Unconscious Processes in Clinic and Culture

DAY, MONTH xx, 3:15—5:15 p.m

Via ZOOM

CEUs for the series: 2 ½ CEUs

12 CEUs for Social Workers (LSW/ LCSW), Counselors (LPC/LCPC), and Psychologists. CEUs qualify for cultural competency hours.

ICSW is an approved Continued Education sponsor by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation

Beginning with Fromm's assertion of a "social unconscious" and vignettes from the 50s and 60s that illustrate how clinical interpretations can contribute to reproducing a sexist status quo, the presentation demonstrates how unconscious psychosocial processes permeate identity formation and clinical work. Examples of racist, sexist, and classist enactments in the clinic demonstrate the workings of normative unconscious processes that sustain cultural and power inequalities. Such enactments are not considered "mistakes," but rather demonstrate the way identities of both patients and therapists are formed by cultural demands to split off and project ways of being human deemed not "proper" to occupying their given social position. The talk concludes with

thoughts about contemporary social forces that contribute to white middle-class subject formation and white middle-class symptoms, focusing again on unconscious collusions that stem from both culture and clinic.

Lynne Layton is a graduate and supervising psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and part-time faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She teaches Social Psychoanalysis in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecopsychologies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That

Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, and co-editor of Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Pychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. From 2004-2018, she was co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. She is a past-President of Section IX (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility) of Division 39,

APA, and founder of Reflective Spaces/Material Places-Boston, a group of psychodynamic therapists committed to community mental health and social justice. She is on the steering committee of the FOR Truth and Reparations campaign, and she is the author of the recently published book, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Character, Culture, and Normative Unconscious Processes.

Registration:

$40.00 for General / $25.00 for students and agency employees

(student/agency/group rates available)

Registration is limited to 12 participants for the series.

Sign up today!

QUESTIONS?

If you have questions about the conference or how to register, please contact Elree Smith at esmith@icsw.edu or (773) 943-6506