Episode 54: Everybody Stays Chill

Summary

Podcast Summary: Between Us – Episode 54: Everybody Stays Chill (July 9, 2025)

Overview

This episode of Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast, hosted by John Totten with regular cohost/producer Mason Neely, features a compelling conversation with Harvard psychologist and psychoanalyst Lynn Layton. The core theme is the relationship between psychoanalysis and social theory—how social forces, power, and ideology shape both individual psyches and the therapeutic encounter. The episode interrogates debates within psychoanalysis about whether issues like privilege, racism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism truly “belong” in therapy, or whether therapy should maintain a focus on the individual mind. Layton brings decades of expertise in feminist, Frankfurt School, and relational psychoanalytic perspectives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Social World and the Psyche: No Separation

• Layton’s Intellectual Formation

  • Layton traces her path from comparative literature to psychoanalysis, steeped in Frankfurt School and feminist thought.
  • She describes her realization that “the social world has everything to do with the psyche and that it's actually an unconscious enactment to separate the social world and the political world off from any thinking about unconscious process.” (02:05)

• Psychoanalysis’ Institutional Resistance to the Social

  • Totten and Layton discuss the persistent resistance within psychoanalytic circles to socially-informed or critical approaches, noting that many institutes remain wary of integrating these perspectives.
  • Layton notes, “I still think that in mainstream [psychoanalytic circles], there is maybe a backlash against it. Well, for sure there's a backlash, but I'm not sure there was ever a deep interest in it.” (17:06)

2. Relational Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Queer Theory

• Widening the Lens of Psychoanalysis
  • Relational psychoanalysis (Stephen Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Adrian Harris, et al.) opened the possibility for the social and political to shape psychic development and enactments in therapy.
  • Layton: “As soon as you say [the psyche is formed through relationships], it doesn't have to be just familial relationship, it can widen into peer groups. ... There's always the possibility that the therapist will be enacting or colluding in alignment with whatever the social norms of their particular culture and subculture end up reproducing status quo, unequal relationships.” (13:51)

3. The “Normative Unconscious” and Social Reproduction in Therapy

• Layton’s Concept: The Normative Unconscious

  • Layton explains her idea that therapists and patients unconsciously enact cultural norms—around race, gender, sexuality—within the therapeutic space, often reproducing the very inequalities that made people sick.
  • “What I had been starting to think about after reading a lot of psychoanalytic feminist work, [was] having split conceptions of what a proper female and what a proper male should be ... only one person was allowed to be the dependent one, and it was the female.” (38:53)

• Unconscious Collusions

  • Layton: “The more aware we become of those just things that have formed us and that we have taken as normal, and that we're trying to normalize the patient into, the better psychoanalytic work that we will do.” (46:59)

4. Critiques of “Wokeism,” Neutrality, and Bad Faith in Psychoanalysis

• Pushback from Within the Field

  • The episode discusses critics like Jonathan Shedler and John Mills, who argue that bringing politics into the consulting room is either unprofessional or destructive (e.g., Mills’ article equating “wokeism” with hysteria and house-burning). Totten critiques these stances as hiding political investments behind a veneer of neutrality.
  • Totten: "Is psychotherapy simply a surgery? Move the scalpel and your beliefs about the person on the operating table don't matter. Can we fix their insides without our insides being involved?" (06:28)

• Mason Neely’s Reaction:

  • Neely: "Is this some, like, misguided attempt to return to, like, fucking Victorian neutrality? ... Who the fuck are you, pal?" (25:57)
  • “To even use that word [woke] at this point, what the fuck are we even talking about? That's not a clear, coherent debate. ... It's certainly not a revolutionary discourse.” (28:02, 31:07)

5. Neoliberalism as the Umbrella Oppression

• Neoliberal Ideology in the Clinic

  • Layton dissects neoliberalism’s psychological effects, emphasizing that it breeds insecurity, defensive autonomy, and internalized pressure to “concentrate for 10 hours a day at work.”
  • “People are suffering economically. ... The narrative [used] is that Black people have cut in line and are getting everything. That was key to Reagan's administration—the ‘welfare queen.’ Racism gets used to deflect from the real sources of the economic sparing and sexism.” (67:03)

• The Role of Therapy: Individual “Failure” vs. Systemic Critique

  • Totten: “My problem is that I can't concentrate for 10 hours a day at work. Where I see Layton's work being important is for a therapist to say ... let's talk about who is oppressing you within your own mind.” (29:44)

6. Social Character, Intersectionality, and Belonging

• Intersectionality Over Singular Social Character

  • Layton draws on Fromm, but differs in seeing multiple, intersecting social characters depending on class, race, gender, etc.
  • "Where I differ from the idea that there is one dominant social character ... there’s a dominant social character, but it is lived differently depending on where you are located socially.” (69:26)

• Belonging and the “Deal” with the Social

  • Layton: “Deals we make in order to be good boys and girls ... In exchange for being loved and socially legible, we tend to take up, consciously or unconsciously, identification with the way power hierarchies define ... social norms proper to where we are socially located.” (51:10 quoting Layton’s own writing + 53:43)

7. Moving the Conversation Forward: Clinical and Political Hope

• Psychotherapy’s Role and Limits

  • The group reflects on how—and whether—therapy can be a place for social liberation, not just adaptation.
  • Neely: “Whatever change can occur in this life ... is a product of interworking, of comrades, of collective engagement between people.” (31:56)

• Messaging, Empathy, and Coalition

  • Layton emphasizes the need for honest messaging and acknowledgment of suffering when communicating across political divides, inside and outside the therapy room:
    • “What's the suffering? Can we first connect on agreeing on what the suffering is?” (73:29)
    • “I think we should make [the attempt to connect even with those we disagree with]. It's kind of like what we do in treatment, right?” (81:37)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Neutrality and “Woke” Cries

  • Mason Neely: "Is this some, like, misguided attempt to return to, like, fucking Victorian neutrality? ... Who the fuck are you, pal?" (25:57)
  • John Totten: “Is psychotherapy simply a surgery? Move the scalpel and your beliefs about the person on the operating table don't matter. Can we fix their insides without our insides being involved?” (06:28)
  • Neely: “To even use that word [woke] at this point, what the fuck are we even talking about?” (28:02)

• On the Normative Unconscious

  • Lynn Layton: “The more aware we become of those just things that have formed us and that we have taken as normal, and that we're trying to normalize the patient into, the better psychoanalytic work that. That we will do.” (46:59)

• On Desire and Social Formation

  • Neely: “Desire, the things we want ... are not the product of something that was missing. ... Desire in all its forms is produced. It's a product that emerges through interaction. ... What we want, what we're moving towards, who we are is not ... a beautiful internal eye that existed. No, it's a thing that's produced through our engagement with the world.” (35:04)

• On Belonging and Compromises

  • Layton: “Deals to belong ... at the expense of the belonging of others.” (53:24–53:29)

• On Therapy’s Social Responsibility

  • Totten: “It's not in my mind, proselytizing my clients to become woke protesters. It's understanding what forces are oppressing them from within.” (34:53)

• On Hope for Conversations Across Divides

  • Totten: “In my most optimistic dreams, there is this framework there for a new kind of belonging.” (72:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Layton’s intellectual and activist origins – 02:05–13:38
• On the relational school & feminist theory – 13:38–17:06
• Resistance to social critique inside psychoanalysis – 17:06–22:00
• Critiques from within the field (Shedler, Mills, “wokeism”) – 20:00–26:00
• Discussion on neutrality, role of “woke” rhetoric – 25:57–31:07
• Normative unconscious and unconscious reproduction of hierarchy – 38:53–49:31
• Intersectionality and social character – 69:26–73:02
• Neoliberalism and the structure of suffering – 59:54–71:16
• Hope, coalition, and messaging – 73:53–81:37

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Tone and Language

The episode is intellectually rigorous but accessible, marked by moments of irreverence (Mason Neely’s expletives), sharp critique, and vulnerability about the hosts’ and guest’s own subjectivities. The tone is questioning, dialogical, and committed to integrating political realities with deep clinical work.

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For Listeners

If you missed this episode:

• Expect a dynamic, dense, and at times combative journey through the present-day culture wars in psychotherapy, with historical context, clinical vignettes, and sharp-eyed looks at the profession’s blind spots.
• You'll hear from a leading scholar-practitioner (Layton) on why social critique is not just an “add-on”—it is fundamental to understanding the formation of self, distress, and the work of therapy.
• The episode pulls no punches on internal professional politics, bad faith neutrality, and the myths of psychotherapeutic purity.
• It challenges clinicians and lay listeners alike to consider: What do we risk by “staying chill”? At what cost do we maintain the status quo?

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Key Takeaway

Psychoanalysis—and psychotherapy more broadly—cannot, and should not, insulate itself from the social, political, and ideological forces that shape both therapist and patient. Doing so reproduces unconscious enactments of power and hierarchy. True liberation in therapy, and in society, depends on facing these realities together—even, and especially, when discomfort arises.

Transcript

[John Totten]

Hello.

[Lynn Layton]

Hi. Hi, John.

[John Totten]

Hi. Good to see you.

[Lynn Layton]

Good to see you, too.

[John Totten]

When you emailed me from a Steely Dan cover band concert, did you know that I was a big Steely Dan fan?

[Lynn Layton]

Well, I did not know that, but it doesn't totally surprise me, having listened to some of your other podcasts.

[John Totten]

That's so cool.

[Unidentified Older Male (possibly a school administrator or colleague)]

This was my first classroom, John, did you know that? Didn't know you taught Mr. Nolan English long before your time. It was hard giving it up, I can tell you. I'm hearing rumors, John, about some unorthodox teaching methods in your classroom. I'm not saying they've had anything to do with the dolphin boys outburst, but I don't think I have to warn you, boys age are very impression. Well, your reprimand made quite an impression, I'm sure. What was going on in the courtyard the other day? Boys marching, clapping in unison. Oh, that. That was an exercise to prove a point. Dangers of conformity. Well, John, the curriculum here said it's proven. It works. If you question it, what's to prevent them from doing the same? I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself and these boys. Age, not on your life.

[John Totten]

I'm John Totten, and this is between us. So I have been exploring some of the topics you write about for a couple seasons now, and in some ways trying to get away from it because I don't want to be pigeonholed as like a. It's such a strict theme, but it chases me. I'm curious about how you emerged into this field and the process of becoming a practitioner, but then also your integration of social and feminist theory into your work.

[Lynn Layton]

It wasn't a straight line. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature. My formation as a person who thinks that the social world has everything to do with the psyche and that it's actually an unconscious enactment to separate the social world and the political world off from any thinking about. Unconscious process began with my graduate school training, which was very much informed by left wing theories. At the time, there was a lot of work on the study of ideology. So I went to college from 67 to 71 and was active in social movements, including feminism, which kind of was just starting. I probably was closest to a Frankfurt School approach to thinking about the psyche and the social.

[John Totten]

So this season we started talking with Eyal Rosmarin about belonging and how the person is a reflection of the collective to the degree that there may not even be a boundary between what is inside us and what is all around us. Following this to its next logical step. Karim Dajani then discussed with me the Social Unconscious, how society has a far greater role in constituting the unconscious than the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought has historically admitted. Today we'll continue that conversation with one of the foremost authorities on the topic, Harvard professor of Psychology Len Layton. I established in our last episode that I'm often flabbergasted by this, probably because I have a knack for staying professionally unaffiliated. But our guests seem to tell me pretty consistently that the bulk of psychoanalytic institutions are invested in downplaying the role of the systemic and the pathologies of individual visuals in their relationships. The contemporary relational school of psychoanalysis, as represented most notably by theorists such as the late Stephen Mitchell, along with folks like Adrian Harris, Lou Aaron and Jessica Benjamin, tends to be more friendly to the idea that there is at least a permeable boundary between the individual and the social. This also is reflected in the contemporary relational view of the treatment room, that there are two unconsciouses powerfully at work in the dyad, that there is no transference and countertransference as much as there is a cyclical flow that is alive in the space, and that this forms a sort of third subjectivity. The alternate view that problems of individual lives are problems of the individual mind has been represented only once, briefly on this show. When I presented Dr. Jonathan Schedler a case of someone experiencing ageism in the workplace, he said that this was not a psychotherapy problem. He's a brilliant defender of psychoanalytic values vis a vis so called evidence based therapies, and his social media presence is quick to identify what is and what isn't therapy. This includes examples I would agree with, such as giving advice and examples I wouldn't agree with, such as discussions of patriarchy while doing a sort of important missionizing to the world to remind them that psychoanalytic and psychodynamic values actually create powerful change in patients lives. He also advocates for a certain kind of purity he himself has a hard time reaching. Last year he tweeted a Fox News article with the headline Drag Queen Forces child to leave class for denying 73 genders and added his comment the most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced that they fight for all that is good and right. It's a sentence he's tweeted multiple times throughout the years in different contexts, along with tweets complaining about those who discuss privilege or the man haters on our professional list serves Dr. Schedler's politics are not subtle, but they also aren't clearly stated. There is a thin veil of plausible deniability, but like the Fox News article mentioned before, the most cursory dive into the background will show that it's all in bad faith. Bad faith is a phrase that comes up a lot this season. I use it as a synonym for disingenuous when we bend the truth to win a point or an argument. I don't know the true details of the incident in the Fox News article, nor do I really care, because just reading the article allowed me to know that that the incident was being investigated, and the superintendent told people that many inaccuracies were being shared online. Oh, but who is it that Dr. Shadler believes are the most toxic, hateful people in the world, and can he see them separately from that when they enter the treatment room? Is psychotherapy simply a surgery? Move the scalpel and your beliefs about the person on the operating table don't matter. Can we fix their insides without our insides being involved? I agree with Karim Dajani from our last episode. Don't mistake your model of reality for the reality of your model. Dr. Schedler is not alone. The Canadian psychoanalyst John Mills, a frequent critic of relational psychoanalysis, shares these views and, unlike those hiding in institutional offices, criticizes the political strands in the field vociferously. There are guests this season who have experienced much pushback from the community about their notions that the model of reality includes permeable borders, psyches that form not simply in the context of the dyad between mom and baby, but in a much larger cauldron, a cauldron that includes ingredients that many in the old school don't believe even exists. Yes, ones we discuss often racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. But systemic forces that oppress even the whitest and the straightest among us. One Reddit commenter said of our interview with Avi Sekhtipoulou that they disregarded her as soon as they heard the phrase neoliberal regime. That made me really want to talk more about the neoliberal regime. So I reached out to lyn Layton. In 2024, the International Forum for Psychoanalytics Education honored her with their Hans Low Wald Award. At the same time, they gave me the honor of awarding me as a distinguished educator. I was, and still am, overwhelmed with gratitude. We met at the banquet. I knew of her work on what she calls the normative unconscious, the stuff we all do to keep things chill, status quo. She's a professor of psychology at Harvard from her first book, who's that Boy? Who's that Girl? To her most recent book, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis. She has been a powerful voice for pushing the envelope in our field and a sort of thorn in the side for those who want to keep things. Things normative. What was your awareness of psychoanalysis?

[Lynn Layton]

My origin story is that I'm sure I was psychologically minded before this, but I went into a graduate lecture on Freud as a healthy human being. Healthy. And the professor started talking about the Freud fleece correspondence and then talked about Fleece's theory that Freud was interested in at the time of the sexual drug drive being located in the nasal passages. And I started to sneeze.

[John Totten]

In the.

[Lynn Layton]

Class, in the class. By the end of the lecture, honestly, I had a full blown cold. I was completely stuffed up, sneezing, et cetera. So I said to myself, there must be something going on here. And I kind of date my real encounter with unconscious process to that moment. Once I went into treatment myself, I recall my analysts saying, what took you so long to be a therapist? Because I was in my family, the mediator between the secrets that mom kept from dad and the debt from Mom. So I had a formation that led one to possibly become a therapist. But in graduate school then my fantasy was that I would be a comparative literature professor and then study to become a psychoanalyst on the side and have a small practice.

[John Totten]

Oh, interesting.

[Lynn Layton]

I decided to flip the script and I became a psychologist and then did psychoanalytic training. The other source I think in that was very prominent for me was feminism. And then being attracted to psychoanalytic feminism.

[John Totten]

And so your interest in that school predates your profession?

[Lynn Layton]

Yes. Telos, a critical studies journal, as in Frankfurt School Critical Studies was published at Washington University in the Sociology department there. And we had a study group where we read stuff together. And one of the things we read was Nancy Chodorow's reproduction of mothering. So that was kind of my intro. And that is very formative, I think, in what I came to understand as normative unconscious processes was gender formation, how it occurs in the family, how it occurred, particularly in the middle class, white 50s family. Then I was lucky because in the 90s, Stephen Mitchell, the first issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues came out and Jessica Benjamin had already been an influence because she's also comes from Frankfurt School critical theory. And I'd already read the Bonds of Love, which was 1988, in that third issue of the first volume of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Muriel Dimon, Virginia Goldner Jessica Benjamin Adrienne Harris had a whole section on psychoanalysis and feminism. I was able to connect with them and be part of a journal that was called, I think it was called First Gender and Psychoanalysis. And then it worked into Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

[John Totten]

I'm always interested in why the relationship between relational psychoanalysis, their relationship with feminist and queer theory is vital. But it's sometimes hard for me to explain why it's vital.

[Lynn Layton]

Oh, okay. Well, I think the way I would think about it is that it enabled the field to widen. First of all, it's focused on relationships as the primary formation of the psyche. And as soon as you say that it doesn't have to be just familial relationship, it can widen into peer groups. And I feel like that is part of the relational literature, whether it's feminist or not feminist. And the other thing I think in terms of maybe an influence through Stephen Mitchell or through the relational school, but from more interpersonal forensi, for example, was the whole idea of there being two unconsciouss in a room and not just one unconscious. So that there is the possibility, if we are formed through ideology, if our unconscious mind is formed through that, there's always the possibility that the therapist will be enacting or colluding in alignment with whatever the social norms of their particular culture and subculture end up reproducing status quo, unequal relationships. And then Erich Fromm, who was part of the Interpersonal School, we didn't read him because he got kicked out of Frankfurt School and he got kicked out of the psychoanalytic canon to the IPA.

[John Totten]

For his interest in Marxism or yes.

[Lynn Layton]

Exactly, for his left wing perspectives. I think it wasn't really until maybe I knew something about him. I mean, somehow I imbibed him. And by the time I was teaching courses in psychoanalytic theory and culture in social studies at Harvard, I taught Escape from Freedom, which was, I think, from 1947. And there he has the chapters on social, unconscious and social character in women's studies. I was teaching Fanon as I was becoming a psychologist and a psychoanalyst. Those were my sources, mostly from the academic world and not from clinical world.

[John Totten]

Right. I often make the mistake of having these kind of generational lines and I think of myself as a millennial in that, like the separation between the social and the psychological or the psychoanalytic is silly to me. But you are not a millennial. And you were coming to psychoanalysis with what sounds like a un angstful perspective on how these two things related.

[Lynn Layton]

Well, I Wouldn't say unangstable, because, I mean, just to draw it most sharply, I would say this. I think my institute is very proud to have me as a member because of my stature in the psychoanalytic parts of the psychoanalytic world. But whether they read what I write and are interested in what I write, I don't know. At my institute, I always taught the psychoanalysis and culture course. I'm grateful for the fact that my institute, which wasn't constituted until the late 80s, came out of the suit, the lawsuit about keeping psychoanalysts from training. We've had a course on culture and gender from the get go, but I would not say those courses were popular.

[John Totten]

I see.

[Lynn Layton]

I still think. I mean, I could be wrong, but I still think that in mainstream there is maybe a backlash against it. Well, for sure there's a backlash, but I'm not sure there was ever a deep interest in it in my. Now what, 35 years.

[John Totten]

Right. Of so plenty of angst, as in external pressures and judgments and all of those things.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

It's always surprising to me that these forces are still active.

[Lynn Layton]

There's very little to no education about group process in the psychoanalytic institutes that I am aware of, to our detriment. But perhaps it's one of those things that's a feature and not a bug. What I've been seeing in my institute and elsewhere is a backlash that's not coming from the right. It's coming from liberals. I drew on a term that Janet Jacobson and Ann Pellegrini introduced in a book, I think it was 2011, called Love the Sin. They talk about a bloc. Bloc that they call the tolerant middle. They have been in power and they don't want to cede power. And they allegedly, in Jacobson and Pellegrini's designation, they don't like extremism. They'll cast this as like being against right wing and left wing extremism. But they only go after the left and thereby abetting, in my opinion, the right. So here's an example. There is an article by Daniel Burstyn and Carrie Nelson that was in a journal, Free Associations, where they're critiquing sharply what they call critical social justice therapy. To my awareness, this is not a thing. It plays the same role in psychoanalytic discourse as critical race theory is playing in early educational debates.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

The only thing they cite in terms of what critical social justice therapy CSJT is are two other people who have gone after it.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

Whatever it is. If it were A thing. I would definitely fall into it, but it's not a thing. And the way they draw the line around it is that therapists no longer ask their patients. They're no longer interested in any of their individual dynamics. They just want to convince them that they're part of some oppressor group or an oppressed group, and it's just made up. Another example was a conference a couple years ago that I went to called Politics of Identity and Identity Politics. And I'm sure you're familiar with this too, the going after the woke who are interested in identity politics.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

Which generally comes from a white male heteropatriarchal.

[John Totten]

Right, right.

[Lynn Layton]

That's concerned about the working class and how the working class has gotten lost in all this feminism and anti black racism stuff. That same article goes after Lara Sheha.

[John Totten]

Oh, sure.

[Lynn Layton]

Got a whole lot of anti Palestinian solidarity stuff in it. One example she gave of the authoritarian left was myself and Lara Shiha using the term non negotiables in psychotherapy. It's Lara's term. And what. What she means is that you don't go into a treatment pretending that there's no such thing as racism or capitalism or heterosexism because to do so is gaslighting. So the non negotiables are you acknowledge what the dominant forces are in the culture. You're not lambasting the patient with it in the way that the people who are criticizing critical social justice therapy were acting like we do. But it's in your mind that's what she meant by non negotiable. So this was an example of the authoritarian left. And by the way, when Erich Fromm was critiquing the authoritarian left, he was talking about Stalinism.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

Not non negotiable. The this is happening in our field.

[John Totten]

In an article for the online journal Fathom that is frankly hard to fathom, the Canadian psychoanalyst John Mills, a frequent critic of the relational school, describes a problem he titles Burning down the House the Crisis in American Psychoanalysis. How Wokeism and Identity Politics Are Destroying the Profession and and Marginalizing Jews. He begins with a metaphor from his days on a psych unit in which, particularly noted, a female borderline patient tried to burn down the unit. He says this is what is happening to American psychoanalysis. Quote, the borderline in the house is woke ideology fueled by identity politics, where race, gender, anti colonialism and social justice activism is steering the field into a warped yet dominant narrative of oppression and power held by privileged white heteronormative men. And Jews and a particularly insidious division or splitting within psychoanalytic organizations is based on race. The psychoanalytic division of the APA has already been largely captured by wokeism and its turn towards critical social justice. And the newest casualty is the American Psychoanalytic Association. And the same person is behind all the brouhaha. Laura Sheeha End quote For context Laura Sheeha is a former psychology professor at George Washington University who was accused of making anti Semitic remarks by a group called Stand With Us that seeks out antisemitism in academia. Dr. Sheha was investigated and disinvited from many speaking engagements. The only problem is that nobody can cite any of her anti Semitic statements. If you believe, like I do, that criticizing Israel is not inherently anti Semitic, the professor of Lebanese origin has been a supporter of Palestinian rights and against the right wing government of Israel and Zionism. In the article by John Mills, after breezing past words like wokeism and identity politics without giving them any context or definitions, he cites a Tweet in which Dr. Sheha says Israel shouldn't exist. Okay, it's provocative, mills says. Imagine saying that to citizens of any other country. End quote. But for me personally, it is something I've said to fellow Americans, even about America. As Al Razmarin said in our interview, states establish themselves through violence. Furthermore, what I happen to know that Dr. Sheha believes should exist is a one state solution where Jews and Palestinians can live in the same region and share equal rights. The article, which reads more like a blog post than anything with intellectual rigor, thrives on obfuscating political anti Zionism with anti Semitic bigotry, just as the charges against Laura Shehad do, which she was cleared of by George Washington University after an investigation, not to mention a letter of support by Jewish colleagues that includes giants like Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin and our guest today. We'll discuss the controversy more later this season when we have Laura Sheeha on the show, but I'll give you a spoiler alert. She's very kind and generous to me. A white straight male with Jewish identity. Mills, after clutching his psychoanalytic pearls throughout the article, closes by saying social justice activism is the new hysteria packaged as upholding values of diversity, anti oppression and anti racism. Racism. It is in fact the new form of tyranny that is colonizing the professions. It is based in group narcissism and cloaked in moral absolutism and grandiose certitude. I wonder if Dr. Mills, whose country is currently being threatened by our president in the old form of tyranny feels still like American tyranny comes from the left.

[Mason Neely]

Is this some, like, misguided attempt to return to, like, fucking Victorian neutrality? Is that what they're going for, is like, is that what this. Is that, like, I'm just, because of my training and, like, fucking transcend the social. Who the fuck are you, pal?

[John Totten]

It feels like it. It feels like it.

[Mason Neely]

Like, we could dress this up in all this discussion of, like, the complicity of psychoanalysts in the bourgeois project and a bourgeois capital down through the ages. Is this literally just returning, too? I'm not affected by that shit.

[John Totten]

Mason, I'm as shocked as you are.

[Lynn Layton]

I actually. I love those conversations that you have with your producer, Mason. You can edit that in or edit it out.

[John Totten]

Oh, I love the compliment. Thank you. I mean, he'll love it as well. This is where I'm going next.

[Lynn Layton]

Okay.

[John Totten]

I want to hear what he says.

[Mason Neely]

What the fuck? What are we doing?

[John Totten]

Yeah, I want to talk to you about. Len. How do you feel about me being a little bit call out y this season?

[Mason Neely]

What was the line you had in one of the episodes? That there is no inside, there's only an outside? Yeah, I only believe there's an outside. My position is certainly within psychoanalysis, we could see as purity. I wonder if really, what those scholars are trying to do is, yes, they're trying to return to a comfortable footing theoretically, which is about kind of the. The purity of the individual, the individual psyche, but really they're trying to return to a world in which psychoanalysis has always been associated with bourgeois society, with psychoanalysts being connected to not so much a leisure class, but people of, you know, it's a. It's an intellectual class. Is it possible that this is trying to return to, like, a theoretical place of comfort, but also of trying to continue to protect a position that could be threatened by conversations that are happening. So it kind of makes sense. This is where I find myself just going numb listening to these debates. To me, anyone who would invoke the word woke, I'm going to struggle to take you seriously intellectually.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

To even use that word at this point. What the fuck are we even talking about? Like, what does that even mean? On one side, we have a class of therapists who are trying to return to a more comfortable theoretical center, the autonomous individual therapeutic alliance, the therapy space as a dyadic space. And that, yes, there are social forces, but ultimately our revolution is one that occurs between two people, either in an interest, subjective way. Or an intrapsychic way. Right. Which. That's not theoretically unreasonable. You can provide a rationale for that.

[John Totten]

But of course.

[Mason Neely]

What's the blind spot in that? Well, are we going to ignore power, privilege, discourses, institutions, the way in which we're normalized, the gender, sex, money, etc. That's its blind spot. Then we've got another side that is completely aware, is foregrounding privilege, power, capital, class, gender, sex, all of these things that form us, which I am much more aligned to, to see us as products of those things. But what's the blind spot there? There. Okay, so if the other side, if the sort of more reactionary impulse, the nostalgic impulse, is to return to the autonomous diet, that's its revolution. That's what it wants. I'm not sure what the revolution of the other side is. I think Len articulates this beautifully, but I'm not sure what to do with my own practice. And I don't think the field knows what to do with it. I don't know how psychotherapy can affect social change in that way. What is it we are wanting?

[John Totten]

I think I have a theory for that.

[Mason Neely]

Okay, go on.

[John Totten]

I go to my patient who says, my problem is that I can't concentrate for 10 hours a day at work. Where I see lens work being important is for a therapist to say, okay, let's try to understand how you could concentrate better.

[Mason Neely]

Sure.

[John Totten]

Is an enactment of the, like, neoliberal.

[Mason Neely]

Absolutely right.

[John Totten]

And that's where a lot of therapists would go is let's dive into the unconscious to understand what's stopping them from concentrating or whatever. And where I see it is if there's a pathway there, and maybe there's not, having some form of like, liberation would be like, hey, 10 hours of concentration per day at work is not normal. Can we at least talk about who is oppressing you within your own mind? Can we at least come to some awareness that there is like this, this little Ronald Reagan in your mind oppressing you?

[Mason Neely]

I am completely aligned to that. That we have to see it as part of, like this unconscious assemblage, whether it's the demands of capital. I mean, particularly for me, from my own lens of digital technologies, how is that shaping not only what you do, but how you see yourself, how you build your own subjectivity? Yeah, absolutely. May we zoom out to understand the world? Of course. It's totally reasonable.

[John Totten]

I think you and I can have like a good faith conversation about what are some of the pitfalls of this way of thinking. And certainly some of our guest can as well.

[Mason Neely]

But again, this kind of gets back to the thing about using the word woke instantly. As soon as I hear that it's not even a pejorative, it's just name calling. It's just shit stirring. That's not a clear, coherent debate. I would say that's not a productive discourse and it's certainly not a revolutionary discourse. And by that I mean any revolution. And I mean that not in some romantic sense, but like moving towards change, Moving towards whatever is next, whatever we're going to become. How do we change? How do we grow? We're relational creatures. We are products of our relationships and our autonomy is built through our social and interpersonal connections. Whatever change can occur in this life, both at the level of the individual or the level of the social, is a product of interworking, of comrades, of collective engagement between people.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

So to me, whether it's calling people fascist or racist or fucking woke mind virus that instantly undoes any opportunity for human beings to find shared endeavors. And at that point I'm like, what the fuck are we doing here?

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

Any form of psychotherapy is a relational encounter. Right.

[John Totten]

I'm interested for you to hear where the Season Goes.

[Mason Neely]

And I think this is a theme that we keep coming back to. Here is very much a post structuralist, postmodern view of the world. That power is everywhere and privilege is everywhere and discipline is everywhere and that institutions and capital, men and women and gender, and we cannot neglect the fact that the world is both unjust and power is accumulated in certain hands and dispersed and inflicted on people all the time. To me, the field is a relational field. I don't know why we cannot incorporate this into our relational lens.

[John Totten]

Hear, hear.

[Mason Neely]

It's obvious if we're talking about the anti wokesters. And again, even to say that I feel myself getting dumber even using this word again. You know what they want. It's like, give me my status. Stop challenging me at research conferences when you comment on my work. Stop talking about power and privilege. Fucking get over it. Like we know what it is they want.

[John Totten]

This is what I love about this season. This is why it feels so different than in previous seasons, which I don't have any regrets about. We're not talking about cultural competency. We're not talking about diversity, equity and.

[Mason Neely]

Inclusion, which one could argue are just part of the neoliberal apparatus anyway.

[John Totten]

What we are talking about is what is in the unconscious of the person. We are not just talking about systemic inequality. It's part of It. And this is the debate that they don't like the people who want to maintain their status. We're pulling out junk from the junk drawer and we're debating about how much we can keep pulling out.

[Mason Neely]

What's the junk in that metaphor?

[John Totten]

The junk drawer is the unconscious.

[Mason Neely]

Okay. They're just trying to limit and delimit the unconscious. Here are its edges. Yes, the universe stops at some point.

[John Totten]

Yes. But we're talking about something much more constitutive to the human than the superego. For an American to understand something like Israel, Palestine, for example. My unconscious language is American.

[Mason Neely]

But what you're describing is an expansive view of subjectivity, of relationship of the human experience. And what. What are you describing but therapy as a place of encounter to where we can take seriously all those inconsistencies and incongruities and all these stimuli from all these different areas. Yeah, I wouldn't include technology in that. Given that we are in this mediated, technologized age, to discount the impact that these fucking apparatus have had on us and our experience of ourselves and others. We do ourselves a disservice. Yeah, what you're describing is a expansive view of the human experience that we can be a part of.

[John Totten]

It's not in my mind, proselytizing my clients to become woke protesters. It's understanding what forces are oppressing them from within.

[Mason Neely]

Of course, we talked about Gildos and Felix Guitari before. They're really applicable to this discussion. I mean, they have a great quote. They said there is only desire, as in those things that we want. And the social. So what does that mean for the therapeutic endeavor? It means that desire, the things we want, things we're moving towards, the things, the pursuits we have, the things that turn us on, that excite us, that. That we seek, are not the product of something that was missing. It's not the product of lack. This is the view of Freud, of Lacan. It's not the absence of something. Desire in all its forms is produced. It's a product that emerges through interaction. The interaction between all the things that we engage with and our social context, our familial context, our technological context, our affective states that what reality is and what our desire is in it is not this innate thing that exists in us that's fixed, it's always moving, it's always dynamic, and it is produced in response to the world around us. Whether that be effective, discursive, relational, that what we want, what we're moving towards, who we are is not the evidence of, like this Beautiful internal. The eye that existed. No, it's a thing that's produced through our engagement with the world. That's all there is. All right, buddy, with that. Right? You're the best.

[John Totten]

You are. I'm very interested in your work on ideology. I mean, it all relates how ideology works on us unconsciously. And then there are some very bad faith forces, I feel like, who are aware of that. Like, if I were to get into like a political debate with my Trump loving family members and I were to say, hey, like, your ideology is working on you, they would very cleverly say, well, your ideology is working on you. And where we, where we go with that?

[Lynn Layton]

Well, you know, I mean, I think that that is true and I think that maybe the next move to make there is. Yes, but I acknowledge that I have ideological forces working on me. Do you? That's another thing I've come up against repeatedly in convers in my institute. You know, in the psychoanalytic world, that anything that's left or that even tries to bring in the social world that isn't left is considered ideological.

[Mason Neely]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

And political. Like you're bringing politics into this politics free sphere.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

Without any acknowledgement that you too are operating in a particular politics.

[Mason Neely]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

And it happens to be the politics that accepts the status quo as normal. And that works under what Erich from would call an ethic of adaptation as opposed to a more radical perspective where you're actually questioning the norms of the culture with your patients and in yourself. This goes back to that earlier conversation of like, was I taken seriously? I'm not complaining because I found my people, but there's real forces, strong forces against that. Stephen Mitchell was not one of them. My first book was about gender. Who's that girl? Who's that boy? Stephen Mitchell wrote me a fan letter. He's such a mensch.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

Not an accident that in that first volume of dialogues, all these feminists voices were given primary place.

[John Totten]

At what point did your concepts around the normative unconscious, how did the development of this idea come about for you and help me understand and what it is?

[Lynn Layton]

So I've been thinking, certainly thinking as I was saying, about how we internalize social world and how we externalize it. And as I'm learning about forensic and the relational school, thinking about that, but Sometime in the mid-90s or early 90s, I was working with a student in women's studies at Harvard, and we came upon this paper that was not really within the topic of psychoanalysis and feminism, but it was a case in the literature where the analyst had an extended vignette of his work. He's white, probably in his 40s, I'm not sure. But it was a younger female patient. And what we noticed, because he had given so much data, so much of the vignette, we noticed the ways in which he was undoubtedly unconsciously heterosexualizing her desire and doing what I had been starting to think about after reading a lot of the psychoanalytic feminist work, having split conceptions of what a proper female and what a proper male should be in our, I would say, dominant white culture. In other words, again, this comes from. Really comes from Nancy Chodorow's work about the different psychic structures that develop in girls and boys when they are primarily socialized by mom who stays home and dad who's out in the world. And she describes a psychic structure for dominant cultural femininity being rooted in relationship, embeddedness in relationship. Don't rock relational boats. Suppress assertiveness. Because that will be interpreted as aggression, which was certainly my experience. So I grew up in the time period Nancy Chodorow was describing. And this certainly was my experience. Whereas masculinity was rooted in what came to be called a defensive autonomy that denied its embeddedness in relationship. More comfortable with aggression. Moms were pushing sons to become more autonomous, but keeping their daughters close. So she had proposed that girls and boys develop different psychic structures. And that's what we were seeing in this article, that only one person was allowed to be the dependent one, or was the dependent one, and it was the female. Although the male analyst had told the reader about his own dependence on the patient, it wasn't interpreted that way to the patient. To the patient, what was interpreted was the patient being dependent on the therapist. So that was, I think, one of the earliest instances for me, finding things in the literature already where I could see a therapist unconsciously colluding with a patient or even dominating a patient from, you know, a more powerful, the asymmetrical part of the relationship to conforming with, particularly with the kinds of social structures that had made them sick in the first place.

[John Totten]

In her book, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis, Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, Lynn writes, soon after writing the gender book, I became interested in exploring more about the way that split identity categories and internalized social norms not only impede growth, but create narcissistic constellations that promote unconscious reproduction of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist social conditions. For this project, relational conceptions of enactment proved crucial. Many relational founders, including Stephen Mitchell, had been trained in the interpersonal Tradition. Some of those members had argued that in any analysis, there are two unconsciouss in the room. As early as 1972, Levinson pushed this premise further to assert that mutual enactments of traumatic experience that cannot yet be symbolized can be, and often are at the heart of therapeutic action. Unconscious collusions within the dyad that reenact rather than analyze earlier traumatic experience often lead to impasse. But working one's way out of such an impasse can be key to promoting deep psychic change. For both participants, clinical descriptions of enactance, especially mutual enactments, became central to my way of bringing interrelation the psychic and the social. For in my view, unconscious process in the clinical and any other setting is always inflicted by cultural norms. By the late 1990s, several clinicians, mostly within the relational and group psychoanalytic traditions, had begun writing about ways that social media inequalities are recreated in, and sometimes sustained by unconscious enactments in the clinic. These clinical descriptions of relational enactments, of disavowed, split off, projected and disassociated experience, helped me formulate my own thoughts about how cultural inequalities became reproduced in both clinic and culture.

[Lynn Layton]

I did a couple of papers that I wrote on other people's work. The other one was bisexuality. I really took a lot of shit. People didn't like this. As you can. Well, the one about heterosexuality was 1995. It was a paper about self disclosure in an analysis. Yeah, so I was not making friends, shall we say, psychoanalytic world. And I understand that because we make ourselves so vulnerable when we're publishing our work with patients. And I was more maybe using my comparative literature training to focus on this, but certainly from a psychoanalytic perspective. So I started thinking about how I'm doing it in my own work, which is not easy. It's not easy to catch. And people are often asking me, well, how do you. How do you find it? You know, I've been told you make a lot of mistakes, but I don't understand them.

[John Totten]

Can you say more what you mean?

[Lynn Layton]

I remember giving a talk in England where I described some of the instances of normative unconscious processes that I. I had already published. One of which was my work with an Asian American guy where I felt like I had unconsciously taken the role of the white person who. He had. All of his partner's boyfriends were white. He had clearly found some refuge from the wounds that he had experienced in his family in whiteness. So where I took the role that he was giving me of whiteness which I later, when asked to revisit that particular case, thinking about more countertransferential, I ended up tying feeling was tied to my own formation by immigrant Jews who did everything they could to assimilate into whiteness, did not want to talk at all about their past, and that those wounds were transmitted to me and that I was all too happy to be white. And in the power position there, I recognized some way that I was reinforcing a racist hierarchy with him. So examples like that I was giving and of what I did, what I said, that either heterosexualized a patient and shamed them or took this position of whiteness. And someone in the audience who was probably a Kleinian, British Kleinian, said, you make a lot of mistakes, don't you?

[John Totten]

How did you respond?

[Lynn Layton]

I said what I always say, which is, I don't see them as mistakes. I see them as coming from the unconscious processes that are formed by social norms that are unequal and in binary formation, like whiteness and non whiteness, straight and gay, right, Masculine and feminine. And that the more aware we become of those just things that have formed us and that we have taken as normal, and that we're trying to normalize the patient into the better psychoanalytic work that. That we will do. And with this particular patient that I described, the giveaway was that I not only took this position of whiteness that he had considered to be the position of invulnerability to pain, but I also did something that ended up, I think, heterosexualizing him, wounding him in the place of. Of masculinity. And I thought, on reflection, that I was having a difficult time sitting with a male who was. Tended to be more passive in social relations. So when I did that particular maneuver, he came back later in the session with thinking of quitting therapy, bringing up the previous therapist he had had, who she was young and quite beautiful. The way he described thinking of going back to her or just bringing her up felt like he figured out how to, like, wound me right in the place where. In femininity. Oh, where I had wounded him and masculinity. So when you're fortunate enough to catch something that you've done like this, you can process it with the patient. But often, I mean, there have been times when I didn't really. You know, some enactment starts and goes on and on and on. And if I caught it while the patient was still in treatment, we could return to it. But sometimes I didn't catch it until later. So it's a little hard to teach or to supervise around. I mean, it's easier to supervise around it. I guess you can hear it if you're going to supervise. From that perspective, you have to know a lot about the social location of patient and therapist. And another problem, I think, in our literature is that often, unlike the papers that I was able to critique, personal change, the gender or the age, or some crucial demographic that would actually enable you to understand more about the social.

[John Totten]

So my way of understanding the. Your use of the word normative and unconscious, is that it. It's actually our way of making our reality seem normative?

[Lynn Layton]

Yes. It's upon the particular cultural inequalities formed in hierarchical relationship that split off, where human attributes and capacities get split off into one or the other pair. And because we strive to be able to have as part of us all of the human capacities, the problem will emerge of what you've split off. And then the question is, does the therapist push you back into enacting the proper or is it questioned?

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

But then you have to know how you've been formed within these cultural hierarchies and how the patient's been formed and how it's getting played out.

[John Totten]

And I'm guessing that it's often colluded in that, like being pushed back into our normative is actually quite comfortable for us.

[Lynn Layton]

Exactly. I mean, in part because it's comfortable for us and it's sometimes comfortable for the patient to their own sabotage, but because of the repetition compulsion, because of the obedience to authority, which is one of the things that I really appreciate in Eric Fromm talking about conformity in relation to wanting to belong, to wanting to be the right kind of boy or girl, the patient might be all too happy again, to their own detriment, to stay in.

[John Totten]

In an article called Splitting in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, published in 2024, Lynn writes, what I've generally argued is that when you look at how the categories operate, you find that they tend to legislate ways of being human, ways of expressing emotion, and ways of relating to other humans. In exchange for being loved and socially legible, we tend to take up, consciously or unconsciously, identification with the way power hierarchies define the class, race, gender, and sexual norms proper to where we are socially located. In so doing, we are encouraged to split off other ways of being, feeling and relating. The split binary structures become narcissistic mirror images of each other, deprived of the full range of human possibility. Culturally ideal norms of, for example, masculinity and femininity were, and sadly still mostly are Monstrous distortions of human possibility. And then many of the identity categories that rest on splitting are conditioned at their core by a split fundamental to our neoliberal US Social reality. A version of autonomy that splits off, disavows its roots in dependency. A defensive autonomy whose split off binary is a despised version of dependency, conceived of as having no autonomy or agency. As defensive autonomy, once idealized only for white straight men, became the social ideal demanded of ever greater segments of the population. Dependency, vulnerability and relationship have been increasingly devalued and rendered shameful. These unconscious processes are kind of like these deals we make exactly.

[Lynn Layton]

Deals to belong.

[John Totten]

And often at the expense of the belonging of others.

[Lynn Layton]

Yes, exactly.

[John Totten]

But that. That belonging is like very crucial to us unconsciously.

[Lynn Layton]

I love that. One of the papers in. In psychoanalyticature that I love the most is a paper by Erik Erickson on ethics.

[John Totten]

Erik Erickson as in like the developmentalist?

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

Okay.

[Lynn Layton]

He has this paper that distinguishes the superego from ethics. When he talks about the superego, he talks about deals. Deals that we make in order to be good boys and girls. Having the benefit of black feminist intersectional theory and other feminist theories of identity, and theories of identity that grew out of the ideology studies helps to differentiate how these things go on in a way that Erik Erickson didn't have. And even Erich Fromm, when he talks about a social unconscious. First of all, it's a thing. I think a lot of people talk about it as a thing as opposed to what I talk about, which are processes that get acted out. Second of all, he's more back in that mold of the ideology theorists, where there's a dominant ideology and therefore a dominant social character. Whereas where my work would differ would be taking this more intersectional approach that there's not one social character, but it would be looked at different if it was a middle class white female. There will be overlaps, but there will be some differentiation. What Erik Erikson describes these deals, the superego that might be the unconscious place where normative unconscious. Right stem think. I don't think in terms of idigo and superego. I guess that's.

[John Totten]

Maybe I should, but I mean, it's actually helpful for me to think about this stuff as separate from the superego in that it helps me think of its pervasiveness more. Yeah, the part of me that decided, you know, however old, no, I don't think sex is for like a man and a wife only is the part of me that could like, quickly kind of reevaluate the superego. And deal with it. Whereas the part of me that maybe hunches my shoulders when I walk through a black neighborhood at night is not as simply removed as the superego, if that. That makes sense.

[Lynn Layton]

That makes a great deal of sense to me. Absolutely. Yep.

[John Totten]

And so when I start to challenge this notion that this is all super ego, it becomes a lot more easy for me to understand that this is like the air we breathe more than like the teachings we got.

[Lynn Layton]

I think so. And I actually, I have Eric From's definition here. I don't think he thought in terms of id, ego and superego either. He says the social unconscious consists of everything we repress in order not to be aware of social contradictions, socially produced suffering, the failure of authority and feelings of social malaise and dissatisfaction. And again, the fear behind it was not castration or annihilation, but the fear of losing love, of not belonging socially. I don't hear any location of that in a particular psychic structure. This brings to mind. This may be peripheral, but going to this conference years ago where Stephen Frosh presented some interview material to a group of us. It was a conference on the psychic and the social in Norway. We all have this interview material. We're reading it, and he asks the question of where we see the unconscious. And I see the unconscious everywhere in this interview. I hear it everywhere.

[John Totten]

Right, right, right, right.

[Lynn Layton]

As you begin a relationship and a conversation with somebody, it's flowing.

[John Totten]

When I'm thinking about my patients and talking to you, the first thing that comes to mind is how more than ever, it seems like I have patients who are feeling dread and stress about their performance at work and what they're giving their employer and whether they're, you know, and how they can't use their free time for themselves. I think the younger generations have this awareness of, like, internalized capitalism.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

Seems to pervade all of our free time and thoughts.

[Lynn Layton]

Absolutely. And I worried about that quite a bit as well. And so many of my patients felt that way that they, you know, if they, if they had downtime, they felt like they were just being lazy. They were white, mostly white, middle class. But again, like all ideologies, it penetrates into every layer and you negotiate with it differently depending on where you're located. So many of my middle and upper middle class white patients would talk about this drive to just be productive all the time. And when I've taught classes, a younger, a millennial younger person will say, well, like, isn't that normal? And I feel fortunate in a way that I'm Old, because. No, actually it wasn't that way when I was growing up. It really did start with Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the uk.

[John Totten]

Okay, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit more about neoliberalism, because I got into a debate last night with a really good friend of mine where he said that, you know, the problem with Democrats is identity politics. And then, you know, an argument kind of ensued. And I told him that, you know what? What I don't see when I listen to the campaigns and the politicians is a lot of woke shit. I hear them talk about the guns they own and how they want the illegal immigrants out, and I hear them kind of talk like they're Republicans. But I'm interested in neoliberalism because I don't know how to move these conversations forward. I'm also aware of how well it pulls across a wide swath of demographics when Bernie Sanders, for example, talks about a fight against billionaires. And there's something in me, not that I want to deride the work that people have done on feminism or racism. Those things are important. But there's part of me that feels like neoliberalism is maybe the umbrella over all of it. And I'm wondering if you could talk to a little bit about how it entered your work and what it is.

[Lynn Layton]

Okay, I'm going to start with how it entered my work. Okay. When I was in literature graduate school, I was most influenced by the Frankfurt School. They were German during the rise of fascism, and most of them left. Many of them were Jewish, including Fromm and Adorno. Their focus was on what binds people psychologically to oppressive systems. Later in my work, I became more influenced, possibly because he was the clinician of the group, even though he was sort of kicked out of the group. To Erich Fromm, his other thought about how the social and the psychological connect was social character. For Fromm, who was not a Freudian and didn't believe that we're motivated by sex and aggression, libido theory, he believed that we're motivated by longing to. For acceptance, love, and social belonging. And he believed that in a culture that is focused around individuation, that a major side effect is aloneness, which breeds a tendency to conform, to be part of the social whole. So the Frankfurt School did all this study of the authoritarian personality, and Fromm did a very early study of the German working class on the authoritarian personality. He also really more generally talked about how the economy of a culture, the material pieces of a culture, have to meet the psychological needs in Some way of the population. And it breeds a certain, in his view, a certain social character that's dominant. Even as far back as 1947, he came up with several different kinds of social characters, one of which are orientations, he called them. One was called the marketing orientation as early as 1947 in his book man for Himself. And the marketing orientation was kind of something that's very familiar in a neoliberal culture. So I'm not really sure if again, there was a direct influence for me from his ideas about social character, or was I just starting to read academic work on neoliberalism and it connected for me with his ideas on social character. You know, neoliberalism is often referred to as a free market fundamentalism, although it really, really. There were neoliberals who began to argue against the welfare state right after the New Deal. There were mostly. The billionaire class was not into ideas of using tax money to help vulnerable populations. They should be the leaders. There should be no regulation. There should be very low taxes right from the get go in response to the New Deal. So from things that I've read, including this really wonderful book, the author was Nancy Maclean, and it was called Democracy and Change. Very interesting weaving together of what happened to get a broader consensus in the population to neoliberal ideas. Because really, there was a consensus around the New Deal for years and years and years, even through Eisenhower. But, and here's where I think this responds to your question. Where the popular consensus started to form against big governments. That's one of the keystones against big government. No regulation, privatization of public goods, another key feature which leads to intensification of individualism in neoliberalism. So where the consensus started to become more popular was after Brown versus Board of Education.

[John Totten]

What is the connection?

[Lynn Layton]

The connection is racism.

[John Totten]

Well, I understand that Brown versus the Board of Education was about racism and segregation.

[Lynn Layton]

Yes. The general public backlash against the civil rights movement as an intrusion by the state where their kids were going to go to school. You know, in Boston, this is later. But busing, that kind of big government intervention was fine when it was Social Security, Medicare, et cetera. You know, people love the welfare state, sure. But once. And again, this is Nancy Maclean's argument, and it fits with a lot of other things that I've read. What starts to happen is that the neoliberal billionaires peel off the white working class through appeals to racism, not just segregation. But there's really not a broad. Broadly, there's not desegregation in terms of housing. Even now.

[John Totten]

In the interest of not splitting, of not disavowing, of not demonizing those I disagree with on this topic. I find in this interview that I have even in myself a tiny right winger inside my mind. When my patient expresses guilt for listening to a white R and B singer because this is clearly cultural appropriation. When another patient tells me she can't hang out with her friends unmasked well after the mask mandates have been lifted and Covid has become endemic with effective treatment, when another patient confronts me about the lack of pronouns in my identification, I feel like a little Republican in my head shouting, these are people who are trying to figure out how to be good. And I see that liberal thought and culture has placed inconvenient questions in front of them that cause them to feel anxious and, and sometimes shameful. But I also know as clinicians, what do we do when a patient is caused anxiety or shame by a question? Do we retreat? Do we smooth it over and say, never mind, you're okay, or do we investigate what is tender about the place we've bumped up against? The tiny right wing guy in my mind is annoyed that there's work to do here. He wants to be uninterrogated. The conservative in me wants to conserve his energy. He wants to sleep in a haze of norms, to be the opposite of woke. He has worked hard enough to get where he is and he is mad at the inconvenience. And on a deeper level, he's angry that he knows this isn't my calling. Yeah, you are very much getting at my question. And clinically, I feel like more than ever I have clients with unconsciouss that are protecting the billionaires and executives in their companies.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah, okay, so now you're talking about a later period.

[John Totten]

Okay.

[Lynn Layton]

Neoliberalism doesn't really catch hold until Reagan trickled down. That's like 1980. Right? That's where it really takes hold popularly. There's where you start to see the increase in income inequality. So what happens there is that people are suffering economically. I'm thinking of Arlie Hochschild's book Strangers in Their Own Land, where, you know, she wants to build an empathy wall for the people in the Tea Party that she, she was interviewing over the course of five years in Louisiana. And she does build the case for empathy for what these people have lost economically, for how the system is completely rigged against them with big tax breaks for fossil fuel companies that the governor gives, but it doesn't help the people at all. They've got enormous number of losses through cancers that are caused by the toxicity of the environment. Where it becomes harder to climb that empathy wall is how they end up in explaining to themselves why these things have happened. And what she pulls out of it is this narrative that black people have cut in line, they're in line, but black people have cut in and they're getting everything. And that was key to Reagan's administration. The welfare queen.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

Racism gets used to deflect from the real sources of the economic sparing and sexism. I mean, you can't. It's not just racism at this point. I think what we're finding in Trumpism is an attempt to wipe out every social movement that's, you know, maybe starting with civil rights movement, but the feminist movement, gay, lesbian liberation movement, trans movement.

[John Totten]

And this is where my conversation with my friend last night went, because my final point to him was to say, listen, you and I agree on a lot of things, but they want us to be bickering about transgender athletes so that they can garner your sympathy and divide us while they rob both of us blind.

[Lynn Layton]

Right.

[John Totten]

I do see these bigotries like racism and misogyny and transphobia and homophobia as working in tandem with those neoliberal forces. My thinking as of this last campaign cycle has shifted to this idea of neoliberalism kind of being the top layer over all of it.

[Lynn Layton]

I think. I think you have to understand all of it in whatever socio historic political context it's all functioning in. And it will take on different dimensions within different social systems. And neoliberalism is definitely the dominant. Where I end up differing with from. Let me read one of his quotes to you before I say that in his book the Method and Function of Analytic Social Psychology, he says it is narcissistic needs for recognition and love that are the most basic. So in a society that is based on acquisition as success, narcissistic needs will be met by acquiring. The desire to acquire is not a universal human need. Reality and pleasure principle are defined differently in different historical epochs. Analysts who take capitalist reality to be the reality principle are producing consumption conformists. But where I differ from the idea that there is one dominant social character, and I think this connects with the argument that you're struggling with with your friend. I would bring in the like, something like the Combahee river collective statement about intersectionality of oppressions. Yes, there is a dominant social character, but it is lived differently depending on whether where you are located socially. And all of these oppressions again work together. But within the neoliberal system, the major Social category for the Frankfurt School was class.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

And class is crucial.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

But all of these other oppressions, they're not just identities. This is where I can't stand this whole idea of like it's identity politics is the problem. Their struggles against systemic inequality.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

They're the root of different oppressions.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

And best addressed in coalition for sure.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Lynn Layton]

As opposed to struggles. Yeah.

[John Totten]

And I'm not interested in sacrificing that point. I think it's because I work with so many and clearly I'm related to so many white, middle class straight men who cannot hear it anymore.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

I'm also always trying to be practical about how to move those conversations forward with clients and with loved ones.

[Lynn Layton]

Yep.

[John Totten]

And if I'm being radically honest, I think that the most optimistic hope here is that one day me and my MAGA father could see how we're both in the same boat, both in the boat of masculinity, and that it makes us afraid of our feelings and the boat of racism and that it makes us afraid of the other.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

All of those things are true. But I'm seeing it as even on a more fundamental level, I was born early in the Reagan years and I was raised with this idea that we should protect the rich and their right to do whatever they want because it would benefit all of us and that we've been lied to.

[Lynn Layton]

Yes.

[John Totten]

And in my most optimistic dreams, there is this framework there for a new kind of belonging.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah.

[John Totten]

And I think when you listen to Bernie Sanders, he's aware of that and that's what he's trying to sell.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah, but it didn't sell. Only up to a point.

[John Totten]

Well, it didn't sell, but it polls better than what the Democrats are selling.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah, I agree. I think the move to the center was a real mistake in the last election. I'm not sure that only I are against billionaires. I think that there needs to be a recognition. And I think Biden for me was the first non neoliberal president since Lyndon Johnson.

[John Totten]

Can you say more about that? Because I think of Lina Khan at the ftc. See, being a really unique feature of the Biden administration.

[Lynn Layton]

Yes. Yeah. Antitrust, Much more favorable to the working class. Bringing manufacturing back. So here's the way I would think about these kinds of conversations. What's the suffering? Can we first connect on agreeing on what the suffering is? And I do think that the working class is aware that manufacturing going abroad and the free trade agreements of the 90s are a cause of the suffering.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

And Trump says, I'm going to fix all of that. He's not. These people are going to suffer even more. And so that might be the point of entry as soon as people are really, really suffering from his policies and grocery prices are going up even more. I'm telling you this as an aspirational thing. I'm not sure that's where I think you'd start. We can agree on what has caused the suffering. I think why folks didn't recognize that Biden was addressing neoliberalism is because, unlike Trump, who has a press conference every day, Biden never did. He never talked about what he was doing. So I actually, there's a part of a chapter, I think, that I wrote about a college student who was, like, working at a college that's predominantly white and upper middle class. And as was this patient. And she was working like 24, 71 semester, producing fabulous stuff, getting all A's. Second semester, she would binge purge, drink too much, not get any of her assignments in on time. And so this had come up in a. In a class where someone was presenting this patient of hers, and the therapist started getting calls from the parents, help her finish her papers. So there's a lot of pressure to, as I would think of it, further neoliberalize this patient rather than. And just be questioning the abnormality of what was happening in the second semester as opposed to addressing the abnormality as well of what was happening in the first semester. This drive. Perfect.

[John Totten]

This is so many of my sessions now. Like, we end up talking a lot about the framework of where we're located, the pathology. As in, someone says, I think I have ADHD and it's undiagnosed. And I say, why do you say that? And they say, because I can only concentrate for about six or seven hours of the workday. And then I say, well, what. What is normal? And they say, well, my co workers are concentrating for eight to 10 hours of the workday. And I say, okay, first of all, that's what you're witnessing of them. I highly doubt they are. But. But let's talk about, like, where we're locating the problem. Right. Is the problem within you or isn't the problem that you're supposed to concentrate for eight to 10 hours of the workday?

[Lynn Layton]

So, yeah, so another therapist might just send them for some drugs.

[John Totten]

Is that true? I guess I have an optimistic view. As in, I feel like more therapists who are boots on the ground are doing this kind of work than the animal in charge who says, we're not.

[Lynn Layton]

Supposed to, but I don't know. I really don't. I hope you're right. But I wonder. I think there's so much cultural pressure, so much anxiety about mobility. I mean, I remember starting to hear this in the 90s, late 90s. One of my friends said to me that he feels that previous generations have all been upwardly mobile, but he's really, really afraid and thinks that that's not going to be true for his kids. And it's that kind of anxiety that I heard from so many of my friends, not just my. Right, my friends. I. Because where would it come from in your training, maybe. Training has changed dramatically since I was in psychology graduate school in the 80s and in psychoanalytic training in the late 90s and early 2000s. Where would this idea come from to question cultural norms with your patients?

[John Totten]

I am also realizing that when I have that conversation with that patient, it's a tough sell, like, yeah, John, but I need some relief from this quickly gets back to, like, belonging and survival. How is questioning the framework going to solve much for me? Because I still need to put food on the table.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah. So you're getting the resistance from the patient. And I don't know what your graduate school training was like, but mine was. There was this nod to the biopsychosocial. I don't even ever really figure out what that meant. No, we never studied anything about how the social world affects the psyche.

[John Totten]

Yeah. The first psychoanalytic book I ever read was from.

[Lynn Layton]

I think you're unique.

[John Totten]

Called beyond the Chains of Illusion.

[Lynn Layton]

Yeah, that's. Yeah, yeah. Great. Yeah.

[John Totten]

And so that was me saying, I want to understand Freud, so I'm going to read someone else and not Freud. Which in a way, I'm glad I did.

[Lynn Layton]

I don't. I. I would be surprised if from is on any psychology graduate student syllabi.

[John Totten]

In these times, particularly, I'm talking to you a week into this shock and awe. How do we have conversations, I guess, is my question.

[Lynn Layton]

I don't practice anymore. I do some supervision, but mostly I'm a social activist. Messaging is crucial. The Democrats really, I think, did fail. You know, I'm not blaming them in a way. Kamala Harris was counseled probably by very wealthy donors to stay away from what they had accomplished and tack to the center, which she did, not only on Palestine, but on the economic agenda as well. So we need to do messaging of the kind that tell the truth, like, just put out some facts. So I've been developing, like, tweets that are just like true, you know, like how Elon Musk benefited from trying to shut down the budget conversations and what dripped out of that, that budget. We have to find a way to talk to people who are too busy, who are, who feel rightly betrayed by the Democratic Party. I've thought of this a couple of times during this interview, so I might as well bring it up now. For what it's worth. A person who is very influential in my thinking about ideology is Stuart Hall. He was a black British Jamaican immigrant to the UK who became the head of the British Cultural Studies in Birmingham, which did a lot to connect politics, popular culture and racism was often central in their analyses. And he was very influenced by Gramsci, who I am also influenced by in terms of how I think about ideology. Because the French folks that I was talking about, like Althusser, think of subjectivity as in terms of subjection to ideology. And what I like about Gramsci and then Stuart Hall's drawing on Gramsci and many post Gramscians is how they center hegemony. But that hegemony cannot wipe out protest. So there are always counter hegemonic forces and that's how I understand the psyche. I could be socialized to be non assertive and meek, but I know, I know in me that I can be a. You know, I could be me, but. So there's these forces in me that are contesting, even if it's with shame or whatever, what the culture's telling me I need to be.

[John Totten]

I've really been thinking a lot about what makes a collective. And if I'm. I am old enough to remember post 9 11, how after a crisis we. There was a lot of like putting our differences aside and being able to talk to people, people who we normally wouldn't talk to. I want to believe that we can be that.

[Lynn Layton]

I do too. I do too. And I do. Yeah. I mean, I do think there's some people who are just like, no, not happening.

[John Totten]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lynn Layton]

But where we can. I think we should. I think we should make. It's kind of like what we do in treatment, right? In a way, yeah. Over time you may well find ways because you're thinking about it. And some therapists wouldn't even be thinking about it would just be.

[Unidentified Older Male (possibly a school administrator or colleague)]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Totten]

This conversation has felt more like we were having a dinner party than maybe an official interview. Thank you for being on the show.

[Lynn Layton]

Pleasure. Thank you. Bye bye.

[John Totten]

This has been between us. Our thanks. Thanks to our guest, Lynn Layton. Between Us is produced by myself, John totten and Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl. Find between us, wherever you find podcasts and subscribe. And if you like the show, leave a review and until next time, take care.