Class and Psychoanalysis

Class and Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Joanna Ryan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317503902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about the emotional landscapes of class? How can class-inclusive psychoanalytic projects, historic and contemporary, inform theory and practice? Class and psychoanalysis are unusual bedfellows, but this original book shows how much is to be gained by exploring their relationship. Joanna Ryan provides a comprehensively researched and challenging overview in which she holds the tension between the radical and progressive potential of psychoanalysis, in its unique understandings of the unconscious, with its status as a mainly expensive and exclusive profession. Class and Psychoanalysis draws on existing historical scholarship, as well as on the experiences of the author and other writers in free or low-cost projects, to show what has been learned from transposing psychoanalysis into different social contexts. The book describes how class, although descriptively present, was excluded from the founding theories of psychoanalysis, leaving a problematic conceptual legacy that the book attempts to remedy. Joanna Ryan argues for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on modern sociological and psychosocial research to understand the injuries of class, the complexities of social mobility, and the defenses of privilege. She brings together contemporary clinical writings with her own research about class within therapy relationships to illustrate the anxieties, ambivalences and inhibitions surrounding class, and the unconsciousness with which it may be enacted. Class and Psychoanalysis breaks new ground in providing frameworks for a critical psychoanalysis that includes class. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to think psychoanalytically about how we are intimately formed by class, or who is concerned with the inequalities of access to psychoanalytic therapies, or with the future of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics

Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics PDF Author: Lynne Layton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134181612
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Do political concerns belong in psychodynamic treatment? How do class and politics shape the unconscious? The effects of an increasingly polarized, insecure and threatening world mean that the ideologically enforced split between the political order and personal life is becoming difficult to sustain. This book explores the impact of the social and political domains at the individual level. The contributions included in this volume describe how issues of class and politics, and the intense emotions they engender, emerge in the clinical setting and how psychotherapists can respectfully address them rather than deny their significance. They demonstrate how clinicians need to take into account the complex convergences between psychic and social reality in the clinical setting in order to help their patients understand the anxiety, fear, insecurity and anger caused by the complex relations of class and power. This examination of the psychodynamics of terror and aggression and the unconscious defences employed to deny reality offers powerful insights into the microscopic unconscious ways that ideology is enacted and lived. Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics will be of interest to all mental health professionals interested in improving their understanding of the ideological factors that impede or facilitate critical and engaged citizenship. It has a valuable contribution to make to the psychoanalytic enterprise, as well as to related scholarly and professional disciplines.

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios PDF Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042979360X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy. As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to the promotion of social justice, in the United States psychoanalysis has been viewed as reserved for the well-to-do, assuming that poor people lack the "sophistication" that psychoanalysis requires, thus heeding invisible but no less rigid class boundaries. Challenging such discrimination, the authors testify to the efficacy of psychoanalysis in the barrios, upending the unfounded widespread belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday survival that they only benefit from symptom-focused interventions. Sharing vivid vignettes of psychoanalytic treatments, this collection sheds light on the psychological complexities of life in the barrio that is often marked by poverty, migration, marginalization, and barriers of language, class, and race. This interdisciplinary collection features essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians. It represents a unique crossover that will appeal to readers in clinical practice, social work, counselling, anthropology, psychology, cultural and Latino studies, queer studies, urban studies, and sociology.

The Analyst in the Inner City

The Analyst in the Inner City PDF Author: Neil Altman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135468524
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
In 1995, Neil Altman did what few psychoanalysts did or even dared to do: He brought the theory and practice of psychoanalysis out of the cozy confines of the consulting room and into the realms of the marginalized, to the very individuals whom this theory and practice often overlooked. In doing so, he brought together psychoanalytic and social theory, and examined how divisions of race, class and culture reflect and influence splits in the developing self, more often than not leading to a negative self image of the "other" in an increasingly polarized society. Much like the original, this second edition of The Analyst in the Inner City opens up with updated, detailed clinical vignettes and case presentations, which illustrate the challenges of working within this clinical milieu. Altman greatly expands his section on race, both in the psychoanalytic and the larger social world, including a focus on "whiteness" which, he argues, is socially constructed in relation to "blackness." However, he admits the inadequacy of such categorizations and proffers a more fluid view of the structure of race. A brand new section, "Thinking Systemically and Psychoanalytically at the Same Time," examines the impact of the socio-political context in which psychotherapy takes place, whether local or global, on the clinical work itself and the socio-economic categories of its patients, and vice-versa. Topics in this section include the APA’s relationship to CIA interrogation practices, group dynamics in child and adolescent psychotherapeutic interventions, and psychoanalytic views on suicide bombing. Ranging from the day-to-day work in a public clinic in the South Bronx to considerations of global events far outside the clinic’s doors (but closer than one might think), this book is a timely revision of a groundbreaking work in psychoanalytic literature, expanding the import of psychoanalysis from the centers of analytical thought to the margins of clinical need.

Reaching Across Boundaries of Culture and Class

Reaching Across Boundaries of Culture and Class PDF Author: Rosemarie Perez-Foster
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN: 1461630371
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
In a world that is forever fragmenting into divisions of ethnicity and class, this groundbreaking book offers an approach to therapy that reaches across the boundaries that usually divide us. Reaffirming psychotherapy's roots in a progressive approach to social change, the contributors show how contemporary methods can be used to treat patients often previously thought unresponsive to psychodynamic therapy. Cultural values, countertransference guilt, immigration, bilingualism, and battered self-esteem in African-American patients are among the many topics discussed. Numerous examples guide the clinician to a better understanding of the role of culture in the therapeutic relationship. A Jason Aronson BookIn a world that is forever fragmenting into divisions of ethnicity and class, this groundbreaking book offers an approach to therapy that reaches across the boundaries that usually divide us. Reaffirming psychotherapy's roots in a progressive approach to social change, the contributors show how contemporary methods can be used to treat patients often previously thought unresponsive to psychodynamic therapy. Cultural values, countertransference guilt, immigration, bilingualism, and battered self-esteem in African-American patients are among the many topics discussed. Numerous examples guide the clinician to a better understanding of the role of culture in the therapeutic relationship.

A People’s History of Psychoanalysis

A People’s History of Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Daniel José Gaztambide
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498565751
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must ask: is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People’s Historyof Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel José Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Max Belkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000028534
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality examines the links between race, gender, and sexuality through the dual perspectives of relational psychoanalysis and the theory of intersectionality. This anthology discusses the ways in which clinicians and patients inadvertently reproduce experiences of privilege and marginalization in the consulting room. Focusing particularly on the experiences of immigrants, women of color, sex workers, and LGBTQ individuals, the contributing authors explore how similarities and differences between the patient's and analyst's gender, race, and sexual orientation can be acknowledged, challenged, and negotiated. Combining intersectional theory with relational psychoanalytic thought, the authors introduce a number of thought-provoking clinical vignettes to suggest how adopting an intersectional approach can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference in psychotherapy. By bringing together these new psychoanalytically-informed perspectives on clinical work with minority and marginalized individuals, Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis makes an important contribution to psychoanalysis, psychology, and social work.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory PDF Author: Jay R. Greenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417003
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities

Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities PDF Author: Noreen O'Connor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429924046
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
This groundbreaking book provides a challenging exploration of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism. Based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, it offers a new and thoughtful framework that does not inevitably pathologise or universalise all lesbianism. A wide range of psychoanalytic ideas are surveyed, from Freud, Deutsch and Jung to Lacan and contemporary object-relations theorists. Questions on sexual identity, sexual desire and gender identity, of transference and countertransference, and also of institutional practices in relation to training, are all critically - and stimunlatingly - addressed.

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Lynne Layton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000037436
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Pierre Bourdieu, and Marie Langer are among those activists, clinicians, and academics who have called for a social psychoanalysis. For over thirty years, Lynne Layton has heeded this call and produced a body of work that examines unconscious process as it operates both in the social world and in the clinic. In this volume of Layton’s most important papers, she expands on earlier theorists’ ideas of social character by exploring how dominant ideologies and culturally mandated, hierarchical identity prescriptions are lived in individual and relational conflict. Through clinical and cultural examples, Layton describes how enactments of what she calls ‘normative unconscious processes’ reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender, and class both inside and outside the clinic, and at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Clinicians, academics, and activists alike will find here a deeper understanding of the power of unconscious process, and are called on to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled.