Intersectionality, Social Context and the Co-Creation of Clinical Experience

Fourth Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2020-21, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm
Katherine Weissbourd, PhD
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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April 2, 2021 — Normative unconscious processes, racial and ethnic identity and clinical process

[31 pages]

Layton addresses the issues of intersectionality and identity. She writes: “does it even make sense to speak of racial identities without simultaneously speaking of the way they intersect with class, gender, and other identity categories?” She calls our attention to normative unconscious processes that bias us to see our patient as a “kind of person,” rather than a person whose identity is complex and specific. She offers a clinical example to show how these issues are revealed and avoided, and how we may unintentionally collude with stereotyping in our work.

Yi notes that theories of racial/ethic identity “conceptualize racial identity in binary terms of the White oppressor and the injured racial other.” She sees it with more complexity and notes that while racial/ethnic identity develops in the United States in a context of the white dominant culture, this is far from the whole story. She gives a clinical example of a patient whose racial identity reflected an internalization of the relational and cultural context specific to her family and her experience of her post-war Vietnamese American community.

These articles encourage us to engage with our patients as individuals, being aware of the unique meanings that race, ethnicity, class, and gender have for different people. This seems like an obvious goal, but both authors note the ways in which they initially missed the complexity of identity in their clinical work.  What are your thoughts about Layton’s idea of the “normative unconscious process” and Yi’s  ideas about racial identity? How can we apply these ideas clinically?  What is the best way to address our preconceptions, and to think critically about these issues? How does the current socio-political moment affect how we work clinically with these issues – or does it?

Layton, L. (2020). Racial identities, racial enactments, and normative unconscious processes. In M. Leavy-Sperounis (Ed), Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes. (Chapter 11, pp. 147-168). New York, NY: Routledge.

Yi, K. (2014). Toward Formulation of Ethnic Identity beyond the Binary of White Oppressor and Racial Other. In Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31, pp. 426-434