Summary, Quotes, and Questions

Layton (2007) advocates for the clinical use of psychoanalytic and social theories. The author highlights how social and psychoanalytic theories are often neglected in medical settings and this has been a detriment to madical practice. Instead, clinical practitioners need to look more closely at the psycho-social worlds that their patients inhabit. Ultimately, many psychological issues are products of the social worlds that people inhabit. The author underscores the importance of looking at social and psychoanalytic theories to better treat psychological disorders in patients. Below were some helpful and illuminating quotes from the reading: 147 - “The models I’ve laid out thus far tend to select either the social or the psychic as their prime mover. It seems to me that the greatest challenge for those of us theorizing about psychoanalysis, culture and society is to resist the either/or and to derive a model that neither reduces the psychic to the social nor reduces the social to the psychic. As I have argued elsewhere (2004a), the problem for a social psychoanalysis is to account both for the ways that norms are internalized as well as for what makes psychic resistance and challenge to social norms possible.” 148 - “Social movements such as feminism, gay liberation and black power demonstrate the way that identities can be deployed in such a way as to facilitate growth. At the same time, however, hierarchies of gender, race, class and sexuality do make certain types of internalizations prevalent. Thus, identities and identifications must be understood in both their potentially traumatizing as well as their potentially liberating forms.” 151 - “As I said above, within mainstream psychoanalysis it is still controversial to consider culture as a mediating influence in the development of the psyche. As mainstream psychiatry in the US has become more and more captive to what I would regard as a reductionist version of science, “scientism,” psychoanalysis has been increasingly marginalized.” 153 - “In what ways might our clinical theory and practice collude with a culture that promotes a terrified and terribly lonely version of independence? While I certainly think that psychoanalytic practitioners value interdependence as an ideal of mental health, I also think that the fact that we exclude cultural considerations from the clinic forces upon us perhaps a too narrow vision of interdependence, one limited to the private sphere of family and close friends.” 154 - “In conclusion, I am arguing that many of the psychological problems that clinicians treat are a result of social inequalities. “ Questions: What would medical practice informed by social theory truly look like? Why has there been such a resistance to psychoanalytic and social theories in medicine? What has clinical practice lost and what can be gained?