ABSTRACT
Layton defines normative unconscious processes as an effect of the workings of unequal power arrangements on identity formation and relational interactions. Identities form in relation to other identities circulating in a culture and subculture, and identities are in part made up of socio-historically specific ways of living emotions such as shame, sorrow and guilt, and psychological states such as dependency, vulnerability, and capacity for assertion. Layton quotes Fromm as one of the early Frankfurt School members. With their concepts, such as the authoritarian personality, they wanted to bring to light how societal violence, both structural and executed violence, constitutively shapes an individual’s very ‘nature.’ Layton gives an example of a racialized enactment around payment between “a white Jewish male analyst and his black male client.” This enactment, she writes, mobilized white unconscious racial stereotypes regarding the unreliability of blacks, as well as shameful feelings in the analyst and fantasies that his patient saw him as a greedy Jew.
