ABSTRACT

Some years ago, long before I understood much about the transgenerational transmission of trauma and how it might be enacted in the clinic, I reported on several racialized enactments in my work with an Asian-American man, Michael (Layton, 2006). My work with Michael continuously challenged and perplexed me, and, through it, I began to recognize the unconscious racial and cultural underpinnings of some of the very ways I think about certain “basics” of analytic practice: dependence, independence, happiness, and love. Revisiting that work now has brought me more in touch with the many ways in which our dialogues were haunted by the transgenerational transmission of trauma present in each of our histories. At the time of writing, I was working with a model of gender identity formation that I referred to as a negotiation model (Layton, 1998). I thought this model could account both for the narcissistic wounds incurred from living in a sexist culture and for the kinds of gendered experience we all have that make us feel good about being men or women or something in between. I called it a negotiation model, because I wanted to capture the way we constantly negotiate identity both from what Benjamin (1988) and others call doer-done to relations and from relations of mutuality. In part, I was writing “against” postmodern and Lacanian theories that suggest that identity categories are necessarily coercive and oppressive, that no version of gender or racial identity is healthy. At the same time, I wanted to give the coercive aspects of identities their due, because so often psychoanalytic theory ignores the psychic effects of the power hierarchies in which we live. The negotiation model accounts psychologically for the defensive and regressive use of identity

categories (see Dimen 2003; Goldner 1991; May 1986) as well as the progressive use of identity categories (for example, in liberation struggles and in the resiliency oppressed groups manifest in spite of the hateful projections to which they are subjected). I next wanted better to understand the regressive and foreclosing use of identity categories, and that work led me to elaborate a concept I refer to as “normative unconscious processes” (Layton 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005, 2006, 2014). With this term, I refer to the psychological consequences of living in a culture many of whose norms serve the dominant ideological purpose of maintaining a power status quo. My assumption is that racial, class, sexual, and gender hierarchies, which confer power and exist for the benefit of those with power, tend not only to idealize certain subject positions and devalue others, but tend to do so by splitting human capacities and attributes and giving them class or race or gender assignations. Such assignations cause narcissistic wounds that organize the desire to belong to one group rather than another, and these wounds become lived as a complex amalgam of class, race, gender, and sexual identities. Coercive norms form the crucible in which we “become” gendered, raced, classed. And these norms operate both within distinct large groups and between them. Working-class white women or middle-class black women, for example, grow up with norms particular to their social location, but no social location exists without reference to all the others, and all identities must take up some cognitive and affective position toward dominant cultural ideals (Layton, 2015). Power hierarchies create and sustain differences that mark out what is high and low, good and bad, pure and impure, and there is certainly a general tendency for those not in power to internalize the denigrating attributions that come at them (see Dalal 2002; Moss 2003; White 2002). I understand the narcissistic process that emanates from these wounds of culture to be bipolar in nature: fragile selves, wounded by traumatic failures in caretaking, oscillate between selfdeprecation and grandiosity, idealization of the other and denigration, longings to merge and needs radically to distance (Layton 1988; Shaw, 2013). Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to think that norms are internalized without conflict (Layton 1998, 2004a). Because the hierarchies split and categorize human attributes and capacities, we find in the clinic and in our lives unceasing conflict between those unconscious processes that seek to maintain those splits and those that refuse them. The ones that seek to maintain the splits are those that I call “normative unconscious processes.”