My explorations in this book have led me through many aspects of psychoanalysis, from its quotidian practices to questions of theory, from its institutional and social locations to the workings of the unconscious. I have attempted to encompass what considerations of class can throw up for psychoanalysis as a theoretical discipline and as a clinical practice, as well as how psychoanalysis can contribute to understanding the psychic embodiments of class. This involves addressing the lack of common concepts or a language in which matters of both class and psychoanalysis can be thought together, and shared across different discourses. Exploring very scattered work, I have delineated patchworks of linked themes which themselves raise further issues. Here I outline some implications of these themes, starting with economic and institutional matters, through considerations of psychoanalytic culture and values, to questions of clinical work and practice, and finally theory.
Money, and the access it brings to psychoanalysis and its trainings, is a crucial reality that structures the psychoanalytic field. Psychoanalysis, in its longer-term and most intensive forms, continues to be effectively an expensive and exclusive good. This reality is largely not a collective concern of the profession as a whole, nor of its various representative bodies, despite many individual concerns and concerted actions that do seek to remedy this. In this way we do not allow the inherent injustice and inequality to really register with ourselves collectively, nor to be conveyed to trainees as an important part of the profession they are entering – a form of disavowal. Much more could be done to make this a central ethical concern in psychoanalytic education. Greater recognition of, and teaching about, clinical work in low-fee, third and public sector contexts would begin to address this professional neglect, and confer more status to such practices.
The role of money is thus seen in what is most valued professionally. The legacy of Freud’s ambivalent distinction between the ‘pure gold’ of psychoanalysis and the ‘copper alloy’ of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (and now psychodynamic counselling) haunts us in ways that have riven the field and hampered thought across this divide, as well as devaluing what is now the most common and less expensive practice. The distinction between pure and applied clinical work is a class distinction, just as it is more widely in British society, but not adequately recognised as such, another disavowal.1 Dropping these terms would be an important conceptual step to wider teachings across the whole range of psychoanalytic activity, including with disadvantaged or poorer populations, with lower-frequency work, and within the NHS. This would challenge the power of the symbolic capital inherent in the elite status of ‘pure’ psychoanalysis, capital that is underpinned by the economic and other assets needed to acquire it. This does not mean we should not nurture and value the kinds of practices and ideas that intensive long-term work makes possible, and that have long been the source of much innovation, in what has been called the ‘laboratory’ of psychoanalysis (Cooper and Lousada, 2010). However, it does suggest considerably broadening and diversifying what we mean by excellence, to include practices and ideas stemming from work in different circumstances.
The disregard of matters of inequality in access to psychoanalysis also contributes to the lack of professional thought on the classed nature of private practice and how, as Fereday (2015) says, its demographic does not reflect society. Greater recognition of the political economies of psychoanalysis, and the status of psychoanalytic practitioners as sole traders within a capitalist economy, would open up discussion on how this impacts on those from working-class backgrounds, and on clinical work more generally. Some organisations are beginning to address the material demands of building a career in psychoanalytic therapy; this also needs understandings of its political economies if it is to address the class factors involved and go beyond individual entrepreneurship. The class awareness of therapists is only just beginning to be explored, as the financial viability of high-fee, long-term private practice has decreased, and as the economic and other discriminations inherent in current training and post-qualification financial demands are increasingly voiced.
An open dialogue about money and work within psychoanalysis would disrupt secrecy and inhibition, and bring the economic facts into debate. It is not enough to leave the modest amounts of redistribution that do take place to the private activity of individual practitioners and their sliding scales. Imaginative ways of funding more people from working-class, ethnic minority or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds as trainees and as patients need to be developed by organisations, as a few already do. The challenges now being mounted, for example, by the new Psychotherapists and Counsellors’ Union, to the ubiquity of unpaid work in the development of therapy careers need to be supported more widely.
Furthermore, the viability and public acceptability of psychoanalysis as a whole would be enhanced by greater inclusivity towards and support for less expensive, more culturally aware forms of psychoanalytic work. The imperative that Freud and the early left psychoanalysts recognised, that the public acceptability of psychoanalysis depended on the availability of free and low-cost forms of therapy and of outreach work, applies even more urgently now. Those current psychoanalytic societies that have reversed their decline in numbers have often done so by broadening their scope to include psychoanalytic psychotherapy and associated practices hitherto considered not to be ‘pure’ psychoanalysis. It is also urgent to devise new forms of public communication and engagement with psychoanalysis. The popularity of writings that depict the intricacies and complexities of psychoanalytic work in accessible ways (e.g. the best-seller by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, 2013)2 shows how great the interest is, but too often these efforts meet disdain or are given little recognition for what they achieve. Rather, they should be critically supported and consideration given to what makes such public communication of psychoanalysis effective – something that could also be taught, as it is in many sciences.
The desire for psychoanalytic clinical work to be more socially inclusive has resulted in many creative projects. I have outlined a few of these, but a much greater compendium and analysis is badly needed. This would not only help valorise such committed work but would also add to our understanding of psychoanalysis in greater contact with the wider world. Collective organ-isational and professional support for psychoanalytic work in these often challenging and complex environments is badly needed. A first step would be for more people who work in such projects to be supported to write up their clinical work, and their engagements with the conditions they work under. Further, these many forms of public and third-sector work need to be seen as central and not ancillary to the main business of psychoanalysis. The inevitable frustrations and tensions of engaging with bureaucracy and management in the public sector need not be seen only as tedious and demoralising (which they frequently are) and therefore withdrawn from, but also as something that can be taught and thought about psychoanalytically, as some writings illustrate. For example, the well entitled ‘The Mole Leaves his Hole’ provides an in-depth account of the exigencies of setting up a psychoanalytic service in the community and how these were overcome (Music, 2004). So also the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic counselling work carried out within the very difficult coal face of IAPT (Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies in the NHS) services needs to be addressed, and support given to those therapists, often younger, recently trained or on placement, who work in them. The recent detailed submission to Parliament by the umbrella organisations (UKCP and BPC) regarding IAPT, and about the support needed for psychoanalytic and psychodynamic work in the NHS, is an encouraging step from our representative organisations in taking political action.3
Many class-inclusive efforts have raised questions of whether psychoanalytic technique needs to be altered in different circumstances. The implication is often that any alteration to make psychoanalysis more comprehensible, more transparent, more culturally aware and inclusive, more flexible, is always a dilution or aberration rather than an enhancement, despite much evidence to the contrary. Fonagy (2006) has argued that the pervasive standardisation of psychoanalytic technique within the mainstream of the profession has led to a petrification which has hampered and devalued many inclusive and innovative clinical practices. This he contrasts to the creative proliferation of theories that has taken place. We know from various studies that psychoanalysts’ actual clinical practices vary enormously, and may not conform to the explicit theories of their trainings, but instead rely more on pragmatic and implicit conceptual notions (e.g. Canestri, 2006). This increasingly explored aspect of the pluralism of contemporary clinical practice could allow more latitude and acceptance of innovative developments in projects at the cutting edge of inclusion and diversity.
The ways in which clinical work with disadvantaged groups or non-normative populations has actually contributed to psychoanalysis in issues of ‘race’, gender and sexuality as well as class needs to be given due recognition, which it does not currently get within mainstream bodies. So, too, the ways in which psychoanalytic skills can be used in combination with other psychological approaches (including even some forms of CBT) need to be taught and valued, as Taylor (2013), in his proposals for a revitalised profession, strongly recommends. Eschewing the discourses of purity and pollution, as Fereday (2015) also advocates, would help practitioners relate to the realities of modern mental health provision, and preserve spaces for psychodynamic and psychoanalytic work. Music (2004) argues that successful efforts such as he describes involve being prepared to compromise the ‘purity of the strict psychoanalytic ideal’, to earn the confidence of public sector staff through the ‘soundedness’ of psychoanalytic clinical judgement. This, he says, helped defray previous negative perceptions of psychoanalytic ‘rigidity, inflexibility and elitism’. I do not underestimate the adverse powerful forces at play, and the strictures of limited funding, intrusive management and current ideologies, which some writings eloquently describe (e.g. Rizq, 2014), all of which can be undermining and depressing. I rather argue that a more vigorous, public and organised case be made for the contributions that different forms of psychoanalytic work and its various contemporary innovations can make within modern mental health provision, as is beginning to happen. This requires dropping some of the tribal passions and identifications embodied in the different organisations and schools of thought, and the defences of status and hierarchy, pure and applied. It involves stepping back from the narcissism of minor differences that is so destructively rife across the whole field, leading it to turn inward rather than outward towards the many contemporary challenges that psychoanalytic work faces.
The experiences of therapists from working-class and non-white backgrounds entering the psychoanalytic field indicate how its implicit cultural mores can create dissonance and unease. More of these voices need to be heard and listened to. The reflections of such therapists provide useful insights into the variously transmitted ideologies and assumptions, especially the non-recognition of material and cultural differences. Their understandings of their own social mobility within the profession can also suggest much about the enduring effects and psychodynamics of class. All this could be an invaluable source of learning, as, in the case of ‘race’ and ethnicity, the powerful and much-viewed video, Black Psychoanalysts Speak (Winograd, 2014) has been. It could also be the means for collective support and action. The economic and structural disadvantages that trainees from working-class backgrounds face are further exacerbated by the role of social capital within psychoanalytic organisations. Networks of affiliation and patronage within psychoanalytic institutions are major factors in obtaining work and developing careers, but are seldom critically addressed. These also inhibit divergent and critical thought.
We have seen how psychoanalytic work in working-class and disadvantaged communities requires some understanding of the historical and present-day circumstances of such lives, and the respectful desire to explore these, given that nothing can be presumed in advance. It also requires analytic self-awareness of cultural assumptions and defences that may otherwise be unwittingly conveyed, some of which are exemplified in the psychosocial literature discussed previously. The question Gurney (2009) asks, whether one can be a psychoanalyst and not be symbolically middle class, could prompt self-reflection on how therapists may see themselves in relation to class, and how they may be seen within clinical work. Several psychoanalytic writers on ‘race’ and ethnicity have advocated the necessity for the history of colonial domination to be part of the self-awareness of therapists, extending the usual notions of transference/countertransference to include more cultural ones (e.g. Thomas, 2013). I suggest this should also be extended to histories of class domination, classification, exploitation and resistance, and the material and ideological aspects of class, as some clinical work is beginning to do.
The processes set in motion by any psychoanalytic encounter can provide a vehicle for understanding class as a psychologically complex aspect of a person. We have seen examples of how class can manifest itself clinically, including, but not limited to, the following: class within the transference–counter-transference matrix; conscious and unconscious class-related identifications, imbued with many layers of meaning and affect; the traumatising effects of particular class experiences, often transmitted intergenerationally; and the unconsciousness with which privilege may be held and enacted.
Much clinical work reviewed concerns cross-class encounters and the difficulties that follow when the emotions aroused by these are neither recognised nor speakable. These various projections, disavowals and resistances are important in any one therapy. They underline the relationality of class as well as the insidious and harmful ways that it can operate on and between people. Such work, as well as illuminating the many ways class can come to constitute us, shows how it may become a vehicle for otherings of various kinds. The potential for such othering echoes some of the psychosocial work which suggests how ‘us’ and ‘them’ become expressions of unbridgeable difference, of conflicts of economic interests and cultures, and of intense, often hostile, emotion. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ is thus both a psychical default position in how class can come to be represented, and also a reflection of the economic and social divisions of a drastically unequal society. Such dichotomised thinking, often defensive, elitist, rigid and virulent in its consequences, can pose problems for a psychoanalysis that loses its connection to the social world. It can be seen as a form of paranoid thinking, in which despised characteristics are repudiated by the self and projected hostilely or enviously into the class other, with no recognition of similarities. But to see it only as that, without any recognition and understanding of the social chasm of inequality, power and circumstance that separates different classes, where one class profits from the exploitation of another, where indeed there are conflicts of interests and class struggle, is to perform the violence of misrecognition and to stymie useful clinical work. The clinical considerations of this book suggest how necessary and how difficult it sometimes is to hold the tension between these two perspectives, and not abandon one in favour of the other.
Powerful and ubiquitous as these othering emotions often are, I have argued that these alone cannot be an adequate account of how class has its effects on, in and through the psyche. Class identifications and identities, as built on processes of distinction and repudiation, and on circulating social imaginaries of various kinds, are only one aspect of how class operates, albeit a salient and prolific one. Rather we also need accounts of the formation of classed psyches in terms of the material circumstances and histories of different classes, and especially those of poverty, wealth and power; how class is embodied and transmitted in the earliest and continuing conditions of a child’s social circumstances, and the kinds of class formations that follow from this. These material aspects have been much less explored psychoanalytically, apart from some of the sources addressed in Chapter 4, although there are rich autobiographical and wider psychosocial and sociological literatures to draw on.
Given the largely middle-class locations of psychoanalytic work, it is also important to generate psychoanalytic understanding of the inhibitions, defences, and disavowals of privilege that may be at play within therapy and outside, and which this book has gone some way to depicting. There may be understandable impatience or scorn for the attempts of middle- or upper-class therapists to understand the psychodynamics of their own privilege, but I have argued that this can be useful in several ways in addressing dominant mores. One is understanding and deconstructing the sheer unconsciousness with which middle-class capital of various kinds can be embodied and enacted, a kind of unconsciousness-raising exercise. This would make it less likely that middle-class cultural practices and values are seen as universal or unquestioningly superior, and leave more space for difference, understanding and respect. It would also allow greater awareness of how, within therapeutic dyads, any unconsciousness in this area can result in unhelpful enactments and limit therapeutic work. Analysis of the narcissistic dead-end of class guilt and of the ambivalences sometimes contained in well-meaning efforts towards greater inclusivity would also contribute to a less disavowed relation to privilege.
Further, some of the writings addressed here show how working-class figures may be installed in middle- and upper-class psyches in disavowed, foreclosed and melancholic ways. That is, a sense of class others may be embodied from childhood, with varying degrees and forms of unconsciousness, and then come to serve other psychic functions. This is one way, characteristic of a particular stratum, but central in the psychoanalytic literature, in which class comes to be represented internally. Here again it is not just class difference that forms identities built on privilege but also all the material and cultural resources and what these enable, within particular sets of relationships.
The clinical examples of this book have suggested how some therapists do integrate pertinent class issues into their work; these examples are necessarily diverse, and much more needs to be explored. Here, a desire and an ability to think psychosocially as this pertains to clinical work, to maintain a critical and culturally self-reflective approach to theory and practice, including to therapist subjectivity, seem essential. However, this does raise theoretical issues as to how the social world is represented psychoanalytically.
A less often articulated aspect of class is the way that the up/down dimensions of class hierarchies can be experienced, or be defended against, as matters of felt superiority and inferiority. I have suggested that this aspect of class is in many ways the most psychologically taboo; it offends any sense of respect and equality, yet it lurks under the surface in many encounters, and also in the enactments and resistances that abound in this territory. As Chapter 3 showed, Freud did identify this up/down dimension of class as psychically powerful, only to discard it in favour of the putative primal scene, an unfortunate either/or move which has meant this aspect has received little psychoanalytic attention.
Shame and the associated feelings and defences repeatedly surface in work on the emotional aspects of class. Shame is often considered the most social of emotions, and along with the transformation of it into pride, it has a long political history in writings about subjugated lives and struggles against oppression. Shame and associated feelings are also prime mechanisms of class distinction, as Elias extensively shows. The subliminal elitism or subconscious superiority of the middle classes, described by several writers, and the more overt class contempt described by others, find their echoes in what Sayer (2005: 153) describes as ‘the low-level shame, which shades into low self-esteem’ as a product of subordinate class position.
Shame has many connections to the evaluative judgements, internalised or otherwise, which, as Chapter 5 suggested, are a ceaseless part of class. Lingering shame that was very hard to tackle was painfully described by some of the upwardly mobile therapists in my study. The way that class contempt can trigger feelings of class-related inferiority was illustrated in some of the therapists’ accounts of clinical work. Helen Lewis argues that shame is especially hard to get rid of, because of the ‘trapped’ hostility towards the self that is involved and also because of attachments to the values of the supposedly shaming other, through whose gaze the self is seen (Lewis, 1971), as some of the sociological research has also shown. Shame also, as Sayer argues, can lead to apparent inarticulacy caused by a sense of lacking any authority to speak, especially in more formal contexts, something which Charlesworth’s (2000) extensive work illustrates. This is very relevant to contesting the prejudices and biases as regards the suitability of working-class people for verbal forms of therapy. ‘Finding a voice’ was identified by several therapists from working-class backgrounds as part of their process of social mobility. Shame also undermines self-confidence, an attribute that the middle classes are seen as performing and possessing, however fragile that may be.
It is well recognised that therapy itself has the potential to be felt as a shaming experience. Foster identifies shame and its consequent anxiety as a key factor in relation to class and therapy: ‘One of the least acknowledged barriers to treatment is… the emotional impact of class and the feelings of suspicion and shame that often characterize immigrant and oppressed cultures, and… feelings of superiority and guilt that characterize members of the dominant culture’ (Foster et al., 1996: xiv). Trevithick (1988), describing the fear and antagonism towards therapy that many working-class women came with, notes how poverty intensifies feelings of shame and fear of humiliation. Class division is about more than economic deprivation or privilege: ‘It’s about constantly looking up or down to each other to see who is superior or inferior to us’ (Trevithick, 1988: 73). Whitson (1996) also writes of the sense of class-related inferiority with which clients may come to therapy, in a society where simply being middle class is seen as a sign of psychological health. John Steiner (2015) argues that the inherent shame engendered by the analytic situation itself needs to be analysed.
Emotions in the register of shame, contempt and guilt, and the defences against them, are part of what make many discussions of class so inhibited and so charged, especially in a mixed-class context. Feelings of inferiority or superiority, and the associated displacements, projections and disavowals, are major aspects of class emotion.
My contention is that disavowal is a ubiquitous and powerful process involved in both the living and the representing of divisive social realities. We have seen how disavowal operates at a disciplinary level: how the theoretical extrusions and elisions that took place in the early formulations of psychoanalysis constitute a disciplinary disavowal that has limited and constrained the language and concepts with which to think psychoanalytically about class. This has, in combination with all the other factors considered in this book, contributed to the vacuum of psychoanalytic thought about class, and the relative lack of psychoanalytic interest in and understanding of working-class lives. In attempting to undo these various extrusions and disavowals, I have begun the process of reading class into psychoanalysis, something which could be taken much further. The valuable and extensive knowledge from related disciplines, of class as it is lived and felt about, could enhance efforts to extend the reach of psychoanalysis, both in more adequately understanding class concerns in any one therapy, and also in the committed engagements of psychoanalysis outside private practice.
Disavowal is also embedded in the living of class, its inequalities and destructive discriminations, in different ways for different class positions. Much of the sociological and psychosocial work reviewed substantiates the claim that in a culture dominated by middle-class values and economic power, working-class identities are commonly formed and lived through dis-avowal, and especially so in those institutions where working-class cultures, practices and allegiances are non-normative. Education is the prime example of this, with much of the most in-depth and psychoanalytically relevant psychosocial research on class taking place in this context of class confrontation, privilege and disempowerment. Disavowal can be a necessary protective and survival mechanism in the face of invasive and stigmatising social forces, a way of preserving some area of a valued self. Without it, as the work of Walls’ (2006) on the double consciousness necessary as a shield to survive racism illustrates, breakdown may occur. There are, though, commonly psychic costs to such survival mechanisms, an area where psychoanalytic work has much to contribute.
Disavowals may also be anxiously embedded in upper- and middle-class ways of living class. Where there is a concerned or troubled perception of social injustice and a desire for inclusivity, there still may be othering, disdain, distancing, guilt and contempt at play, often unconsciously so, and paralysis of thought and feeling. This speaks to internal conflict and anxiety, and displacements of various kinds, which psychoanalysis is well placed to explore. In less consciously troubled perceptions, in what has been described as ‘fortress mentalities’, there may be foreclosures, a lack of recognition of the social realities of others, an unwillingness to acknowledge the implications of inequalities, in the interests of keeping undisturbed a privileged position and hermetic world view. Psychosocial writings have shown how this can result in the demonisation of working-class others. Psychoanalysis, in some manifestations of the discipline, has not been entirely free of this, in the labelling of sections of the working classes as too concrete in their thinking, too close to ‘reality’, less able to articulate emotion verbally, and therefore unsuitable for and excluded from analysis. These othering attributions are not only inappropriate and culture bound, but broadly fit with who can and can’t pay for psychoanalysis. This is a problematic legacy that contemporary psychoanalysis could do more to disown.
Disavowals of social realities are also seen in current neo-liberal ideologies of self-sufficiency, and in denials of dependence and interdependence. This, Layton (2014: 473) argues, can be the source of the ‘pathological narcissism and perverse states of disavowal’ that she encounters in the clinic and perceives more widely.
Many theoretical issues have been thrown up by the explorations of this book, especially as regards the kinds of theoretical frameworks needed to more adequately encompass class and the impact of the social world within psychoanalysis.
I have argued that more weight needs to be given to how social forces and discourses impact on us and structure our psyches, whatever our class positioning. To do so can challenge the psychoanalytic assumptions of universal laws of the psyche outside of any social determination. Such universality was debated from early on and is still a dominant trope, if more qualified in recent debates. It is not, I suggest, a question that can be definitively settled empirically, despite sometimes being seen in this way; any ‘findings’ from cross-cultural clinical work are always open to contestation as to what they might mean. However, maintaining a questioning stance to this assumption is important as a signifier of openness to diversity and difference, and of a lessening of psychoanalytic hubris. It is also important in the debates about whether cultural and social factors are to be seen as relatively superficial, superimposed on supposedly fundamental psychic mechanisms, or whether they are to be treated as of equivalent (or greater) constitutive importance. I have argued that much greater space within psychoanalysis needs to be given to how we are constituted in and through the social world, in combination with the intra-psychic, and I have illustrated the problems that can arise in clinical practice when this is not done.
Positions in these debates predetermine what is seen and recognised in clinical work as important or intelligible, and how, if at all, class experience is explored and within what terms. The question is often framed as to whether a psyche outside power is conceived of, with power as external, to be inter-nalised, identified with and/or resisted by an already existent subject, as much psychoanalysis implies; or whether we see ourselves as fundamentally constituted by these forms of power, dependent on pre-existing conditions and discourses which initiate our agency, the conditions of any subjecthood, as Butler (1997) argues. Adopting either of these positions is a strategic, philosophical and political decision but one which can have huge implications in what is then seen as possible, interesting and legitimate within the language and practices of psychoanalysis.
Positions which exclude or underestimate the foundational impress of social circumstance and history can be to the detriment of certain analysands, especially those who are in some way non-normative for psychoanalysis, as many examples have shown. Much is to be gained by an adequate inclusion and understanding of these conjunctures of personal and social circumstance, and the language used to represent them. Conversely, rather than neglect of social circumstances, the opposite response can occur, which is to see the force of social circumstance as so determining that little room is perceived for any intra-psychic investigation – a kind of psychoanalytic resignation. This is especially likely, as the considerations of Chapter 7 suggested, with non-white, non-middle-class analysands, commonly expressed as ‘too much reality factor’. Here an unbridgeable opposition between ‘reality’ and the concerns of psychoanalysis is evoked, a consequence I suggest of the founding dualism of the psyche and the social. This blocks psychoanalytic exploration of what may be involved, takes ‘reality’ as self-evident, and neglects the constitutive relationship of each pole of this dualism.
Psychoanalysis, I have suggested, is typified by an ambivalence of class positions: as, on the one hand, a counter-normative, marginalised and subversive enterprise, but, on the other, one which can reinforce normative cultural values, adaptation to the status quo and organisational and theoretical compliance. These poles of possibility run through the whole history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is importantly counter-normative to many contemporary neo-liberal practices and ideologies in the mental health field, in its concern with the unconscious, with vulnerabilities, complexity, dependency and thoughtfulness, and, within some theoretical affiliations, its broadly human-istic values. It is also counter-normative in that psychoanalytic work is slow, takes time and does not offer quick solutions. However, in radically separating the psyche and the social, and privileging the former, it can unwittingly echo that aspect of neo-liberalism which also does that, which valorises the entrepreneurial self, free of any social context, where all mental health issues are seen only as matters of individual deficits, and the impact of social circumstance and policy are given no recognition. This makes it especially important that we find ways of integrating the social world more into our clinical and theoretical thinking.
Thus, the overall philosophical frameworks in which particular forms of psychoanalysis are embedded may facilitate or exclude the kinds of social considerations I have shown are important. Further questions arise about how the conceptual frameworks of psychoanalysis can embrace any such extensions, how we can more adequately embrace the social without losing the complexity, richness and specificity of what psychoanalysis can offer. This is an old question that first arose in the context of the historic free clinics. In contemporary times the relational position has productively carved out much more space for the social. However, it has done this through setting up an opposition with so-called drive theory, which is positioned as only a one-person approach, to be discarded in favour of two- or three-person psychologies. I argue that this opposition, like the dilemma Fenichel saw, is not a necessary one, stemming as it does from the presumption of the dualism of ‘individual’ and ‘society’ that, paradoxically, it also seeks to overcome. We saw how Reich, perhaps the arch drive theorist (and taken by him to problematic and homophobic extremes), also provided powerful and still relevant analyses of the social recruitment of unconscious drives and conflicts; this suggests that these are not necessary oppositions.
Rather, a form of theory is needed that encompasses the advantages of both the more socially orientated relational position and of modern classical psychoanalysis, with its languages of desire, drive and sexuality. Here I outline how, schematically at least, Laplanche’s propositions might contribute to this. I have pointed out previously how Laplanche’s theorisations led to him criticising Freud for scotomising the working-class figure of a nurse and her subjectivity. We also saw Hartman’s innovative use of Laplanche’s notion of enigmatic messages, as a conduit for the unconscious transmission of the exigencies of class, through the bodies and anxieties of the parents or caregiver. This important suggestion, if developed further, could create a theoretical space for the inter-generational transmission of class and class histories. There are many enigmatic and foreclosed aspects of class, in its dense imbrication of the personal, the sociocultural and the economic, and in the widespread unavailability of a language of class, especially in the worlds of therapy and psychology.
Contemporary trends in psychoanalytic and philosophical thought emphasise how as subjects we are always formed in alterity, under conditions we do not choose, and constituted through many forms of otherness. This means, to follow Laplanche, that the primacy of the other needs to find a central place in psychoanalytic theorising. This forms his critique of the ipso-centralising tendencies observable in Freudian theory, despite also its decentring of the subject. Laplanche argues that the other is primal in relation to the construction of human subjectivity and is always to some extent enigmatic. The enigma leads back to the ‘otherness of the other’, which is itself the other’s response to his/her own unconscious, his/her otherness to their own self. He proposes a ‘fundamental inversion’ (Laplanche, 1999: 257) in which the individual’s agency is seen as secondary to the founding moments of passivity or seduction, taking the latter in the most general (and not specifically abusive) sense of the term.
This ‘fundamental inversion’ has advantages compared to the postulation of two-person psychologies or concepts of intersubjectivity, which do not start from a position of constitutive alterity. Rather, in assuming two monads, they then try to explain the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of two individuals. Laplanche’s emphasis on the role of the unconscious of the other in the transmission of enigmatic messages, and his reformulation of repression and drive in these terms, mean that his approach does not suffer from discarding core aspects of Freudian theory, which these other approaches are predicated upon. Laplanche proposes that drives are not primary but are constituted by impingements and incitements; and that the source of drives is the ‘otherness of the other’, as well as the body. Drives are thus seen as formed through the impingements and ‘messages’ of the adult world, as interiorisations of the enigmatic desires of others, carrying traces of these original external desires.
Laplanche’s very detailed reformulations have only recently been applied by others to clinical work of varying kinds, and there are many unanswered questions as to how they can be put into practice clinically. Furthermore, his emphasis on otherness primarily involves other individuals and their unconscious, not social or cultural forces as such. John Fletcher (1992) and Butler (2014) however do extend Laplanche in this way, in the implications they draw for the status of Oedipal theory. Both argue that Laplanche’s account of the origins of sexuality implies a significant departure from the universalising and restrictive assumptions of Oedipal theory. This chimes with my argument that to recognise the formative roles of non-parental figures, in the form of the hitherto disregarded working-class employees, in the early texts of psychoanalysis, does question the reductive and universalising assumptions at play.
Moreover, Laplanche’s reformulations could also illuminate psychoanalytic perspectives on the intergenerational transmission of social history, an aspect of especial relevance to class, with its many forms of conscious and unconscious inheritance. Laplanche proposes implantation and intromission as processes that capture the ways we are subjected to and impinged upon by others. ‘[I]mplantation allows the individual to take things up actively, at once translating and repressing’ (Laplanche, 1999: 136). It inaugurates the differentiation of psychic structures. Intromission is a more violent process, perhaps typical of many processes of racism or class exploitation, poverty and contempt. It blocks translation-repression, leads to foreclosures or repudiations, and creates elements that are resistant to any metabolising. Intromission can lead to psychosis, or to the unmetabolisable categorical imperatives of the super-ego. Laplanche thus provides us with the psychoanalytic underpinnings whereby individuals are subjected to the forces of the social world, through the enigmatic messages of adults, which are implanted or intromitted. These concepts are additions to the more familiar ones of internalisation, introjection and incorporation, which imply some kind of agency or activity of the subject, an ‘I’, not necessarily conscious. These, in Laplanche’s account are secondary to and consequent upon these processes of implantation and intromission. In all these ways, Laplanchian theory can provide a framework, albeit one which leaves much to be worked out, for encompassing the impress of the social world and the workings of the psyche, how we are both subjected to and become subjects of class, thereby amplifying much of psychoanalysis. I am not here proposing his reorientation of psychoanalysis as any kind of an ‘answer’, but rather to show that it is possible to extend and enhance psychoanalysis to embrace our inextricable sociality, without discarding much of it.
Any such usage of theory also needs more historical, cultural and social frames of reference, as I have shown, and as the politically radical and other projects involved in transposing psychoanalysis into working-class contexts exemplify. Walkerdine (2015) also argues these understandings are needed to address the transmission of class in any one individual or in communities, and to avoid reductive and pathologising explanations in terms of supposedly inherent psychological characteristics. She sees the effects of complex histories of suffering across generations as a mixture of ‘small’ and ‘large’ histories, such that ‘large histories are lived and mirrored in the small across haunted generations’ (2015: 179).
Class does indeed haunt psychoanalysis: in the many disavowed and displaced forms that I have identified, in the limitations of theory, and in the recurrent concerns with the inequalities and discriminations of practice. There is much to be gained from a more adequate incorporation of class matters into the language and explicit discourses of psychoanalysis; in particular, it would allow a better recognition of all the psychoanalytic work that does take place outside private practice and lessen the condemnation of psychoanalysis as something only for the privileged. It would open up the whole area of how we are (differently) formed by class to the richness of psychoanalytic thinking. This would all contribute to psychoanalysis renewing itself and to better surviving contemporary ideologies, policies and financial strictures. But such a project does require the political will to do so: which returns us once more to the fundamental ethical and moral issues at stake in any consideration of class and inequality, and to the necessity for forms of collectivity that transcend purely individual concerns, important as these are.
1 ‘Applied’ might be more appropriately used to designate non-clinical uses of psychoanalysis, when applied to other fields.
2 Other writers who popularise psychoanalysis include Susie Orbach, Darian Leader, Adam Phillips and Brett Kahr.
3 This evidence is available at bpc.org.uk, posted 15 June 2016.
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