Class and Psychoanalysis

We have seen in the previous chapter how theoretical questions concerning the integration of social factors with psychoanalytic work were a preoccupation of many of the psychoanalysts involved in the clinics, albeit secondary to the task of running and maintaining these. This debate subsequently took off in many directions, mainly, apart perhaps from Erich Fromm, divorced from clinical work and often, as in the post-war Frankfurt school, increasingly in the form of a psychoanalytic sociology. In all such critical theorisations of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the emphasis is mainly on ways to stitch them together rather than to understand how the grounds for their dis-articulation were created in the first place. This chapter addresses points in the development of psychoanalytic theory where such disarticulation from the social world arises. Anne McClintock (1995), in Imperial Leather, names this an aporia – a radical disjunction. Here I identify significant points in the construction of theory by Freud that led to the extrusion of class from psychoanalytic discourse, leaving a theoretical vacuum which has also had effects on clinical work.

The abjected nurse

McClintock (1995) uses the notion of disavowal to argue that Freud founded his Oedipal theory on the elision of the working-class female employee, depriving her of any theoretical status and presenting the Oedipal account as free of any economic or class structures, as universal. There is much to support this account, as will be illustrated later on. She argues that the categories of gender, ‘race’ and class exist and operate in and through each other, often in contradictory and conflictful ways, so that they are not as hermetically distinct and separate as is often assumed. Psychoanalytic accounts of gender may make no reference to ‘race’ or class, as Walton illustrates, yet these are often the unspoken (abjected) terms at play.

Class was palpably and extensively present in the family lives of many of Freud’s patients and of Freud himself. There are numerous references in various of his case histories and also in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) to nurses and governesses, working-class or lower middle-class servants and other employees in the households of middle- and upper-class families. The presence of working-class employees within these families introduces a significant class aspect into the care and development of these children, as well as structuring their relationship with their parents. The family is of course only one context in which class operates, but it is a key one for psychoanalysis, as it is the site of the formulation of Freud’s theories of sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Furthermore, the care of children is part of the territory of the embodiment of class. Norbert Elias’ epic study of class signifiers and socialisation (Elias, 1939/1994) focuses on matters such as hygiene, manners, bodily comportment, clothes, and taste. These have a bodily aspect inscribed early in the care of children, and are often unconsciously carried, albeit instantly recognisable, in body language of various kinds. Nurses, nannies and maidservants frequently had much more bodily and intimate relationships with children than their own parents did. Jane Gallop argues that the most insistent locus of intrusion into the idealised family is the maid/governess/nurse, naming this as the intrusion of the symbolic into the imaginary, or ‘the hole in the social cell’ of the nuclear family (Gallop, 1982: 144). Here I attempt to trace this ‘hole in the social cell’ through some of the many references to the significance of such working-class employees in the early Freudian literature.

It is well known that Freud’s self-analysis, conducted mainly through letters to Wilhelm Fliess, was entwined with his formulation of the Oedipus complex. Strikingly, for present purposes, this is put forward in the context of various dreams, memories and associations concerning his nurse, in a period of intense self-analysis. Freud does not provide any details about her identity; indeed she is not even given a name, but subsequent references and secondary literature name her as Monica Zajic (Glenn, 1986) and describe her as working class, Czech and Catholic, at a time when Freud’s family were living in Moravia (Grigg, 1973; Swan, 1974). Jim Swan suggests that her ethnic, social, cultural and economic status was one of considerable inferiority, a potent mixture to carry into a caring relationship with an infant from a different social milieu and one which might inspire many conflictful feelings, conscious or otherwise (Swan, 1974).

Freud analyses his significant early relationship with her: ‘I can only say shortly that der Alte [my father] played no active part in my case… that the prime originator [of my troubles] was a woman, ugly, elderly but clever …’ (Freud, 1897: 261, brackets as original). Making reference to his memories of early sibling jealousy, cruelty and his current travel anxiety he says: ‘[I]f I succeed in resolving my own hysteria, I shall be grateful to the old woman who provided me at such an early age with the means for living and going on living. As you see my old liking for her is breaking through again’ (Freud, 1897: 262).

The following day, he says, in response to a dream of the previous night: ‘She was my teacher in sexual matters and scolded me for being clumsy and not being able to do anything’ (Freud, 1897: 262). And later: ‘Besides this, she washed me in reddish water, in which she had previously washed herself. [The interpretation is not difficult; I find nothing like this in the chain of my memories, so I regard it as a genuine ancient discovery.]’ (Freud, 1897: 263, brackets as original). He then recounts an apparent memory of ‘the old woman’ making him steal some money and give it to her, which he invokes as a parallel with himself in the present taking money from his patients for his ‘bad’ treatment of them. Subsequently his mother corrects this memory to the effect that the nurse had stolen the money herself and on being found out, was dismissed and sent to prison. Freud, reflecting on his mistaken memory, says ‘I = she’, suggesting that he was identifying with her in his memory and associations (Freud, 1897: 264).

Freud underlines the extent of the emotional disturbance created for him by the nurse’s sudden disappearance in a memory of how distraught he was on a later occasion of not being able to find his mother, and fearing that, like his nurse, she could vanish completely. Following this, reflecting on the course of his self-analysis, he then provides one of the earliest statements of what became the Oedipus complex: ‘One single thought of general value has been revealed to me. I have found, in my own case too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal event of early childhood’ (Freud, 1897: 265).

The leap in Freud’s text from these vivid memories and associations concerning his nurse to the bald, generalised statement of the Oedipus complex, without even a paragraph break, is indeed an aporia, into which the working-class employee is propelled and thus abjected.

This whole sequence is striking for suggesting how, in these letters of self-analysis, Freud could credit the figure of a nurse as having an often decisive importance in his development: arousing him sexually in disturbing ways, but providing him with an affectionate attachment that he then lost, and also with the basis for a subsequent identification. It also underlines the extent of the physical intimacy involved in the relationship. Swan, in an extended commentary on these passages, argues that the figure of the nurse not only played a crucial role in Freud’s own development but also in the formulation of his theories. He remarks on the nurse’s role in both arousing and shaming the infant Freud, and compares this with the much more distanced description Freud gives of his more passive later interest in his mother:

What needs explaining is how the theory of the Oedipus complex accounts for the boy’s guilty impulses towards his mother but ignores the boy’s arousal at the hands of his nurse, especially in view of how much more attention the nurse gets from Freud than his mother does.

(Swan, 1974: 19)

Swan maintains that there are in effect two mothers: the one whose name and nakedness Freud can only mention in Latin (Freud, 1897: 262) and the other whom he remembers as the agent of disturbing sexual experiences. This allows Freud to depict the mother of the Oedipus complex as pure in her sexuality, as only the object of attraction from the son, rather than in any way seductive or intrusive, with the ‘bad’, humiliating aspects of the now banished nurse projected into the oedipal father.

Freud’s postulation of the Oedipus complex and the role of children’s erotic fantasies was also the site of the abandonment of the seduction theory. In abandoning that, and its implication of intrusive external influences, the figure of the nurse was also abandoned. It is paradoxical if not contradictory, and certainly significant for subsequent theory, that a working-class figure can be attributed such an important role and yet also be banished, both in actuality and from the theory, present but absent. Prophecy Coles in The Second Mother shows how extensively these female employees have been afforded no importance in theories of child development and in clinical work, despite the evidence of significant attachment and involvement, and how the traumas associated with their departure have frequently been minimised or denied any recognition (Coles, 2015). She argues that the ‘impression’ Freud’s nurse made on him continued to puzzle him, but that he failed to find ‘a significant place for his nurse in his emotional life’ (Coles, 2015: 69); nor, we may add, in his theories.

The return of the nurse

Like all expelled figures, traces remain or return. McClintock (1995) argues that the nurse, ‘the repudiated working-class other: the expelled abject’ (1995: 89), returns to haunt the dreams of Freud himself and also his patients. She argues that servants, seen merely as parental surrogates and temporary intruders into the ‘family romance’, should rather be recognised as major sources of love, splitting, conflictual identifications and desires. There is now a considerable secondary literature on such passages from Freud, the import of which is often to trace the significance of his nurse in his subsequent dreams (e.g. Grigg, 1973), or to suggest reinterpretations of his case studies where servants are concerned (e.g. Glenn, 1986; Colombo, 2010).

Jean Laplanche, in his reworkings of Freud, makes use of the discarded figure of a nurse to link Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory to the writing out of the primacy of the other (Laplanche, 1999). This unnamed nurse occurs in a chain of associations and memories that Freud recounts in the course of analysing one of his own dreams. Referring to an inn-hostess who was making dumplings in the dream, Freud writes:

Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman’s breast. A young man who was a great admirer of feminine beauty was talking once – so the story went – of the good-looking wet-nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby: “I’m sorry,” he remarked, “that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.” I was in the habit of quoting this anecdote to explain the factor of “deferred action” in the mechanism of the psychoneuroses.

(Freud, 1900: 203–4)

Laplanche argues that, in this recounting of the story of the young man:

Freud, who has abandoned the theory of seduction, forgets or rather scotomises the nurse, in whom he refuses to see a new figure of the ‘perverse adult’ of the letters to Fliess. Here, she is hardly anything more than the support of an object without enigma. But what object, what consumption is at issue here? Is it the milk which is to be ingested? Is it the breast which is to be… sucked …? Incorporated …? Caressed …? Stimulated …? As for the nipple, precisely the erogenous part of the object, it is cruelly absent, as is any reference to the pleasure the other seeks there.

(Laplanche, 1999: 258, italics/gaps as original)

Laplanche thus criticises Freud for reducing the nurse to the barest of simple functions, someone without complexity, her breast purely as an object for the infant, and not as an erotic zone for her. By characterising Freud’s depiction of her as ‘object without enigma’ Laplanche implies that the nurse is not seen as a fully constituted other, not a subject in her own right, not someone formative for the child’s unconscious, nor the conveyer of enigmatic perhaps untranslatable messages. We could add the nurse’s desires and needs deriving from her class status and history to Laplanche’s list of omitted characteristics. Laplanche also argues:

After all – and one is slightly ashamed to say so – psychoanalysis with and since Freud has omitted to note that repression and the unconscious exist in the other before being present in the child: in the Wolf Man’s parents, in Grusha 1 and in the beating father.

(Laplanche, 1999: 158, my italics)

As I argue later, Laplanche’s reorientating of Freudian theory towards the primacy of the other allows more scope for the inclusion of the desires of significant working-class employees, and for the transmission of unconscious communications, including those of class.

Daria Colombo, in a contemporary revisiting of this terrain, cites the many references to servants scattered throughout Freud’s writings, often occurring with greater frequency than references to mothers (Colombo, 2010). She points out that while Freud abandoned his original seduction theory, he never doubted the reality of the many seductions by nursemaids, governesses and other servants that he heard about. Colombo examines both the Dora case and also that of Lucy R who was herself a governess (Freud, 1893), as well as others more briefly. She argues that relationships with servants ‘function not only as vehicles for split-off aspects of the maternal transference, but also as important independent object relationships’ (p. 840). These various servants, she says, are both marginal and central: marginal as persons of little power in the families and households where they worked, and also marginal in psychoanalytic theory; central however to the early lives of many children and in the many references to them, especially in their sexual engagements with their charges. They were thus given some historical and psychic truth at the same time as constituting a theoretical blind spot. Colombo interestingly argues that much of the scotomising of these women servants was because they represented an active, unruly female sexuality which ran counter both to bourgeois morals of the time and also to Freud’s own theories of female sexuality as essentially passive. They were, in Freud’s words, seen as persons of ‘low morals’, only remembered as ‘worthless female material’ (Masson, 1985: 241). Thus were working-class women depicted, and abjected, given neither reality nor fantasy status.

In this secondary literature, two things are going on simultaneously. First, there are the biographical arguments about the importance of Freud’s own nursemaid to his subsequent dreams, identifications, recollections and references to nursemaids, as reported by him or interpreted by others post-hoc. Second, there are the theoretical critiques of the lacunae and contradictions in the manifest presence of the servants in the text with their writing-out from theory and with the privileging of the oedipal theory as involving only the parents, and, as we see next, with the theory of the primal scene. Most commentators run the two aspects together, which may have some legitimacy given that Freud’s own theorising developed from his self-analysis. However, it is not necessary to speculate about the putative biographical aspects of Freud’s motivations and possible countertransferences to insist on the theoretical elisions at play in the various texts, elisions and disavowals that have had such determining influences on the framework of subsequent psychoanalytic theorising.

Class and the Wolf Man

The Wolf Man text (Freud, 1918) provides one of the clearest examples of the writing-out of class from theory, and its return in another form. This case is the site of Freud’s main theorisation of the primal scene, and is also the site of a striking erasure from the theory of the social relations so vividly portrayed in the descriptive case material. Here I trace some of the ways that class permeates the text and the significance of this. The racial and class disavowals of this text have been critiqued by Luz Calvo, using post-colonial theory. He argues for a reading such that ‘the subject is constituted through fantasy scenarios in which difference is conceived as a tangled web of sexual, racial and class positions’ (Calvo, 2008: 57).

The Wolf Man came from an aristocratic Russian family and one of his symptoms was a compulsive attraction to working-class women. Freud describes this as: ‘all the girls with whom he subsequently fell in love – often with the clearest indications of compulsion – were also servants, whose education and intelligence were necessarily far inferior to his own’ (Freud, 1918: 22). Freud suggests at this point that if all these servant girls were substitutes for the figure of his intellectually superior sister whom he had to forgo, then an intention to debase was contributing to his object choice.2

Freud’s account contains many references to various nurses and female servants who played key roles in the child’s life and also, it seems, in the construction of his sexual fantasies and later practices. At the outset, Freud describes how little the mother had to do with the children of the family, and that there were several substantial and crucial periods when both parents were absent. There are multiple references throughout the text to the various caring and educational roles that his nurse performed, and also to the roles that various governesses and tutors carried out. There are strikingly fewer references to the mother. The boy was mainly looked after by a nurse, an old peasant woman ‘[W]ith an untiring affection for him. He served her as a substitute for a son of her own who had died young’ (Freud, 1918: 14). Freud makes some reference here to the nature of the nurse’s possible desire for the boy, which may well have been crucial to their relationship, framed as it was for her by her loss, but he gives her no further status as a desiring or grieving subject, rather as only an employee. Thus are the subjectivity of the other and the enigmatic messages she may have conveyed dispensed with.

In Freud’s account the nurse, ‘his beloved Nanya’ (a phrase Freud often repeats), with whom he shared a bedroom, becomes an important object of the boy’s libidinal strivings, frustrations and conflicts. There is ample evidence of the intensity and loyalty of the boy’s feelings towards her, in the face of criticism, and contempt expressed by the governess (another employee) and also by his sister. Indeed it seems that the marked change in his behaviour as a child occurred during the period of conflict between these two adult employees. This was also associated by Freud to the earlier seduction by his sister, carried out while she told him sexualised stories about his Nanya. Freud sees the boy’s masturbation in front of his Nanya as attempts to seduce her, only to be met with refusal, disapproval and threats from her. He then, Freud says, begins a secret search for another sexual object. Freud describes the boy’s regression to a sadistic-anal pregenital organisation in which ‘his principal object was his beloved Nanya’, whom he tormented. The earlier seduction by his sister had, Freud says, forced him into a passive sexual role, and he ‘pursued a path from his sister via his Nanya to his father’ (Freud, 1918: 27). Later Freud describes how the child only recovered from the anxiety with which the wolves’ dream (a crucial part of the text) ended by having his Nanya with him at night. Freud renders this as a flight back from father to nurse, as objects of his desires. In all these many important ways, the nurse rather than the mother appears as the cardinal female object of the boy’s early and turbulent emotional life, yet she is never described as anything more than a substitute for the mother.

As the case narrative proceeds with its constructions and reconstructions, another servant, Grusha, enters the account as formative in the Wolf Man’s subsequent sexual compulsions. This scene was produced by a chain of associations from a screen memory involving another peasant girl. Freud describes the scene with Grusha as the first experience the Wolf Man ‘could really remember’, arrived at ‘without any conjectures or intervention’ by Freud. This certainty contrasts with the many conjectures in the text surrounding the alleged witnessing of the putative primal scene between the parents. Freud links the boy’s sexual excitement at the sight of Grusha, on her knees scrubbing the floor ‘with her buttocks projecting’, to the posture his mother allegedly assumed in the earlier hypothesised scene of copulation from behind with the father, such that Grusha ‘became his mother to him’ and ‘like his father… he behaved in a masculine way towards her’, by urinating on the floor. He earlier remarks, as suggested by a linguistic confusion, on how Grusha ‘had become fused with his mother’ in the Wolf Man’s memory. Freud continues: ‘The compulsion which proceeded from the primal scene was transferred on to this scene with Grusha’ (Freud, 1918: 93). Freud then goes on to describe the subsequent compulsiveness with which the Wolf Man fell in love with several peasant girls in similar occupations and postures to Grusha, and how this compulsion dominated his love choices. Notably Freud remarks that it was not just the posture but also the occupation of the young woman that was to have such a decisive influence on his subsequent conditions of being able to fall in love. In this respect we can see that something associated with class (occupation) had made its mark in the text.

Despite these abundant references to many different employees and to the significant roles of the Nanya and Grusha in the Wolf Man’s early childhood, they are only rendered as substitutes or surrogates for the mother, a unidirectional displacement without any theorised significance. Freud preserves the primacy of the constructed primal scene by interpreting the significance of the physical debasement of Grusha’s kneeling only in terms of his association to the posture of the mother in the parental coupling, not as something in itself full of emotive social meaning and difference. In conducting this argument, he wants to disprove any greater significance of what he calls the Wolf Man’s ‘intention to debase’ (Freud, 1918: 95), which he sees as a rival to the primal scene explanation, an argument he keeps going throughout the text. Freud contends that the Wolf Man did not respond in any fruitful way to this alternative interpretation and concludes that this militates against any overestimation of such an ‘intention to debase’, rather than the primal scene hypothesis. It is notable that Freud poses this as an either/or choice, not as both being contributing factors. By invoking an ‘intention to debase’ Freud is assuming this as a defining feature of class relations on the part of those of the upper classes towards those of the working classes, which, while plausible, is not elaborated. He returns later to the question of the status of the ‘intention to debase’ in a discussion of the importance of the dumb water carrier who Freud says served the patient as a father-surrogate.

Although these servants are described as having far-reaching impacts in the childhood and adult life of the Wolf Man, class is not given any significance. Rather Freud argues: ‘A child pays no regard to social distinctions, which have little meaning for him yet; and he classes people of inferior rank with his parents if such people love him as his parents do’ (Freud, 1918: 98). This is a strong assertion in one of the founding papers of psychoanalysis that class differences as such cannot be expected to impinge on or affect a child, and that the alleged ‘inferior rank’ of working-class employees will not register. It undoubtedly has had far-reaching effects over the subsequent course of psychoanalysis. The child’s supposed lack of ability to perceive social difference is contradicted by Freud’s argument a few pages later, in relation to the primal scene hypothesis, that ‘we have rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing what they cannot be given credit for’ (Freud, 1918: 103). Yet the early and formative relationships that the upper-class Wolf Man had with working-class employees are dismissed in favour of the (often absent) parental couple, at the same time as being extensively described. The question of how a child internalises social differences between significant figures and, in the wider world, of how class becomes part of the psyche, is rendered a non-question within the canon. This is a form of disavowal, of knowing and not knowing, and is a prime site within psychoanalysis for the elision and extrusion of class.

Calvo (2008) rereads the Wolf Man case in the light of the racial transference that occurs at the beginning of the analysis. Freud says in a letter to Ferenczi, the patient ‘confessed to me, after the first session: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head’ (Brabant and Giampieri-Deutsch, 1992: 138). Calvo argues that this racial dynamic is dis-avowed by Freud in an ironic joke about money 3 and that this leads to the eliding of the structuring role of racial difference. Calvo’s analysis is valuable for the ways in which he then reads Fanon alongside Freud to emphasise the ways in which subjects are constituted through powerful social imaginaries and the circulation of fantasies of miscegenation. He also links his extensive rereading as regards ‘race’ to the elision of class. He considers that Freud overlooked the primal importance of the boy’s relations with Grusha and other servants, and the structuring rather than secondary role of social difference: ‘These distinctions of high/low recur as organising tenets of the Wolf Man’s desire, demonstrating that social difference and oedipal scenarios are intertwining fantasies and sites of dense condensation’ (Calvo, 2008: 62). Social forces and imaginaries are thus given a dynamic equivalence with the intra-psychic processes; in such ways social position can structure sexual desire. This approach locates the workings of social formations as part of the earliest structuring of subjectivity, rather than as an externally imposed effect on an already existent psyche.

The challenge is to identify such ‘intertwining fantasies and sites of dense condensation’ in the case of class, something that some contemporary work considered later is beginning to illuminate. An upper-class/middle-class example of this, namely class-related sexual debasement, is also described in ‘The Universal Tendency to the Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (Freud, 1912). Here Freud observes how the frequent choice of a woman of a lower class by men of a higher class is a means to complete sexual satisfaction, a consequence of their need for a debased sexual object, inhibited with respected and respectable women. Thus such splitting between love and sex has a class dimension, again described but not theorised as to how class comes to signify debasement. Instead the debasement that is attached to sex, as something degrading, is seen as coming only from internal sources and the childhood repression of sexuality, rather than, or as well as, from the social configuration. Here, as in the Wolf Man case, we can see how for upper-class white heterosexual males the class and sexual dynamics are intertwined. McClintock (1995) provides many similar examples from the era in which psychoanalysis was first formulated. Such eroticisation of class difference can also be found in many historical accounts of gay male sexuality.

I suggest that Freud’s notion of the ‘intention to debase’ depicts one aspect of class relations, and the ways people are constituted by them, that has a powerful significance, both in its materiality and in being one of the many circulating fantasies about class. Because the ‘intention to debase’ is used as a foil for Freud to disprove as a putative alternative to the primal scene hypothesis, the significance of it is easily overlooked. This is that the up/down, inferior/superior aspects of class are central to many aspects of class experience and class relations, as later considerations show, however much we may for other reasons wish to resist or dispute this. The Wolf Man case itself suggests the early age at which bodily distinctions between high and low, and the accompanying fantasies, are transformed and intermingled with social distinctions. It was at such a juncture that psychoanalysis turned away from any further exploration of the implantation of class relations in the psyche of the developing child.

Cross-class love and loss

We can see from the foregoing how working-class employees are present in the founding texts of psychoanalysis at key moments in the evolution of theory, yet discarded as of any importance in their own right. The work these employees did, the services and relationships they provided, in caring for the children (and indirectly in the creation of the theory), are rendered invisible, as servants so often were and are required to be (Lethbridge, 2013). Thus, the ways in which middle-class and upper middle-class identity and defence structures can be significantly built on excluded working-class others are not investigated psychoanalytically. These servants remained the ‘worthless female material’ of Freud’s letter to Fliess, excluded from the theory of the ‘family romance’ of the Oedipus complex, yet in many cases crucial to the child’s development. These various relationships also exemplify the vicissitudes of and barriers to ‘crossing the boundaries of inequality’, a central notion in Sennett’s (2003) discussion of class and respect.

The ways these working-class employees come to figure or be forgotten, in the minds of others, illustrates powerfully Judith Butler’s notion of ungrievable lives, those which are not valued enough to be recognised as worthy of grief. However, a few psychoanalytic writers, including Coles (2015), have questioned the contemporary lack of psychoanalytic interest in surrogate or second mothering. Sara Scheftel (2012), like Laplanche earlier, describes this as a ‘scotoma’ in the literature, and Harry Hardin (1985) remarks on the contrast between the absence from theory and the frequency in his clinical practice of various forms of substitute primary caretaking. He contests the commonly accepted argument that the mother, even if largely absent, trumps the nurse/nanny, an echo of Freud’s eclipsing of his nurse by the image of his mother. In this and subsequently (Hardin and Hardin, 2000), he and his co-author trace the vicissitudes of care by servants/employees through detailed clinical examples. They highlight the intense, often very physical, attachments involved and the trauma for the child when employees leave or are sacked. They argue that the importance of such loss for the child and subsequent adult is significantly unrecognised, often forgotten or repressed, ungrievable but sometimes surfacing in fragments of sensory memory or symptoms of detachment in relationships. They criticise the lack of recognition of surrogate–mother transference in clinical work (Hardin and Hardin, 2004). Coles (2015) suggests that the neglect of the nanny or nurse lies in their unacknowledged emotional importance, the traumatic nature of the losses sustained, the conflicts inherent in substitute care, covered over by an idealisation of the mother, all of which may contribute to later melancholia. To which I would add their lack of any social power.

The difficulties of the nannying job, another ‘impossible profession’, are taken up more fully by Scheftel (2012). She describes the very rapid repression by the child of caregivers who leave as part of their devaluation. She sees the nanny as falling into a divide between mother and baby, likely to disappoint the child or else elicit resentment towards the mother, a kind of negative ‘problematic and potentially split psychic space’ (Scheftel, 2012: 253). The nanny may be the repository of all kinds of projections from the mother, whose own conflicts may lead her to deny, hate or make invisible the very person on whose help she is dependent. The nanny is required to remain in the background, her necessary presence overlooked. Scheftel considers this normal for many cross-class relationships, where underpayment and disdainful or abusive behaviour can reflect the entitled dynamics of domestic employers. Skeggs, in her research on class and gender, quotes one nanny:

They treat you like shit. What I’ve noticed is that they never look at you… they just tell you what to do.… Some of them want you to know you’re shit in comparison to them.… Even the kids. They learn really early on that you’re not worth the ground they walk on.

(Skeggs, 1997: 92)

What is remarkable is that in the face of huge disparities of power and recognition, very often (albeit with exceptions, see Sonntag, 2006) these working-class women do forge significant loving relationships with their more privileged charges.

Such denial of the subjectivities of domestic employees, or of their significance, has meant there are few clinical accounts where the patient herself is a domestic employee. One exception is Freud’s case of Miss Lucy R, a governess and putatively lower middle class (Freud, 1893). Her duties meant that she could only come for short sessions – a material constraint often echoed in the exigencies of providing psychoanalytic therapy in poor communities (see Chapter 4). She felt conflicted between her loyalty to the children who needed her (their mother was dead), and her desire to leave an uncomfortable situation and return to her own mother. Freud analyses her symptoms (recurrent smells of burnt pudding) as deriving from the repression of the conflict of her love for her employer that she wanted to forget. On Freud interpreting this she said very eloquently that she was not ashamed of this love, but that it was distressing to her because she was only a poor girl in his service as an employee and thus did not have the same ‘independence’ towards him she would to anyone else. She felt people would laugh at her if they knew. She traced the arousal of her love for the employer to his unusual declaration of how much he depended on her to bring up his children. Freud considers the ‘operative trauma’ to be an occasion when the employer, angry with her for an incident, threatens to dismiss her. This display of power crushed her hopes that he loved her in any way, but her symptoms disappeared with these interpretations. Two aspects of being a servant stand out: the powerlessness she felt as an employee, which Freud does not take up, and also the vulnerability and confusion of being needed and depended on, but not loved as an equal.

Furthermore Freud gives little space to her fantasies of love. Colombo (2010) highlights Freud’s apparent insistence that Lucy R should stay in service, rather than follow her own desires, that is, reconcile herself to her role as an exploited servant; replace the dead mother as caretaker of the children but not as someone more equal, as wife or lover of the father. Colombo comments how unusually the death of her fantasy is accepted with remarkable complacency by both Freud and Lucy R; her love ‘makes no difference’.

Elsewhere Freud emphatically denied that servants were interesting or adequate as psychoanalytic subjects, as Vicky Lebeau (1995) argues. In a letter to Jung he said: ‘What with their habits and mode of life, reality is too close to these women to allow them to believe in fantasies. If I had based my theories on the statements of servant girls, they would all be negative’ (Freud, 1907: 64). He continues: ‘we can tell these persons their story without having to wait for their contribution. They are willing to confirm what we tell them, but one can learn nothing from them’ (Freud, 1907: 64, my italics).

Freud in this passage gives up on servants, re-inscribing them with his version of their story, not open to hearing theirs. Whether Freud means the servants do not have the kind of fantasies that psychoanalysis can make use of, or whether they do but do not believe in them is left ambiguous. However, the distinction between reality and fantasy, the borderline with which much psychoanalysis works, now becomes inflected by class. Thus was a limit placed on who was suitable for or interesting to psychoanalysis: this was justified in terms of ‘too close’ to reality, an often repeated theme, closing down any psychoanalytic exploration. The class dimensions of this have reverberated through the subsequent history of psychoanalysis, disenfranchising many working-class subjects, and taking for granted what ‘reality’ might mean.

Identities built on privilege

I suggest that the vagueness and blankness with which many of these working-class caregivers come to be portrayed by both writer and patient is a function of their generally devalued status as poor and working class, scarcely remembered by the adult and unrecognised in psychoanalytic discourse or as psychoanalytic subjects – an aporia indeed. Thus the powerful social framing at play, replicated in the theory, leaves unaddressed not just the subjectivities of employees themselves, but also the ways in which middle- and upper-class identities can be structured by this abjection. Certain kinds of middle- or upper-class identity and defence structure can be partly built on the unrecognised love and loss of the working-class caretaker. Donald Winnicott, for example, described a patient whose ‘actual nanny gave much colour to the False Self organisation’ (Winnicott, 1960: 142).

Relational psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on intersubjectivity, has opened up this ground further. Melanie Suchet addresses the intersection of socially structured relationships, privilege and the melancholia of profound attachment to, and loss of, family employees in a retrospective portrayal of her black South African nanny, Dora Moketzie (Suchet, 2007). While recognising the ambiguities of such a search from a position of her own white privilege, she attempts to retrieve Dora from the annihilations of racial and social class privilege, and the necessarily narcissistic perceptions of the child she was. Asking the question ‘who was she?’, Suchet speaks of a time before she was aware that the hands that so gently held her and bathed her were black, or that she was white. She evokes the sensuous nature of Dora’s loving care, while remarking that she came to know without it being spoken, that she herself was part of the ruling class, and that to be white was to have power, even as a child. She expresses the confusion she felt as to who they were for each other: Dora as someone she ‘loved effortlessly’, her ‘nanny-mommy’, but who was not recognised as a person worthy of love and loss, part of the family yet a servant from another world about which Suchet knew nothing. She tracks the vicissitudes of this deep, loving relationship that was socially devalued and ambiguous within the family. Suchet asks when it was she realised her ‘idyllic childhood’ and happiness were at Dora’s expense – that Dora seldom saw her own child who occasionally came to visit, that she and her family lived a life of poverty and oppression of the most stark kind.

Suchet’s article is important for the ways she analyses and deconstructs a form of white identity built on privilege and the unrecognised emotional labour of a working-class woman. She coins the term ‘the melancholia of the beneficiary’ encapsulating the experience of loss and the diminishment of the sense of self for those who have benefited from the privileges of whiteness and class. Melancholia is a place of loss in which the socially disparaged other can persist unconsciously, not grieved or grievable. Suchet sees her re-membering of Dora, as a loving parental figure whose strength and endurance she feels marks her, as part of the re-evaluation of the self through an integration of what has been disavowed or foreclosed. She sees the confrontation with shame and the relinquishing of the previously idealised self as a first step in ‘unravelling’ privilege. Suchet acknowledges there is no way of escaping or transcending the profound racialisation and privilege of her relationship with Dora. She argues that the process she describes is part of living fully in the awareness of ‘race’, of surrendering ‘the brittle defensiveness of whiteness’ to be able to see the socially disparaged other as ‘a like subject’, rather, I would add, than perpetuating distance and disavowal. In this way the social framing that ‘tears asunder the ability to love fully, to admit that love and to value both the black and the white mother’ can be held up for questioning and deconstruction (Suchet 2007: 882). Sarah Hill (2007), in a commentary on Suchet’s paper, argues that in any such process the real and material social context has to be foregrounded, a reminder that ‘a narcissistic injury or lack is of a different order from a racist injury’ (2007: 897), or indeed from one originating in class inequality and discrimination. Otherwise, the crucial dialectic between the psychic and the social collapses, and the social is inadvertently reduced to the psychic – a danger inherent in all such explorations.

Adrienne Harris (2007) takes this analysis further in her commentary. She observes that in the context of working mothers in Western societies and the globalisation of childcare, many children are now raised in multiple class and ‘race’ contexts, with the employment of childcare workers from diverse backgrounds. She, like previous authors, observes how often in clinical work:

[O]ne comes upon some odd elision in a patient’s narrative. Lost nannies, caretakers, or housekeepers without names or apparent meaning, any number of different missing pieces of a developmental attachment puzzle are often erased in family memories and certainly in our institutional, professional memories and narratives.

(Harris, 2007: 890, my italics)

She depicts the complexity of trying to disentangle the ‘use of another’ in the Winnicottian sense from its other usages that relate to class, economic necessity and exploitation. She sums this up as ‘the mix of gift and unwilling extraction and necessity’ involved in childcare arrangements.

Harris argues that the construction of self in acts of domination and the continuation of privilege is a deep infrastructure in any white person’s life, something that can constitute what she calls a ‘psychose blanche’ – a psychic absence that can only be papered over. This she sees as a ‘spot’ of dissociation, despair and failed symbolisation (again an aporia), in contrast to Suchet, whose article assumes that this can, via the kind of process she depicts, be symbolised and altered. I suggest that class position also can be deeply constitutive of a privileged person’s identity and personality in ways that may well resist symbolisation, and therefore lack articulation and reflection. In Harris (2012) she further argues that this means that even authentic expressions of social concern will be inevitably compromised, a way of expressing the pernicious divisions between people that social inequality creates, and an important corrective to any self-idealising.

Disavowal

This chapter has pinpointed the elision and disavowal of salient cross-class relationships in the lives of some of Freud’s patients, as well as of Freud himself. This disavowal has allowed the creation of a universalised account of the Oedipus complex, and the assumption of the primacy of the constructed primal scene. These working-class figures do, however, continue to persist and haunt the subsequent adults as scotomised but often crucial figures. It is argued that the elision of these working-class employees allows psychoanalysis to continue with the construction of the primacy of the nuclear family, where questions of ‘race’, class and power are extruded. This is one important way in which the disarticulation of psychoanalysis from significant aspects of the social world arose. To bring significant cross-class relationships within the context of domestic employment more into the clinical and theoretical picture is to conceive of the working-class employees as persons in their own right, as ‘like subjects’, to use Jessica Benjamin’s important term, with their own histories and subjectivities. This requires a form of theory that would embrace the ways in which class enters into and structures intimate emotional relationships, and also where the primacy of the other is more fully considered, as Laplanchian theory suggests. This would also throw light on the foreclosures and defensive structures of upper- and middle-class privilege, as some psychosocial and clinical work, addressed in later chapters, does.

The importance of naming the extrusion of class as disavowal is, I suggest, that disavowal is a process more widely involved in the way we deal with painful or unwelcome social realities. Disavowal is a mode of defence in which, as Hinshelwood (2008) describes, conscious awareness of painful realities is rejected. Freud originally evolved the concept in relation to male fetishism but it has a wider applicability to any unwelcome knowledge that is known but not known, denied or pushed aside. Two incompatible positions are held at the same time, so a compromise position results between two conflicting forces or ideas which exist side by side but do not influence each other. This Freud characterises as splitting of the ego, which occurs to enable ‘normal reality awareness to survive while in another part of the ego it is strenuously denied’ (Hinshelwood, 2008: 507). It results in the weakening of the ego, and we can see a parallel to this at a social and a disciplinary level. The way this operates may differ depending on the social positioning at any one point in time of the subject – as more or less privileged, and in relation to more or less privileged others. The disavowals concern knowledge of these others and their social realities, of how social realities impinge on and construct the self. Disavowal is an accommodation to realities we know about but feel powerless to affect or unwilling to engage with. The dis-avowal of the social world as of relevance to psychoanalysis means that the extensive knowledge, for example, of class as it is lived and felt about from other disciplines is ignored. My contention is that this weakens and isolates psychoanalysis in any attempt to reach out beyond what seems like its hermetically sealed province. It has also created a theoretical vacuum in which the languages and concepts to talk about class are not readily available within psychoanalytic frameworks.

Hinshelwood raises the question of the different ways and degrees to which the ego can be split, from conscious, maybe neurotic, conflict in which the ego can recognise both sides, through various forms of repression, disavowal and fragmentation to foreclosure in psychosis. Such differentiation is the stuff of detailed clinical work. Many writers have described the internal dividedness produced by class, and I suggest this can operate through all kinds of disavowal and splitting. Several writers on the affective aspects of class have also used notions of disavowal to describe the vicissitudes of living class in a divided society (see Chapter 5). Sennett and Cobb (1972) are at pains to distinguish the kind of divided self that they see as part of working-class consciousness from those described in cases of schizophrenia. However, Gary Walls (2006) makes a link with clinical work in how the often necessary double consciousness engendered by racism can be seen in symptoms of various kinds.

Notes

1 Grusha was the servant girl the memories of whom played an important part in Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man.

2 Here Freud is pursuing an argument with Alfred Adler and his postulation of the primacy of motives of power and prerogative. These, Freud avers, would have explained the case if he had not pursued the analysis further. Adler, who worked contemporaneously with a mainly working-class population of patients, described a symptomatic picture of inferiority complex, resulting from their socially underprivileged positions.

3
Elision and Disavowal

The abjected nurse

The return of the nurse

Class and the Wolf Man

Cross-class love and loss

Identities built on privilege

Disavowal

Notes

References

3Elision and Disavowal

The abjected nurse

The return of the nurse

Class and the Wolf Man

Cross-class love and loss

Identities built on privilege

Disavowal

Notes

References

3
Elision and Disavowal