Psychosocial and sociological perspectives
The last chapter showed how psychoanalytic work in low-cost and free clinics and disadvantaged communities could benefit by some reflective understanding of the social circumstances of the clientele and of the class formations affecting both them and the therapists themselves. Here I attempt to glean something of what psychoanalysis can learn from how sociologists and psychosocial researchers have investigated class as it is lived, experienced and felt about. Several years ago I set out to explore this growing body of contemporary research, through immersion in some of the literature and through an attachment to one of the UK’s leading sociology departments.1 This enterprise came from realising that for any psychoanalytic concern with class, if it was not to be simply reductive, I had to go outside of psychoanalysis, to a wider knowledge and theorisation of class, and attempt some interdisciplinarity of thought, as regards the social and the psychoanalytic. I found much of relevance to the subjective, psychological and emotional aspects of class, and to the many ways in which class forms and inhabits our psyches, all within a framework of structural social forces. This, I contend, provides a necessary basis for any psychoanalytic exploration of the conscious and unconscious ways in which class may form us and also enter into clinical relationships, in private as well as public sector work.
In the course of this project I learned much about processes: the manifold historic processes of distinction that proliferate in the terrain of class, the everyday practices that constitute class as something to be continuously done, the often hidden feelings that accompany this, and the unceasing processes of judgement and moral evaluation that divide people externally and internally. I also learned about the pain, ambivalence, anxiety, defensiveness and sometimes pride involved in the ‘emotions of class’, and how it is possible to study these in a way that brings to life the complexities of feeling, self-conception and perception.
Much of this research has emanated from the recent ‘affective’ turn in sociology, although pre-dated by older interests. This represents a turn away from the preoccupation with stratification and class-consciousness, towards a much greater interest in cultural aspects of class and the personally experienced subjective and emotional dimensions, the ways in which ‘class is in everything about a person’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001: 39). Some of this research uses psychoanalytic methodologies to enhance its methods; other theorists use psychoanalytic concepts to enlarge their theorising or to further explain their findings. Yet other work does not make explicit reference to psychoanalysis but, in dealing with emotions, provides much of potential psychoanalytic interest.
Such work, of which I can present only snapshots, could add greatly to any clinical attempt to recognise and understand class-inflected experiences, relationships and emotions, within and outside the therapy relationship.
Here I outline some of the points of orientation within sociology, which I have found helpful in addressing class psychoanalytically. I ask what kinds of language, themes and concepts are used in talking about personally experienced and affective aspects of class, and how do these connect with psychoanalytic concepts? How can reading such work with psychoanalytic ears illuminate some of the processes identified?
Norbert Elias’ epic study, The Civilising Process (Elias, 1939/1994), is an historical survey, in great depth and detail, of the class distinctions prevailing at different periods in Western Europe. What this reveals is that while the precise criteria differentiating one class from another change historically and according to locality, class distinction per se does not. There is always an upper and a lower class, and often others. Elias is emphatic that class should be seen as a total figuration, comprising all classes as interrelated parts of a totality. This supports the relevance of addressing middle- or upper-class positionings within any field, in addition to the much more studied working-class ones. Elias emphasises the immense psychic work of socialisation and the enforcements that are needed to sustain distinctions between classes. This focus on the processes by which class distinction is produced, maintained and reproduced is relevant to contemporary concerns with the intergenerational transmission of class, and the multitudinous practices through which individuals become classed subjects.
Elias notes how within the modern period class boundaries have become less fixed and more permeable, and also more subject to internalised rather than external control, in judgements of the self. He makes use of Freudian concepts of id, ego and super-ego to argue that such structural differentiations within individuals are connected to the structures of relationships within society at large, and the particular forms of drive and affect control at play. He attributes a decisive role to changes in feelings of shame and delicacy in generational processes of class differentiation. This, and his focus on matters of manners, hygiene, etiquette and taste, allows us to see the deeply embodied and personally experienced markers of class, which are often instantly and subliminally apprehended. Elias’ massive work leads him to emphasise ‘how deeply the stratification, the pressure and tensions of our own time, penetrate the structure of the individual personality’ such that the child ‘feel(s) the entire tension of a society, even before he or she knows anything about them’ (Elias, 1939/1994: 445). This suggests how class and class difference become part of a person from the earliest age, long before any consciousness of social distinctions; absorbed and felt before they can be thought.
Elias’ work is distinctively psychosocial, antedating the modern identification of this as an independent discipline. He sees an ‘indissoluble interrelationship’ between how individual personality and social structures evolve, and he argues against the dichotomisation implied by the concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘society’, seeing them instead as inseparable albeit different aspects of the same human beings.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisations of class allow us to see the many subjective, qualitative and quantitative micro-distinctions through which class is lived and perceived. His analysis of different forms of capital – economic, cultural, social and symbolic – underlines the complexities of class and inequality (Bourdieu, 1984).2 In positing cultural capital as on a different axis from economic capital, Bourdieu opened up an enormously fertile field for investigating the force and operation of distinctions and differentiations, often the bases for instant and subliminal apprehensions of class.
Classes exist for Bourdieu ‘not as something given but as something to be done’ (Bourdieu, 1994/1998: 12, original italics). Thus any kind of static psychology of class is eschewed, with the emphasis instead on the constitutive nature and processes of practices and dispositions, the makings of class. This has been central to much subsequent psychosocial work on class. Class is produced and lived within the positions occupied in social space and the structures of the distribution of different kinds of capital. The critique of any psychology of class with inherent attributes, and the emphasis instead on its processes and practices, is a dynamic model of how people become and live as classed subjects. This has a synergy with psychoanalytic dynamic processes and mechanisms, as Bourdieu suggested in his later work. Relationality is also central to Bourdieu’s work: the sense of one’s place in social space always involves a sense of the place of others.
Bourdieu’s analyses of the multitudinous processes of distinction that are part of daily social being, his ideas of relationality, dispositions and habitus have psychoanalytic resonances, as will be seen further on. His work has illuminated a huge body of empirical research on the lived experiences of class, what Skeggs (1997) calls the ‘mundane, reiterative everyday experiences’ that are formative of and also a product of structural inequalities.
Despite the generally acknowledged decline in self-identification as belonging to a class (itself a topic of research and theorising), many sociologists argue that class differentiations based on multiple criteria rather than clear-cut boundaries are still a vital aspect of how people live, intensified by changing inequalities. Savage expresses this as class being construed more as difference than as belonging (Savage, 2000). Tyler (2015) describes a process of ‘class decomposition’ in the transition to present-day forms of finance capitalism, in which fewer people recognise themselves as part of a class, aided by the increasing individualisation of poverty, the fragmentation and casualisation of work and neo-liberal ideologies and practices that blame the poor for their circumstances and celebrate the rich. Inequality, however, as Tyler argues, remains a matter of class. Issues of life chances, opportunity and achievement, wealth and poverty, cultural positionings and taste, social networks and marginality and media representations all remain of intense concern, often sites of struggle, resentments and antagonisms.
For Skeggs also, class is an identifier of inequality. She is emphatic about its ubiquity, its fundamental marker being exclusion, such that inequalities proliferate and pervade all aspects of life. This leads to the emotional politics of class, ‘fuelled by insecurity, doubt, indignation and resentment (but also lived with pleasure and irreverence)’ (Skeggs, 1997: 162). Charlesworth’s phenomenological study of working-class life in the wake of deindustrialisation underlines the persistence and damage of social exclusion, poverty and cultural constraints: ‘From conditions of scarcity… their position of exclusion comes to dominate their experience because it is the fundamental condition in relation to which their experience is constituted’ (Charlesworth, 2000: 172).
Recently Skeggs and Tyler have advanced critiques of the whole enterprise of class stratification and classification, which are very relevant to understanding the deep, ambivalent and often unspoken emotions that class can arouse. Classifications necessarily contain presuppositions and evaluations, however much they purport to be describing an objective reality, and in doing so enact forms of power. ‘Class is a historic representation of a categorisation of a person’s value and this was always a moral classification’ (Skeggs, 2015: 214). The kinds of attributes used to assign people to classes are always symbolically valued in some way; hence the terms ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ or the hierarchical numbers of official classifications. In this sense classification is a performative act, creating what it purports to describe. Class names reveal ‘structural conditions of inequality’ (Tyler, 2015: 496).
These considerations about classification underline the powerful moral and emotional impacts of these acts of categorisation and naming, however much, especially within any discipline such as psychoanalysis that priori-tises the uniqueness of the individual, these may be resisted. They fuel the widely reported ambivalence and ambiguities in any talk about class, as will be seen later.
Language is key in psychoanalysis, and one starting point is with research on how people talk about class. Andrew Sayer (2005), in his study of everyday speech and feeling about class, draws on empirical sociological work and on moral philosophy. He argues that most sociology has sidelined the normative and moral significance of class, focusing only on people as the occupiers of social positions, or as the bearers and performers of class practices, rather than on their values, dispositions, emotions and beliefs. Rather, it is moral values such as social justice and respect for persons which render class such a contested and troubling subject. As I found in my research (see Chapter 6), questions about what class people belong to often evoke unease and evasion, hesitant and complex responses. Sayer claims this is because ‘class’, far from being merely a descriptive term, is understood as one of injustice and moral evaluation, a highly charged issue. Any psychoanalytic approach has to take this moral aspect into account, which it often does not easily do.
Sayer seeks, with many examples, to capture the complexity of ways in which people talk, feel and respond to class. ‘Ordinary’ class concerns always involve evaluations of some kind, infused with feeling, whether acknowledged or not, and this should not be separated from the more cognitive aspects of class experience and knowledge:
Feelings about class are suffused with tensions: between ethical evaluation and economic evaluation; between status and worth; between judgements of moral luck in terms of deserved and undeserved advantages and disadvantages; between acknowledgement of injustice and defensive rationalisation and evasion; and between recognising class as ethically problematic yet being able to do little or nothing about it.
(Sayer, 2005: 225)
Sayer’s emphasis on the ‘intractability’ of the tensions surrounding class suggests how deeply class permeates us intra-psychically and interpersonally. Other work illustrates further this fraught terrain, something which it might be thought psychoanalysis is well equipped to explore.
The conflicting emotions, the ambivalences and ambiguities aroused by and about class are evident in many studies. As a contemporary survey suggests: ‘What people say about class on the one hand, and how they actually enact and perform class in their everyday lives on the other, are very different’ (Savage et al., 2015: 388).
Skeggs’ (1997) detailed ethnographic work with a large sample of working-class women is invaluable in portraying the complexity of their emotions linked to class. She provides detailed economic, occupational and educational data pertaining to the women but also remarks how it is easier to define them by what they were not, that is, not middle class. Class was experienced as exclusion: from access to most forms of economic, cultural and social capital, and with very few legitimating forms of recognition. They were, Skeggs says, never in a position to construct distance from necessity, something which is central to Bourdieu’s understanding of class distinctions, and also suggested by Layton in her psychoanalytic work on class (see Chapter 8).
Skeggs found that many of these women did not wish to identify themselves as working class, and refused this categorisation by dissimulating and disidentifying. She argues that this dissimulation is itself part of class, a form of resistance or refusal, something akin to disavowal. For many of the women, ‘working class’ was a pejorative category, one implying poverty, lack of respectability, something dangerous, dirty and valueless. Skeggs attributes this to the historic and contemporary representations of class, and also to experiences of being negatively positioned by others. She portrays the huge efforts many women made to distance themselves from this label, in their concerns with respectability, appearance, domestic styles and self-improvement. Pride in being working class was relatively unusual, and many wished to pass as middle class, although with uncertainty and anxiety as to whether that was possible:
They know that there are certain ways of being and doing to which they do not have access. This generates resentment. There was not a clear split between those who wanted to pass and those who resented. The two affects were held together.
(Skeggs, 1997: 92)
Holding together such different affects is part of the ambivalence and dividedness in the emotions surrounding class, and something that psychoanalysis can recognise with its understanding of divided and conflicted subjects. It underlines how economic class position and class identity are not necessarily the same, and makes the latter more complex and ambivalent than often assumed.
Other sociologists have observed how questions about class provoke considerable unease. In a study of spontaneous talk about class, Devine (2004) found that those from middle-class or lower middle-class backgrounds rarely used the category, whereas those from working-class backgrounds often did. With the latter, the discussion included issues of status, of inferiority and superiority, and judgements of worth. Considerable feeling was expressed with an acute awareness of the moral judgements that might be made of working-class people. Resentment and anger about the adverse effect of class on their lives, and the apparent ease of achievements for those from middle-class backgrounds were also voiced: ‘Arguably, an undercurrent of class conflict, of struggles over moral worth, became apparent. This underlying tension might explain why the British middle class do not articulate, and indeed go to some length to distance themselves from the class label’ (Devine, 2004: 208). Such middle-class distancing, with its unspoken feelings, can be recognised as operating within the psychoanalytic field.
Sayer suggests that the widely reported unease, embarrassment, evasion and ambivalence associated with talking about class is not a denial of class but rather an implicit acknowledgement of unjustified structural inequalities. This complexity, and the corresponding potential for anxiety of many kinds, is the kind of ground in which psychoanalysis has something to offer. It also suggests that speaking about class within a clinical context may be fraught with these kinds of emotions, anxieties and disavowals, for all concerned.
I have had many opportunities to speak with groups of psychotherapists, counsellors and trainees about class. The discussions often have a sense of pervasive anxiety, which can be hard to identify. They become both charged and inhibited. Some participants express fears of giving offence, others of exposing what they consider shameful aspects of their backgrounds or of being looked down upon. Those who see themselves as more privileged sometimes retreat into a kind of defensive guilt, or assert that class is not important, it is just individuals that matter. This defensive use of liberal individualism can, as Cooper describes in the painful processes of addressing institutional racism in therapy organisations, flatten or deaden the particularity of any articulation of such experiences (Cooper, 2010). In one workshop,3 with trainees on a course where understanding difference and diversity was a prominent feature, nonetheless some said talking about class felt like a taboo, suggesting the unspoken fears of what might be unleashed. Others felt there was not a language with which therapists could think about class. This conceptual vacuum suggests the untheorised psychosocial conjuncture that class within the psychoanalytic field occupies, the gap or aporia that opens up and that stymies people’s thoughts. It is this gap that Chapter 3 identified as part of how class got left out of psychoanalytic discourse.
Many authors from within different theoretical traditions have underlined the salience of evaluative judgements, made or imputed, as a part of everyday consciousness of living with class. Not only are these damaging and wounding in many cases, but also insidiously internalised.
In their pioneering, now classic, work, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Sennett and Cobb (1972) view class as a matter of daily existence rather than as an abstraction. They explore with in-depth interviews the ‘complexity of working-class consciousness’. Many of their interviewees felt they were judged and not respected as equals by middle-class people. They attributed a kind of superiority to the latter, as being more ‘internally developed’, with the power to judge but also as having more chance to escape from the force of circumstances, and to develop the ‘defences’ of personal control that education can bring. The authors emphasise how personally their interviewees took their class position, comparing and judging themselves as inadequate, but also resenting these emotions. This is ‘the burden of class’, an existential wound, in which class denies ‘any feeling of secure dignity in the eyes of others, and of themselves’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: 170). They describe how ‘social differences… appear as questions of character, of moral resolve, will and competence’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: 256). They attribute this to the flaw in a putatively egalitarian meritocracy, in which social success or failure can only be seen as the result of individual differences in ability and effort, thereby becoming one of the insidious ways in which class is internalised as personal failure.
Sennett and Cobb show how class creates a dividedness within the person; a split between the conscious understanding of the injustice of unequal opportunities and an ‘inner conviction’ of personal responsibility, self-blame and shame. Dividedness, disavowal and split or double consciousness are related themes that surface frequently in psychosocial understandings of how people live with and within social divisions. Disavowal, through the splitting it involves, can lead to a diminution in effectiveness and resilience. It can also render people especially vulnerable to the actual or perceived judgements of ‘superior’ others, to the middle-class gaze. Skeggs also emphasises the prevalence of judgements that the working-class women in her study felt exposed to. Class ‘is still a hidden injury’ (Skeggs, 1997: 95). It ‘becomes internalized as an intimate form of subjectivity, experienced as knowledge of always not being “right”’ (p. 90). Her interviewees continually doubt their own judgements.
Skeggs sees this confluence of emotion as presupposing a real and/or imagined superior other. She illustrates with extensive quotations the many ways and areas of life in which her participants felt judged, and/or judged themselves, under surveillance, constantly uneasy and convinced they could be found wanting or undesirable; and sometimes resisting this negative evaluation of themselves. ‘The working-class are constantly aware of the dialogic other who have the power to make judgements about them’ (Skeggs, 1997: 167, my italics). The middle-class gaze, she says, takes on a life of its own, not needing to be enacted to be felt. This echoes Bourdieu’s description of symbolic violence: ‘(D)ominated lifestyles are almost always perceived, even by those who live them, from the destructive and reductive point of view of the dominant aesthetic’ (Bourdieu, 1994/1998: 9). Psychoanalytic notions of identification with the aggressor underline how such a position can be held unconsciously. Skeggs points out how contemporary pathologising representations, especially in the media, exacerbate these processes, intensified in the current era of impoverishing and demonising a section of the working class, as Tyler (2008) shows.
It is significant that Skeggs uses concepts of internal dividedness – the dialogic other, disidentification – to capture part of how class is lived. This is despite her Foucauldian sociological framework, with its emphasis on how subjectivity is produced, which eschews notions of interiority or depth. To my ears, her depiction of such dividedness demands the use of psychoanalytic concepts.
Diane Reay, in her extensive psychosocial research on class and education, does make use of the notions of interiority, internalisation and depth. She aims to establish the psychic economy of class as a legitimate concern for social science. She argues, in ‘Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class’, that despite contemporary ideologies of classlessness,4 class is ‘still deeply etched into our psyches’ (Reay, 2005: 911). Elsewhere she emphasises how ‘living class in a deeply unequal society like the UK is a powerfully defended and defensive experience’ (Reay, 2015: 21). Throughout her research she studies both working-class and middle-class subjects, something relatively unusual and especially important for present purposes. She describes the ‘psychic landscape of class’ as lived both consciously and unconsciously: ‘My contention is that beneath socio-economic categorisation, underneath class practices, lies a psychic economy of class that has been largely invisible in academic accounts and commonsense understandings’ (Reay, 2005: 912, my italics).
Arguing that sociology has falsely seen ‘psychic responses’ to class as only a matter of individual psychology, she comments on how much of the recent interest in the lived processes and relationships of class was pioneered by feminists, many themselves from working-class backgrounds. Feminism is intrinsically psychosocial, and thus in a good position to challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and binarisms, and forge new ways of thinking. Reay argues, as do other authors, that emotional and psychic responses to class and to inequalities are part of the makings of class, intrinsic to its formation and operation, not just add-ons to structural features. She understands the complex psychosocial dynamics of class to be essentially relational: these involve comparisons, affiliations, differentiations and judgements, and strike at the heart of how people may feel about themselves.
Reay shows, with many telling examples, how the working-class pupils in her study had by the age of ten already internalised negative judgements of themselves: ‘These girls, in the context of schooling, inhabit a psychic economy of class defined by fear, anxiety and unease where failure looms large and success is elusive; a place where they are seen and see themselves as literally “nothing”’ (Reay, 2005: 917). She describes how her extensive research was ‘permeated by the petty mundane humiliations and slights of social class.… Class recognitions, visceral aversions and feelings of inferiority and superiority are routine’ (Reay, 2005: 917). She summarises her powerful data as: ‘[C]lass is produced in a complex dynamic between classes with each class being the others’ “Other”’ (Reay, 2005: 923). Such a formulation lays the ground for the powerful projections and emotions that surround class difference, and emphasises the relationality of all class experience.
Judgements and comparisons depend upon perceptions of difference and the making of distinctions. Bourdieu’s emphasis on the ceaseless work of distinction is amplified further in his massive The Weight of the World (Bourdieu, 1999), in which many of the interviews read like clinical engagements, in bearing witness to the intensity, pain, and conflicted identifications that stem from lack of recognition and low social standing. Distinctions constantly proliferate, something Skeggs also remarked upon; the women in her study ‘were continually making comparisons between themselves and others, creating distances and establishing distinctions and tastes in the process’ (Skeggs, 1997: 82).
It is perhaps hard for anyone not subjected to such invasive forces to really acknowledge and want to know about how being working class can expose a person to harms and wounds of many kinds, to being the recipient of pejorative perceptions, disdainful judgements and discriminatory actions, let alone the economic inequalities and structural disadvantages. Just as it can take a huge effort of will and imagination for a white person to take on board the impact of being subject to racism, the daily experiences of micro-aggressions and denials as well as the larger ones, so too with class. An example of this is that I, in my middle-class bubble, had not expected and indeed was shocked by how some of the therapists in my study from working-class backgrounds had experienced being the target of class contempt (see Chapter 7). The academic research that I cite in this chapter, as well as other experiences, can open our eyes, as it did mine, to the far-reaching impacts of class that we might be ignorant of or rather not know about, but which have the potential to profoundly hurt and constrain people, and in which we are structurally complicit.
Reay’s work on the middle classes also illustrates the often judgemental aspects of such identities. Empirical sociological interest in the middle classes is relatively recent and, compared to the volumes of work on the working classes, uncommon. However, for any understanding of how class works in and through persons, as a whole figuration of a social field, and how dominant values operate alongside economic inequalities, it is essential to address the more privileged classes and their subjectivities. As inequality widens and intensifies, studies of elites are becoming more common (e.g. Savage et al., 2015). For any discourse such as psychoanalysis that has largely been the province of the middle and upper classes, the unspoken, hidden and taken-for-granted nature of its class mores and practices means it is especially important to address the psychic embodiments and effects of such hegemony.
Elias suggests that foresight, rationality and affect control are part of the upper and middle classes’ means of sustaining distinction, status and domination in the modern period. This has required a vigilance and cultivation of super-egoic functions. Reay et al. (2013) render this as middle-class privilege working in and through individual qualities under individual control. Foucauldian thought also emphasises the increasing historical use of psychological processes as a means or technology of domination. In Class, Self, Culture Skeggs (2004) provides an historicised account of how different notions of the self and of the individual inflect differently with class. She describes how excess, vulgarity and stasis are projected onto the working classes, with the middle classes ‘owning’ responsibility, respectability and reflexivity. Through such processes and discourses, differently classed selves and classed judgements are produced and sustained. She depicts how ‘property and propriety have long been central to the middle-class self, how ownership, exchange and morality are always intimately connected’ (Skeggs, 2004: 175). Interestingly for any psychoanalytic approach, she argues that it is methods of telling and knowing that make the self, and also make class difference. ‘The concept of the self (in particular the reflexive, knowing, inner self) is a specific historical production, enabled through particular methodologies’ (Skeggs, 2004: 119). As argued in Chapter 4, this can lead to different class-related attitudes to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, including working-class wariness.
Much of the empirical work involving the middle classes has taken place in relation to education, a crucial site of class division and confrontation, a key to middle-class cultural and economic reproduction, as well as a source of upward mobility. In Growing Up Girl, Walkerdine et al. (2001) put forward a framework that combines both Foucauldian and psychoanalytic approaches for understanding the different educational trajectories and outcomes of working-class and middle-class girls. Their study was in-depth and longitudinal, and notably draws on psychoanalytic methodologies and concepts in the analysis of their data.
The educational trajectories of the two groups were hugely divergent, with even the most successful working-class girls doing much less well than the least successful middle-class ones. The authors argue that the production of educational success is intimately tied up with emotional processes, with the ability to turn emotionality into rational discourse as one of the factors in middle-class achievement. They see child-rearing practices that encourage ‘rational autonomy and nice feelings [as] central to the bourgeois order’ (Walkerdine et al. 2001: 119), an echo of Elias’ emphasis on upper- and middle-class self-restraint. Hanley (2016) emphasises how disconcerted she initially was by the seeming niceness and rationality with which the middle-class people she met presented themselves: ‘Darkness is managed or hidden’ (Hanley, 2016: 115).
Such emotional constraints are central also to the middle-class imperative to maintain and reproduce their status. Walkerdine et al. note especially the powerful fear of failure in middle-class families, with endemic and intense feelings among the girls of not being good enough, despite very high performance. Any ‘failure’ was felt to be an individualised one, rather than leading to any reflection on the values and demands of their cultural locations, and simply required harder and harder work: ‘It is difficult to overstate the way in which very high academic performance is routinely understood as ordinary and simply the level that is expected’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001: 179).
The authors describe the role of their own working-class backgrounds in ‘making strange’ the apparent ‘impenetrable normality’ of such success, and observe their sense of contradiction and confusion in interviews with middle-class girls. They ‘were presented with apparently seamless success but at the same time deep anxieties surfaced, anxieties that increasingly seemed to underpin that very performance, supporting our view of success as part of a defensive organisation’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001: 167). Whereas the working-class girls who did well seemed able to take pride in their performance, the middle-class ones found it harder to do so, or to consolidate a sense of achievement. The authors suggest that this pursuit of excellence covers over a terror of its opposite – of falling off the edge of rationality and middle-class status, into an abyss of unreason, uncertainty and their own suppressed desires, often projected into and typified by feared working-class others. As clinicians we often see the most extreme manifestations of this in some of the symptoms of anorexia, a condition infused with a relentless drive for perfection and one which has an unusually large proportion of middle-class, high-achieving young women, compared to other psychiatric conditions, although it is by no means exclusive to them.
Reay et al. (2013) argue that middle-class responses to inequality have not been much researched, and that it is important to unpick the ‘unacknowledged normality’ of middle-classness and whiteness. They use the complexities thrown up by parental choice of urban comprehensive schooling as a tool to do so. Their focus is the section of the white middle class they characterise as having egalitarian values, who attempt to engage with difference and inequality in choosing to send their children to urban comprehensives. These are contrasted to those with more exclusivist orientations and a ‘fortress mentality’.
The authors describe the combinations of guilt, defensiveness, empathy and conciliation in these ‘egalitarian’ parents’ attitudes. Despite their ‘desirous openness’, anxieties of all kinds proliferated, with a ‘complex mixture of pity, sympathy, disgust and fear towards the working-class “other”’ (Reay et al. 2013: 105). They often objectified the latter in pejorative ways, manifesting the wish to maintain distance, despite being committed to the value of engaging with difference. Fears of contamination also abounded. The authors saw their subjects as struggling to manage the tension between this ‘desirous openness’ to proximate different others and their ‘subliminal elitism’, that led them to assert and defend their ‘distinction’ through the claiming of some kind of superiority, usually ‘brightness’. They were ‘attempting to do class, distinction work under conditions of anxious proximity’ (Reay et al. 2013: 116), thus illustrating the middle-class use of class as a defence.
Reay et al. describe these middle-class subjects as also divided: looking defensively inwards and protecting ‘their investments of capital and their children’s futures, but also looking outwards, towards otherness, tentatively recognising a value in difference that is more than just tokenistic’ (Reay et al. 2013: 165). The authors invoke psychoanalytic concepts in naming this as disavowal: ‘What is seen to be shameful, in this case any responsibilities for very visible inequalities, is split off and projected into subordinate groups’ (p. 117).
Their study lays out, in many evocative examples, the internal conflict that the social order creates, illustrating how class can divide (some) more privileged people internally, albeit differently so from those less well off. It is a depiction that some readers may identify with – certainly I did – and which is also relevant to any engagement with working-class circumstances from a middle-class position, as in the inclusive projects of Chapter 4, or work in the public sector. What it brings out is that alongside the values of democracy, fairness and openness that Reay et al. attribute to their subjects, there is often an undercurrent of something more fearful and hostile. This, as the authors point out, is something that psychoanalysis is well placed to understand. From within psychoanalysis Layton (2011) also described how the ‘tolerant middle’ can conceal a hierarchy of values, privileging self-control and devaluing strong displays of emotion, in the mental health field as elsewhere, such that therapists may ‘unconsciously perform’ such cultural values. Just as racist feelings or homophobia may exist alongside a conscious commitment to equality or non-discrimination, so too class contempt, conscious or otherwise, may and does coexist with other attitudes and beliefs.
Reay, Crozier and James were surprised how often their subjects saw working-class circumstances as a cultural rather than an economic and structural issue, an effect perhaps of the insidiousness with which structural disadvantage readily comes to be seen primarily as a matter of personal responsibility and choice, something which current ideologies reinforce. It is in this way, Steph Lawler (2005) argues that taste – the ‘other’ to disgust – can come to displace inequality as an explanatory schema, an aspect of how the middle classes can appropriate being ‘cultured’ for themselves. The denial or sidelining of economic factors in favour of cultural distinctions is something that the psychoanalytic field is likely to be prone to, especially given the legacy of the exclusion of working-class people from psychoanalysis on grounds of their supposed lack of verbal ability and educational credentials – that is, their cultural capital.
The more hostile and fearful aspects of class distinction, such as mockery and disgust, have, as Tyler argues, become increasingly acceptable through various media representations, whereas other forms of overt hatred have become less legitimate or even illegal (Tyler, 2008). Owen Jones’s book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class is replete with such examples (Jones, 2011). Lawler argues that such far-reaching negative and stigmatising representations produce working-class people as other and abhorrent to middle-class existences. By doing so they constitute middle-classed identities as not being the ‘repellent and disgusting “other”’ (Lawler, 2005: 431). Lawler sees class-related disgust as a powerful indicator of the interface between the social and the personal, a sign that some norm has been violated, and often felt immediately in the body: ‘It indicates how the drawing of distinctions is laden with negative affect’ (Lawler, 2005: 438). To this I would add that identities based on disavowal and repudiation of denigrated others are especially likely to be insecure, readily threatened and thus in need of over-assertion. Lawler argues that the forms of distinction and contempt that she describes are not just contingently related to class but rather are ‘at the very heart of an identity and a subjectivity that is classed’ and are ‘unconsciously incorporated… an effect of unequal social and cultural processes’ (Lawler, 2005: 440). Her work suggests the need for further psychoanalytic exploration of such class dynamics, in understanding how those excluded by structural forces can come to be so denigrated.
Although many people may consciously and genuinely eschew such attitudes, we cannot be complacent as to their possible existence within us in ways we might not wish to know about. The concepts of institutional racism and everyday sexism have taught us much about the manifold ways, unconscious as well as conscious, in which prejudice, hostility and hatred may be embodied socially and personally. There are many subtle, covert and unconscious ways of enacting class distinction, and as psychoanalytic therapists we have the tools to acknowledge and address these, if we so wished. The denial or disavowal of structural and economic factors, and the separation of the psychological and cultural from these, exemplify the ‘unlinking’ that Layton suggests runs through much contemporary discourse.
Reay (2015) argues that Bourdieu often fails to engage fully enough with the affective aspects of class, despite in many ways laying the ground for doing so. However he increasingly if ambivalently incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into his writings, recognising them as intrinsic to his theories, as Steinmetz (2006) depicts.
In Distinction Bourdieu invokes the notion of a ‘social psychoanalysis’, arguing that taste, ‘one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production’, is where sociology is especially akin to a social psychoanalysis (Bourdieu, 1984: 11). He argues that: ‘[T]he social relations objectified in familiar objects, their luxury or poverty… impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered garish linoleum’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 77). Bourdieu continues: ‘Experiences of this sort would be the material of a social psychoanalysis which set out to grasp the logic whereby the social relations objectified in things and also, of course, in people are insensibly internalised, taking their place in a lasting relation to the world and to others’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 77, my italics). What is of particular note here is Bourdieu’s positing of the embodied, non-conscious internalisation of social relations (here class relations) as these manifest themselves in cultural practices and in relation to others. These particular passages have been made much use of in Layton’s incorporation of Bourdieu’s work into her clinical understandings of class (see Chapter 8). His notion of internalisation fits well with the schemas of relational and object-relations psychoanalysis.
Bourdieu criticises the more essentialist and ahistorical aspects of psychoanalysis in his critique of ‘substantialism’ but makes extensive use of psychoanalytic terminology at other points. Steinmetz (2006) cites many examples of Bourdieu’s use of concepts such as repression, denegation, identification, libido and defence, and yet also his ambivalence towards them. He argues that psychoanalysis could fill in some of the holes in Bourdieuian theory, especially as regards how disparate life experiences either become integrated or fail to be, in the formation of a biography or habitus; and also in how the ‘dominated’ often need the approval and recognition of the ‘dominant’. These are aspects that I also suggested earlier are of psychoanalytic relevance.
In later writings Bourdieu recommends that sociology and psychoanalysis, rather than being seen as alternatives, should unite their strengths, but he acknowledges that they would have to overcome their mutual suspicion, a highly recognisable description. The psychosocial work cited here does illustrate the creativity unleashed by attempting to do so. Bourdieu summarises the task of this disciplinary collaboration as understanding how:
[T]he social order collects, channels, reinforces or counteracts psychological processes depending on whether there is a homology, redundancy and reinforcement between the two systems, or to the contrary, contradiction and tension. It goes without saying that mental structures do not simply reflect social structures.
(Bourdieu, 1999: 512, my italics)
This passage is especially important in view of the tendency (see Chapter 8) of some contemporary psychoanalytic writers to read off mental structures from what they perceive of as social structures, as a direct reflection in all instances. Rather Bourdieu allows for a more differentiated relationship, one in which psychological processes have some degree of autonomy and complexity but interact with and are ultimately shaped by the conditions of the social world. Bourdieu thus leaves space for the autonomous operation of unconscious mental processes as well as asserting the primacy of social forces.
Reay suggests that it is through the conceptual lens of the habitus that psychoanalytic understandings of affect can be fused with sociological theorisations, allowing us to analyse what Bourdieu calls the genesis of ‘investments’ in a field of social relations. She argues that dynamic emotional processes may become ‘sedimented in certain habitus’, such that the learning ‘that comes through inhabiting pathologised spaces within the field often results in a predilection for shame, fear, anxiety or even righteous indignation, while the internalisation of social inequalities in the privileged can result in dispositions of superiority, entitlement, disdain but also a predilection for guilt, ambivalence and discomfort’ (Reay, 2015: 12).
Such a psychosocial extension of the concept of habitus gives, Reay argues, ‘a sense of how blurred the lines are between psychic processes and social processes’ (Reay, 2015: 13), an argument of particular relevance for the project of this book. Reay illustrates this with examples drawn from multiple interviews in the educational field over years, in which she draws on psychoanalytic concepts. In one example, she describes a working-class boy as caught between two different but compelling fields, that of white, working-class masculinities and that of educational achievement and neo-liberal imperatives of self-improvement. This is ‘an untenable space’ requiring an exhausting amount of psychic and interactive work, struggle and conflict, to ‘maintain his contradictory ways of being, his dual conception of self’ (Reay, 2015: 13). She regards this as an example of Bourdieu’s notion of divided habitus, something also eloquently described in other writings on social mobility (see Chapter 6). Reay describes the toll on this boy of trying to resolve these tensions, ‘the complex, at times contradictory interweavings of ambivalence, defensiveness and pride that make up his divided habitus’ (Reay, 2015: 14), which she links to the dilemmas facing many of the men in Sennett and Cobb’s study (described earlier). The French sociologist Didier Eribon vividly describes his sense of living in two ‘irreconcilable worlds’ which ‘co-exist in everything you are’ (Eribon, 2013: 18), producing a ‘level of tension that was hard to bear, and above all, highly destabilizing’ (Eribon, 2013: 167).
Reay also elaborates the divided habitus of the middle-class parents she studied: ‘Dealing with the discomforts of privilege in disadvantaged contexts all too often results in varying degrees of repression, sublimation, dis-identification, splitting and projection’ (Reay, 2015: 19). Here again we can see how psychoanalytic concepts can illuminate the ways in which class becomes the site of internal dividedness and conflict, albeit very differently so for those positioned differently in social space. Reay invokes the notion of a psychic economy of social class: ‘feelings of ambivalence, inferiority and superiority, visceral aversions, recognition and abjection… internalised and played out in practices’ (Reay, 2015: 21). Reay’s concept of a psychic economy of class, drawing on psychoanalytic processes, places the complexity of living and experiencing of class firmly within the purview of psychoanalytic theory, as does the other work reviewed here, in different ways.
The considerations of this chapter suggest how fertile, as well as how necessary for any interest in class, the collaboration of sociology and psychoanalysis can be. I have described some of the ways in which a psychoanalysis interested in class could draw on relevant sociological and psychosocial work. This provides useful language, frameworks and concepts with which to understand how people inhabit their particular class locations, including unconsciously, as well as how they are impinged upon by social forces. This goes some way to filling the conceptual gap I have shown psychoanalysis has in relation to class. It brings out how class is always relational, involving distinction and difference as well as identification. It also shows how class is more than that: in the moralism and evaluations of its classifications, that have such powerful emotional impacts; and in its far-reaching structural, material, social and cultural inequalities. Some of the research also shows how sociological and psychosocial work can be enhanced and illuminated by drawing on psychoanalytic concepts. The dense emotionality of class; the many forms of pain, anxiety and conflict involved in living class; the resulting projections and disavowals; these all speak to the kind of divided subject that is the province of psychoanalysis. The following chapters exemplify much of this through the experiences of therapists within the psychoanalytic field and contemporary clinical writings.
1 At Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2004 to 2008, where Victor Seidler and I ran interdisciplinary seminars on psychosocial topics.
2 To give approximate definitions: economic capital includes income, wealth, financial assets and inheritances. Cultural capital includes dispositions of mind and body, as in taste, style, etiquette, etc.; cultural goods; and educational and professional qualifications. Social capital includes resources built on networks of connection and affiliation. Symbolic capital is the form these different types of capital take when recognised and legitimated in the operations of power. All are context-specific.
3 Laurence Spurling and I conducted this in May 2016.
4 Now perhaps less prevalent, with the politics of austerity imposed on working-class lives and incomes.
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