Here I consider the class-related experiences and concerns of therapists from diverse backgrounds, as subjects within the profession, drawing on my own research and other writings. These often painful and conflicted experiences suggest much about the implicit structure and hierarchies of the field, in the various enactments and denials of class that abound. Several recent surveys confirm what is informally known, that the psychoanalytic profession lacks diversity as regards ethnicity and class (Cooper, 2010; Axelrod, 2012; Ciclitira and Foster, 2012). This chapter fleshes out in first-person accounts the various understandings of class that therapists have in their backgrounds and in their adult circumstances. The vicissitudes of social mobility are evident in the complex trajectories of those from working-class backgrounds, which I link to other writings on the psychic demands and costs of class transition. Social mobility presents a particular conjuncture of the social and the psychic and illustrates how the divisions of the social world are lived out personally, how class becomes embodied and has its enduring effects.
In a small research project (Ryan, 2006/2013) I interviewed thirteen experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapists. These were psychoanalytically informed interviews in the questions I asked and in the abilities of the subjects to articulate their thoughts and experiences within such a framework. The main focus of these interviews was their clinical work with differently classed patients (the topic of Chapter 7), but I prefaced this with biographical questions about the therapists’ own class backgrounds, current class status and also their experiences of class within their trainings, their own analysis and current professional discourses. They worked in a variety of public sector, voluntary and private locations. According to their own definitions, there were six from working-class, two from lower middle-class and five from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds. Other details can be found in Ryan (2006/2013). Here the subjects are referred to by alphabetised initials.
Many of the interviews generated intense, complex and painful feelings, for both the interviewees and myself. A few were more distanced. I was left with a sense of how much there is to articulate that is more often left undiscussed and unprocessed, and what a charged yet elusive subject this is. Many expressed great relief and interest in being able to talk about class within a psychoanalytic framework, compared to their previous experiences of lack of discussion.1
This sense of a loaded absence is corroborated by other psychoanalysts attempting to address class. Thus Stephen Botticelli suggests: ‘At the mention of class, all progressive heads reverently bow – yet within psychoanalysis, few can think of anything to say about it’ (Botticelli, 2007: 121). Lee Whitman-Raymond suggests that one factor is ‘the unbearability of facing the pain that inheres in many discussions of class’ (Whitman-Raymond, 2009: 428). Elisabeth Corpt, in an extended discussion of her journey through the psychoanalytic field, ‘Peasant in the Analyst’s Chair’, asks why, despite her complex feelings about her class origins, she never felt able to raise the subject in her training and first analysis (Corpt, 2013). She suggests that the psychoanalytic institutional context in which she and her analyst were embedded relegated class concerns to the superficial and the extra-analytic. These observations are amplified by what follows, in which I present illustrative selections from Ryan (2006/2013), as well as previously unpublished material.
The hybridity and heterogeneity of class ascriptions were evident in the replies of therapists from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds, as regards class of origin. One, A, said: ‘Culturally and educationally working-class, occupationally lower middle-class.’ H defined her family as: ‘Lower middle-class… well, neither of my parents had an education so from that point of view they were working class.’ Some also referred to housing and location. F said: ‘You knew where you were in the pecking order… there was them up there and us down here’, reflecting how the divisions of social space ‘really and symbolically’ are translated into physical space (Bourdieu, 2000: 134). The therapists from middle-class backgrounds mostly expressed less complexity and hybridity.
Questions about present-day class status produced complex, hesitant and ambivalent responses from those from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. Most saw themselves as middle class to some extent but qualified or resisted this in different ways. A said: ‘It can’t be escaped, I’m reluctant, resist this, feels like being invisible, it’s a shame to lose where you come from.’ C replied: ‘That’s a difficult one, isn’t it?… I feel kind of split… divided more than split.… I have very middle-class interests, not entirely, and I have working-class interests, certain attitudes.’ E said: ‘I suppose I would still say I was working class.… I mean that it’s in me, but I recognise that I’m obviously middle class in my aspirations and that I’m educated and in my socioeconomic status I’m middle class. I’m influenced by my roots and allegiances that are working class, or identifications and triggers that I’m working class.’ D thought the definition of class in her Mediterranean country was more specifically related to occupation and wealth only, whereas class in the UK ‘implies a set of beliefs and values’ which she saw as amounting to an internalised identity.
Such excerpts illustrate the understanding, born of personal experiences, that class as it is lived is not only an economically or occupationally defined entity, but also is a matter of interpersonal perceptions, identifications, lifestyles, values and feelings, that it constructs a person at the deepest level, whatever life changes in social status may be made. One challenge for psychoanalysis is to understand how such constructions relate to psychoanalytic models of the mind, for example how and when aspects of class have their impact developmentally, and how it becomes part of psychic structure.
The therapists from middle-class backgrounds gave briefer and less ambivalent descriptions of their present status, with one exception. P, originally from an ex-colonial country, defined himself as middle class on grounds of education and occupation, but added: ‘I suppose sort of middle, I don’t know what it means.’ He felt his particular background and ethnic status ‘adds to the complexity of not knowing where to place oneself’. The mainly untroubled self-ascriptions by those from white, middle-class backgrounds reflects the taken-for-granted and dominant nature of such status within professional cultures, and the greater degree of continuity of this with their family origins.
The sense that class constructs something enduring ‘in’ a person, as E said, despite huge changes is important from a psychoanalytic point of view, as to the persistence and formative nature of early experience. Studies of upward social mobility amply corroborate the ways in which early class formations may persist. This has been expressed in many ways, as, for example, ‘the marks of earlier class may still remain’ (Raymond, 1999: 128), or as ‘class is in everything about the person’ (Walkerdine et al. 2001: 39). This suggests that social divisions and inequalities are so great and so fraught, and construct the self and its allegiances so fundamentally, that earlier class experiences will remain as significant parts of a person, whatever the change in circumstance. As well, upward mobility is unlikely to bring with it the inheritance of wealth that better-off classes may have.
In response to questions about early awareness of class difference, much emotionally significant material emerged, often of a stark nature. E said: ‘I had a real sense of the haves and have-nots, I definitely belonged to the have-nots.… So I could compare myself… I could see the differences about having.… Some people lived in big houses.… We lived in a perfectly fine house, but it was very cold, and only some parts of the house were furnished, because there was not enough money.… I don’t know where I had seen stair carpets but I had a sense the right and proper thing was a stair carpet… the right and proper thing we didn’t have, we had lino.’ Her comparisons of the furnishings in her house with other houses, and the coldness in her house, recalls Bourdieu’s use (quoted in Chapter 5, p. 97) of the contrast between lino and stair carpet as an illustration of the way class becomes objectified in material objects and impresses itself unconsciously through bodily experiences. E described her parents as being good providers, yet their lesser economic status was a powerful factor in her relationship with them, influencing ‘her entire life’.
F also described the hierarchical layout of her village: ‘The demarcation was very very marked… we were just different… and it felt like, you knew you were inferior… there was a lot of deference by our parents to people at the top of the village.’ C described an early sense of shame at the poverty of his home and his anger at seeing his mother’s meekness and humility in the face of the arrogance of the landowner.
Awareness of class difference in educational establishments was frequently mentioned. H said she became aware of class ‘without knowing the word’ when she went to grammar school. Visiting friends’ houses: ‘I would see and feel a difference… lots of books, we didn’t have anything like that in our house… it affected me quite deeply, I think, some sense of inferiority… why don’t we have these things?’ This left her with a sense ‘of something missing’. Class permeated her relationships with others. She started to feel uncomfortable going to school, and inadequate visiting friends’ ‘very posh’ families. These friendships ‘tended not to go anywhere… either I or they didn’t pursue it… quite unconsciously at the time I sought out people who were from more ordinary backgrounds’. This is eloquent testimony to the difficulty of forging close personal relationships in the face of social inequalities. Corpt (2013) also recounts the failure of an early cross-class friendship, in the face of huge differences in domestic milieu.2
The middle-class therapists mainly described early awareness of class in terms of comparisons with others. K said: ‘Very early… it was clear to me that my father’s work and our home were very different from other people’s whose homes I went into, who lived in terraced cottages and came back dirty from work.… I knew that sort of thing without it ever being said.’ Asked what she felt about this, K commented: ‘I don’t think it made any difference to me.… I used to play with working-class children and I used to go to their houses all the time.’ Another described a big difference between his grandparents’ houses – one a terraced council house and the other a big detached house – but did not recall any talk, sense of conflict or difficulty about these differences.
Other middle-class and upper middle-class therapists were more troubled by their experiences. N said: ‘From very very early on I was aware of class difference.… My parents were major landowners. I quickly developed a sense of class privilege. In relation to other children… I felt both guilty and deeply envious. I wanted more than anything else to escape my own privilege and eat fish and chips out of newspaper.’ Asked what she felt this would relieve her of, she said: ‘Guilt and isolation and fear of hatred and dislike from others.… I was definitely teased for being rich, not exactly teased, I was marginalised.… I became very aware of scrutinising my language for evidence of class privilege.’ J, from a background where snobbery was always blatant and accepted, describes her early anxious concern for those less well off as ‘in me from the start, and a big problem to me’. She didn’t want them to ‘think about me in a more privileged position… there was a sort of reversal process that went on’. She had subsequently always wanted ‘to make things better for people who weren’t as fortunate as myself’. Others had called her ‘an inverted snob’.
These more anxious upper middle-class accounts also illustrate the enduring nature of early class experiences in creating a conflicted sense of self. Rather than a denial or repudiation of the working-class other (which might be found with different subjects), concerns for that other and/or anxieties aroused by them persist uncomfortably in the psyche, as the research described in Chapter 5 suggested. This resonates with Frances Maher’s (1999) attempts to understand what her upper-class background had bequeathed to her, both consciously and unconsciously. She describes persistent feelings of marginality and isolation from the issues of others, frequent embarrassment or silence about her class origins, and her attempt to solve this by becoming involved in feminism. J’s self-questioning echoes Maher’s description of how at school, while being told that because of their privilege they had to make a difference in the world, nonetheless this was within the framework of maintaining class superiority and exclusivity. Maher suggests her own political involvements covered over a ‘subconscious sense of cultural superiority’, a dynamic that Reay et al. (2013) also identified with their conflicted middle-class interviewees. It is not hard to imagine the degree of unease, hurt or anger that anyone subject to such enacted or unconscious superiority might feel.
From subsequent parts of the interviews it became apparent that guilt about privilege and fear of attack were still powerful emotions that could be aroused countertransferentially, limiting the clinical work of some of these therapists (see Chapter 7).
Class transitions illustrate some of what is involved in the psychic life of class and its enduring effects. The huge struggle and persistence needed against various barriers cannot be overestimated, nor the lifelong effects of lesser economic capital or inherited wealth.
The sense of dislocation attending social mobility, and the feelings of complexity, dividedness, isolation and multiple identities, has been richly described in other literature about class and culture (e.g. Hoggart, 1957/2009), in autobiography (e.g. Steedman, 1986; Kuhn, 1995; Eribon, 2013), in the accounts of women academics from working-class backgrounds (Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997) and in recent sociology. Bourdieu described himself as ‘torn by contradiction and internal division’ as a result of his huge upward mobility (Bourdieu, 2000: 16). Reay, in an incisive article on social mobility, describes how she has ‘spent the last 50 years trying to reconcile the working-class girl I was with the middle-class woman I have become’ (Reay, 2013: 673). Bourdieu describes this as a ‘habitus divided against itself… doomed to a double perception of the self, to successive allegiances and multiple identities’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 511). A recent empirical study suggests many, although not all, subjects found their upward mobility problematic, with some unable to fully adapt or acculturate and all having to reconstruct their sense of place within social space (Friedman, 2015).
Bourdieu (1999: 510) depicts many of his upwardly mobile interviewees as experiencing ‘success as failure’, and a betrayal of those who have nurtured them. He saw his own success as ‘a transgression and treachery’ (cited in Friedman, 2015: 2). Reay describes how, despite being appreciative of her ‘privilege’, it was difficult to avoid ‘a sense of treachery and overwhelming guilt’ (Reay, 2013: 673). She suggests that enduring ambivalence character-ises many upwardly mobile people. Combined with the often-reported lack of self-confidence, this makes, I suggest, the achievement of professional success even harder and can heighten vulnerability to (often unconscious) self-sabotage. By contrast, Eribon, who radically cut himself off from his background in order to ‘create’ himself, felt no guilt, but rather such intense shame that he would hide his family origins.
From within the psychoanalytic field, Dick Blackwell also foregrounds a sense of betrayal accompanying his class mobility. He criticises how upward mobility is seen only positively so that its difficulties and losses are not sufficiently recognised (Blackwell, 1998, 2002). This leaves no adequate space for mourning, and instead creates a confused longing for what had been lost, alongside the experiences of being uprooted and replanted, ‘with no original soil’, which I would render as a kind of melancholia. He comments on how there is no meaningful transitional space for these psychosocial issues to be addressed – something which it might be hoped therapy or training would provide. Depicting the discontinuity experienced in moving from a working-class coal mining community to being a New York psychoanalyst, Susan Bodnar remarks how she is haunted by her grandmother’s injunction to ‘remember where you come from’ (Bodnar, 2004).
The comments of my interviewees amplify much of this, and suggest how class of origin remains embodied as part of the psyche. Several evoked the experience they had of ‘living in two cultures at once’, and the complexities of identity that this involved. D remarked how upwardly mobile people often feel they do not belong, are ‘in between’, do not feel accepted or don’t deserve what they have: ‘(class) is something that is internalised and stays with people throughout their lives’.
F emphasised the isolation that can result: ‘I can move in and out of either class in different situations I suppose.… It’s always remained something I’m painfully aware of now that I’m seen as middle class, but I don’t have that middle-class background that would give me a sort of confidence with my peer group.’ The lasting impact of her early class experience had created feelings of shame that had been very hard to tackle, despite: ‘politically, emotionally and rationally I think everybody’s equal but there’s a sort of residue that goes right back to childhood, so it’s quite hard to get rid of… I can see when it’s operating, because I am aware of it, so I can challenge myself, but it’s still there.’ Reay also describes the vulnerability to a ‘resurgence of the humiliations and shames that populated a working-class past’ (Reay, 2013: 673). These comments bring out the enormous amount of psychic work that has to be continuously done, to counter the personal reverberations of the construction of some classes as superior and others as inferior, by those who have been positioned in the latter category. This is a fundamental aspect of how people are formed by class, as others have described (see Chapter 4). F expressed adherence to a principle of universal equality, while showing how very hard it is to make this a psychically operative notion, when emotionally and socially so much appears to contradict this.
Several other therapists also commented on a lasting lack of confidence that made negotiating the middle-class world of professional trainings especially hard. H said: ‘I resented my parents for not giving me more confidence because I felt that I was going off into this new world somehow at a disadvantage.’ Her lack of confidence was focused on differences in accent, and a recurrent feeling that she wouldn’t be accepted because she was not good enough, an aspect stimulated strongly countertransferentially in her clinical work (see Chapter 7, p. 120). She had had to battle with her resentment towards those who hadn’t had to fight so much to get to where they were – a recurrent theme.
B also emphasised what a personal transformation training required, and his concern as to whether he could ‘make that jump’. B’s articulation of this resonates with Bourdieu’s (1984: 251) description of upward mobility: ‘a “social promotion” experienced as an ontological promotion… a leap’. A, on going to university, felt in a minority ‘in another country… I felt shame, inadequacy, then anger’. The scale and extent of such differences are too often minimised or discounted.
These issues of confidence, intertwined with negotiating social relationships, and also speech and language, were mentioned by others. A referred to the sense that how someone speaks ‘absolutely defines you’, and said that part of his class mobility had involved ‘getting used to having a voice’. E said that she had felt ‘traumatised by class, my sense of low self-esteem, sense of embarrassment, feeling not as good as, not feeling that I had something to say… now I don’t feel so raw.’ She described a greater sense in the present of entitlement to speech, to place and status. She, like others, saw middle-class people as having confidence, of having a voice, a view, a sense of their place in the world, an inheritance, not having to make such efforts either financially or culturally.
What might the widely reported lack of confidence speak to psychoanalytically? It is as if the impressive educational and professional achievements, gained without the support and resources that middle-class individuals often have, cannot sufficiently counteract the earlier invasive impact of a class positioning felt as inferior. Such positioning is deeply internalised and constructs fundamental aspects of the sense of self. As Corpt says: ‘Early social class identifications persist’ (2013: 59). Psychoanalysis, if it is to extend its reach, needs to recognise the power and persistence of these early social identifications. Social mobility can also mean the ordinary separations of growing up are entwined with class issues. These social separations, infused with anger, dividedness, shame and guilt, may well complicate and make harder the necessary internal separations, as N later described for a working-class patient (see p. 125).
Class mobility exposed these interviewees to very great challenges as to their sense of self-worth, in contexts that can appear to invalidate good internalised aspects of the parents. It was as if they could not take their backgrounds – their old habitus – into these new environments in a sufficiently helpful way. Reay (2000: 159) describes the ‘concoction of working-class past and middle-class present’ as a confusing contradiction, emphasising how deeply social divisions are etched into our psyches. Psychoanalytically this could be seen as creating splits in the ego which may well weaken a person’s ability to deal with their present-day circumstances.
The force of class is such that the good, nurturing aspects of the interviewees’ parents, while undoubtedly important, often could not sufficiently withstand or protect the then child from the destructive impact of adverse social experiences and of the powerful constructions of themselves as inferior, constructions that the writings of the previous chapter addressed. Here there are probably very important differences between families, with class consciousness and ideology a significant factor. Reay identified her parents’ strongly politicised working-class consciousness as an important contribution to her persistence against many odds. In my research D’s very political father and her family’s oppositional values appeared to have given her some strength in not internalising class oppression, despite very hard financial circumstances. F described her family, low in the social hierarchy of her village, as not having the solidarity and strength of a working-class community that she saw her grandparents as having, and commented painfully on the defer-ential attitudes of her parents, as did C.
Some features of the institutional framework emerged very strongly, especially the absence of any discussion of class in professional trainings, and subsequently. All the working-class and lower middle-class interviewees and some of the middle-class ones felt that this absence was problematic. H said: ‘There was a sort of assumption that we were all the same.’ This assumption of universal class-blind similarity among individuals was a recurrent theme, progressive in many ways, but problematic in its non-recognition of material differences.3 P said that no aspects of ‘social reality’, including the socio-geographical locations and accoutrements of many consulting rooms, were addressed on his course, even in clinical presentations. The hermetic nature of the therapy milieu that this absence created was emphasised by N, having previously immersed herself in radical politics where she had been attacked for her class privilege: ‘It was an enormous relief going into the world of psychotherapy precisely because class wasn’t an issue… almost total denial of class factors. It was a relief but at the same time I felt inauthentic, concealing the fact that I had grown up with an acute awareness of class and its manifestations. It wasn’t directly pathologised, simply not addressed.’
Many added that even post-qualification there were few arenas in which class issues formed part of any professional discussion. The exceptions were those therapists who had worked at a feminist therapy centre, where class was a recurrent issue in their clinical discussions, as Orbach (2011) makes clear. The critical approach to established theory and practice that feminism engenders enables and requires it to embrace issues of ‘race’, culture and class, not as an add-on to the formation of the psyche but as an integral part of it.
This widespread silence about class constructs a very powerful institutional framework. It echoes, and is built on, the extrusion of class from the psychoanalytic canon, as Chapter 3 described. It is likely to have far-reaching effects on therapists’ abilities to think about and work productively with class-related issues with their patients, as well as on how they find themselves in relation to their own professional identities.
The financial demands of psychoanalytic trainings and the sacrifices entailed in completing them were frequently mentioned by those from working-class backgrounds. The strains of doing so alongside others who were much better off put considerable demands on their capacities to process rather than enact resentment and envy. Chapter 9 considers further aspects of money and political economy.
Many from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds emphasised the often difficult personal impact of the social milieux they encountered, and anxieties about being accepted. B said he had had to learn the codes of this milieu, and ‘was fearful of overstepping certain boundaries, your sense of humour, being out of place, would I fit in… it demands a personal transformation’. This echoes Skeggs’ argument, that excess, vulgarity and stasis are projected historically onto the working classes (Skeggs, 2004), leaving the (psychoanalytic) middle classes to occupy the grounds of discretion and politeness.
Several therapists commented on the class markers they felt they encountered in various analytic consulting rooms. G described an analyst: ‘[W]hose consulting room was almost as big as a football pitch, she was so far away, and she was very traditional/classical, and I thought how would a working-class patient feel in that kind of room… if they are on social security and they go into this huge room that’s just used for consulting, not doubling up.… I had to process my envy.’ Apart from wealth or the lack of it, the consulting room and its adornments can convey other cultural values. It signals the need for privacy, for quiet, for boundedness, and often for discreetness. As such, it can seem typical of a middle-class study, which is not to question the usefulness of these features, but to indicate their cultural loadings, and how, for some, they may be a source of unease.
Therapists’ own experiences as patients provide some voices from the couch, to put alongside their thoughts about their work as therapists. For some from working-class backgrounds, the difficulty of talking about class and feeling adequately heard continued. F, while very positive overall as to her analyst’s ability to understand her, identified her feelings about her working-class background as the sole area where she didn’t feel heard. Her analyst she identified as middle class: ‘So it was right in the room for me.… He’d got that public schoolboy, sort of charming, polite blah de blah.… I actually raised how I felt about being working class and those feelings of inferiority and shame, and I felt it was one of those areas he didn’t quite understand because he’d hooked into the “you’re all equal sort of thing, and I really need to value myself”, he couldn’t identify with the place where it was painful, or the shame. So I told him that.… He was a little bit defensive about it that made me feel… there’s something about this you can’t hear.’ Whitman-Raymond (2009) records a similar experience with her well-off analyst, whom she greatly valued overall: ‘His “forgetting” often seemed to be around those aspects of my life – finances, status and all the intangibles that constitute my experience of class’ (2009: 439). Such perception of upper-class/middle-class resistance to hearing working-class pain, even by those most concerned to ‘understand’ the other, illustrates the defensiveness with which privilege can be embodied. Reay (2000: 153) argues that the ‘complicated self-hoods of working-class children… have not adequately informed either psychological or psychoanalytic theorising’ and that a much more sophisticated understanding is needed of ‘social jealousy, fear, denial, longing and envy’. These, like Steedman’s ‘proper envy’, should not be pathologised but should be seen as ‘the rightful inheritance of the poor’. One aspect of psychoanalysis opening itself up more to considerations of class would be to follow these suggestions.
E said: ‘It sounds omnipotent but I had to put a lot of it together myself… in making those links between class and say my shame… there was an inadequacy in my particular therapists although I felt helped by them.’ A said that one therapist would ‘individualise and pathologise’ the difficulties he described. B described himself as having ‘to make some transitions in relation to my therapist who didn’t have to move so radically or make jumps’. D felt that in her group analysis it was a ‘nogo’ area.
Corpt (2013) vividly describes how, despite her experiences of the ‘injuries of class’ and its accompanying shame, she seldom talked about this in ten years of a training analysis with an analyst she perceived to be from a higher social class. She describes her confusion about feeling like a ‘have-not’ despite ostensibly leading a middle-class life, and how she worked hard at passing, including buying the same expensive clothes as her analyst. At no point could she address the ‘real shame and feelings of loss about actually deep down being a “have-not”’ (2013: 64). Corpt considers whether this impasse was an accommodation on her part, protecting her connection with her analyst, and also herself from painful feelings of humiliation. However, she also argues that she needed her analyst to be able to see class ‘as a psychologically complex part of me’ and to have a kind of ‘realness’, something she feels was foreclosed by the theoretical approach and neutrality embedded in the institution. She argues that such disavowal of class and money can lead to premature foreclosure of issues of indebtedness, shame and gratitude. Her ‘class shame’ became a central aspect of a second analysis; it no longer needed to be a ‘disavowed aspect’ of her identity as an analyst. Subsequently she was surprised to learn from her first analyst that she maintained an air of superiority that had made it difficult for the analyst to reach her – an example of a defence covering up socially induced painful feelings of inferiority.
Others from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds had more positive experiences in relation to class. H felt that she was aware, mainly through how he spoke, of her therapist coming from a ‘higher social class’ than herself, and doubted whether he could understand her. However, she said she liked him and it ceased to be a problem. G recounted how she had had quite a chequered history with different therapists, but with her main therapist she did feel she could talk about her class experiences and feelings.
The therapists from middle-class and upper middle-class backgrounds had varied experiences of being understood in their class concerns. N said that none of her analysts had been able to help her with her class background. She felt that they all ‘bought into the mystique’ surrounding her family, and were too fascinated and excited by the social charisma to be able to help her with the shame and isolation she had felt. One thought it was right that N should feel shame, which stimulated her defensiveness. Such an unanalytic response chimes with reflections from analysts with high-status or wealthy patients. For example, Altman (1995/2010) acknowledges his sense of gratification and Glick (2012) describes the analytic potential for narcissistic identifications with such patients. Moral superiority on the part of the analyst in the face of great wealth is also identified by Glick as a potential analytic trap, and also recounted by Bodnar (2004). None, N said, understood the hatred connected with the UK class structure. There was no acknowledgement of the ‘realities of the psychology of the class system’, something she thought would have helped her see how her fears had a basis in reality as well as enabling her to explore them intra-psychically. Subsequently these limitations were evident in the shortcomings she identified in her own clinical work (see p. 125). Such analytic blind spots illustrate what happens when class is not adequately recognised and thought about, as both social reality and intra-psychically.
Another middle-class therapist, K, said that class had never been part of any dialogue with her therapists whom she took to be middle class. ‘It hasn’t been something that I’ve noticed or thought about.’ As the interview progressed it became apparent that there were some quite striking class experiences in her background (see p. 106). She expressed surprise that the class differences had emerged as such a big feature in the interview: ‘It was completely unpredicted by me and I hadn’t thought about it at all before.’
Other middle-class therapists felt more heard and understood in their concerns about class. J had had lifelong huge anxiety about snobbish attitudes towards working-class people. She had been persistently concerned for the disadvantaged. She felt her ‘complicated inversion’ had been well understood by her analyst, and that her unconscious identification with the ‘do-gooder’ and marked guilt had been effectively analysed. It was still though an issue that had enormous resonance for her (see p. 123), illustrating what Sennett calls ‘the perverse seductive power of inequality’ (Sennett, 2003). P also felt that during his analysis differences of ‘race’, skin colour and class were well explored. He said: ‘I was lucky enough to have an analyst who didn’t see everything as just in the mind, it was slightly more broad based. Recognition of reality, so to speak.’ Here there is a reference to ‘reality’ to include the social, as if this was outside the usual psychoanalytic dialogue. This is a recurrent theme, usually signifying some kind of felt impasse (see Chapter 7).
This chapter illustrates the often difficult journeys that therapists from non-white and non-middle-class backgrounds had through the institutions of psychoanalysis. The accounts of this chapter underline the sense that class is everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere in the fabric of the setting of psychoanalysis, its unacknowledged institutional and economic framework, yet it is nowhere in its explicit discourse. It concurs with Walkerdine et al.’s (2001) argument that the prevailing ideology of the production and reproduction of selves is one in which it is as if class is absent, yet played out against stark inequalities. The enduring effects of class on the psyche are vividly shown through the vicissitudes of social mobility, which provide much useful information about how class forms people. The lack of much psychoanalytic interest in class, combined with an ideology of presumed equality, means that important differences and useful understandings of the psychic landscapes of class are neglected. The reflections of many of these therapists could provide starting points for critical psychoanalytic reflection on the operation of class within the profession.
1 In workshops and talks on this subject I have found that simply asking people to identify and share their social class of origin and their present status generates intense and complex discussion.
2 Reading Corpt’s account made me remember my awkward attempts to form friendships with schoolmates from working-class homes, which never developed into anything enduring. A recent study of cross-class friendships (Pellandini-Simanyi, 2015) identifies the many strategies that people employ to bridge income gaps within friendships, and the frequent weakening and dissolution of these.
3 In a discussion at a community psychotherapy centre, where the funding Labour council was concerned about the small proportion of disadvantaged and non-white clients, a supervisor argued that if you need help, it doesn’t matter what colour you are. This kind of psychoanalytic liberalism is contradictory in its effects – an assertion of possibly progressive universalism that denies important differences.
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