The last chapter showed how class can become activated in conscious and unconscious ways in the intensity of therapeutic encounters. This chapter addresses the clinical writings of contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapists where class explicitly features; my explorations of the literature found many more sources than I had expected. Ricardo Ainslie, in his considerations of class and immigration, remarks on how class and other social configurations are often harder to address in therapy than familial and parental ones (Ainslie, 2009, 2011), underlining the importance of exploring the clinical work that does do this. Here I gather together these scattered clinical writings involving class, something not done before, to identify the approaches taken by different psychoanalytic writers. The focus is on the substantive contents of the clinical material and also on how different authors perceive and theorise class as having its effects. Such attention to how any one writer brings the social more into their clinical work shows the many challenges of doing this.
Relational psychoanalysis represents the most developed recent clinical thinking about class, with several writers claiming they are breaking new ground theoretically and clinically. Different writers within this school of thought vary considerably in how they mark out a psychoanalytic space for the social world. Here I consider the reflection/projection model put forward by Altman and then address Layton’s elaboration of this, with her concept of normative unconscious processes and critique of unlinking. Such relational work, portraying classed identities as constituted via processes of splitting, disavowal and projection and based on difference, has been very fertile in addressing the dynamics of clinical work, but it has limitations that I outline. Stephen Hartman introduces a valuable perspective on class as transmitted through parental work and bodies, proposing a ‘class unconscious’. He also extends the relational schema by using Laplanchian ideas, which I argue have much to contribute to a reorientation of psychoanalysis towards a greater incorporation of the social world. Other authors rely more on existing theory, as in Ruth Fallenbaum’s powerful account of the traumatic effects of exploitation and damage at work. Dorothy Holmes also sees class as a source of trauma and makes use of the Freudian super-ego. In many of these writings class intersects with ‘race’, gender and sexuality and such multiple identifications and configurations are illustrated by other authors.
Altman’s title, The Analyst in the Inner City (Altman, 1995/2010), underlines the relatively unusual recognition of psychoanalytic work in such contexts, and his book has become a much cited and taught work on class and ‘race’ in the clinic. Some of the factors specific to work in such public spheres were addressed in Chapter 4. Here the concern is more with the clinical material and theorising emerging from Altman’s work, in which he advocates two- and three-person models. Throughout, Altman, like most relational authors, makes extensive use of his own responses and feelings to understand the dynamics of the relationships between himself and his patients. How a patient’s concerns are read off from the analyst’s subjectivity and self-awareness is an important point of debate in case material of this kind.
Altman begins his chapter on class with a vignette about his encounter in private practice with a well-off man from a prominent family whose care as a child was delegated to servants, a familiar upper-class scenario, as we have seen (Chapter 3). Altman highlights his sudden heightened awareness of his humble office, its simple furnishings and his own somewhat shabby appearance, illustrating the visceral, instant and embodied ways in which class operates. He felt gratified at having a ‘high-status’ patient, something writers on the role of money also observe (see Chapter 9), and realised he was envying the patient, and denigrating himself. Altman observed how, unusually, he initially felt no empathy for the patient’s experiences of emotional neglect. The patient’s wish to delegate paying the fees to an accountant left Altman feeling disregarded, as he then surmised the patient had felt neglected by his parents. This is an example of the use of a mirroring response to infer the feelings of the other; only subsequent clinical work can indicate whether this is a correct or useful insight, or whether it says more about the analyst than the patient. Altman however argues that when he was the one with relative status and money, with inner-city patients ‘the hierarchy’ was reversed.
Altman, in his main example of Ms B from a working-class family who dropped out of her prestigious university, describes many issues familiar from writings on social mobility (see Chapter 6 especially), although he does not reference these. Subsequently Ms B quit her ‘good’ job and went onto welfare. Altman writes of her ‘powerfully self-defeating tendencies, based on her conflict about succeeding in life, which would mean surpassing her parents and the rest of her family’ (1995/2010: 84), and of ‘her tremendous destructiveness in such an undermining of self, as well as our work together’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 85). As the work continued, he realised how succeeding professionally made Ms B feel isolated and that she felt she couldn’t connect with him or her family unless she was ‘down and out’. This perception modified his previous attribution of self-destructiveness, a realisation that is often overlooked in clinical work where class transitions are at issue. He became aware of his own inclinations to focus on her vulnerabilities, as this confirmed in him a sense of being useful – also a recognisable therapist problematic. Altman also acknowledges how he had previously felt gratified by Ms B’s socioeconomic success, an indication of the traps involved in equating therapeutic success with upward class mobility, something Layton (2014a) names as therapeutic collusion with neo-liberal values. Such collusion risks minimising or disregarding the losses and conflicts upward mobility may give rise to and inappropriately interpreting seeming self-sabotage as inner destructiveness rather than a relational issue.
Altman argues that what he calls a one-person psychology, or drive theory approach, cannot adequately address class since, in his view, this is an inherently relational phenomenon. Rather, he maintains, such approaches wrongly reduce conflicts that derive from the social world to intra-psychic or familial dynamics. Instead he proposes two- and three-person models. There is undoubted truth in the accusation of psychic reductionism in some psychoanalysis, especially as regards the way social envy is seen. Carolyn Steedman, in her now classic autobiographical interrogation of class and psychoanalysis, Landscape for a Good Woman, sees Freud’s account in ‘Family romances’ as ‘the most extraordinary and transparent political paternalism’ (Steedman, 1986: 12). There Freud describes how when a child apprehends the social category to which his or her parents belong, envy leads to replacing them in daydreams with parents of ‘higher social standing’ (Freud, 1909). Freud interprets these fantasies as concealing erotic aims and Oedipal wishes, not also as social envy or desire for a better quality of life. However, Altman’s statements are unduly caricaturing of what he calls drive theory. They also invalidate the ways in which earlier left Freudians addressed class issues, as we have seen, with complex understandings of the intertwining of the intra-psychic and the social. Holmes strongly criticises Altman for what she considers his ‘ill-informed’ approach, for abandoning all aspects of classical theory, and for championing the needs of the poor by valorising one approach and ‘vilifying’ others (Holmes, 1997).
There is though much to agree with in aspects of Altman’s model, in which the actual social status of patient and therapist, their relationships to the social context in which their work takes place, and the various perceptions, projections, identifications and desires at play between them are all seen as part of the therapeutic relationship. Chapter 7 illustrated the possibilities for many kinds of projective processes, for identifications and disidentifications, between patient and therapist in the terrain of class, and the utility of being able to address and deconstruct these. Bodnar also suggests there is ‘a broad continuum of dissociative processes where self meets culture’ and that to decontextualise individual personality from cultural reality is to compromise analytic work (Bodnar, 2004: 581). However, the ways in which Altman theorises the relationship of the social and the psychic is more problematic. He proposes an essentially reflective relationship: ‘What exists on the social level cannot but find reflection in the individual psyche, and vice versa’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 89, my italics). Social structure, the structure of a public clinic, what takes place within therapeutic dyads in such a clinic and within individuals, all are assumed to reflect one another – another form of reductionism. The problem here is with the inevitability and simplicity that Altman attributes to such correspondence, not with the possibility that this can sometimes or often happen. Assumptions of parallel and mirroring processes are rife in the therapeutic world; while often having considerable interpretive power, they can also be dangerously misused. Too much similarity can be assumed, and this can block further exploration, deny complexity and difference, and leave no room for non-conformity.
Furthermore, this leads to a too-mechanistic parallelism in which interpersonal projective processes are seen as each party disowning and projecting something that ‘really’ belongs to the self. Altman describes how Ms B’s low social class position contributed to him seeing her as ‘helpless and needy’, which he says made him less aware of such unwanted qualities and feelings in himself, confirming him in his competence. Ms B became the needy one, wanting caring and nurturance: ‘What we each disowned in ourselves, the flip-side of our conscious self-images, reappeared in the transference in the sense that Ms B felt she was taking care of me by being helpless.… Our roles were reversed’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 92).
While in many cases such a process is recognisable, this model does not allow for the possibility that someone might perceive or misperceive a socially disadvantaged person as helpless and needy, without this being a disowning or disavowal of those very same qualities in themselves. It might be a result of identification, prejudice or misinformation, or indeed be accurate. Many writers, including Bourdieu, have described working-class circumstances as rendering people closer to necessity, as having fewer choices and options. In Altman’s case, there is a failure to distinguish between perception (of possible social realities) and projection, in a model in which all perceptions are only constructions of the perceiver’s mind, and therefore projections. The paradox here is that Altman, with the best of intentions, is trying not to make strange or to other people less well off than himself, to understand their experiences as part of a common humanity; but, in doing so, he risks misrecognising and obliterating important specificities by his conviction of an inevitable intra-psychic correspondence between patient and therapist. The dynamics of similarity and difference are at play here and, as with all important social divisions between people, both have to be kept in productive tension, rather than resorting to a dichotomised position.
While we may appreciate his honesty, Altman’s somewhat repetitious statement of his own privilege and guilt, a more than recognisable trope, has the effect of distancing the disadvantaged clientele. Adrienne Harris (2009) has drawn an important distinction between guilt and guiltiness in socio-political matters; the latter involves a form of anxiety, a defensive shame-laden stance, lacking possibilities for ‘mature remorse’ or effective reparation. This she regards as an unstable basis for either theory or politics.
A further theoretical problem is Altman’s reliance on a model whereby the powerfulness and unconscious nature of what may transpire between two people of differing social class is mistaken for the entirety of class itself. Thus: ‘projective-introjective processes, when deployed rigidly and defensively, form the basis of classism, not valid understanding across class lines’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 93). Although clearly aware of the actual material and economic circumstances of his inner-city clientele, his model, by focusing only on the dynamic interpersonal, runs the risk of collapsing class into psychological processes, despite all Altman’s intentions otherwise. His model fails to adequately include the force of extensive material privileges and disadvantages inherent in a class system, whereby, however concerned a well-off person may be to ‘understand’ and respect the less well-off other, this does not mean that they would cede their power, wealth or status, become less class-defined, nor that substantial class differences would not still operate. It might, though, make for some better cross-class relationships, although that cannot be assumed.
This problem derives from his assumption that: ‘In a sense, racism, classism, and ethnocentrism (as well as sexism and homophobia) have a common deep structure.… On one level these categories are interchangeable, simply different surface manifestations of the process whereby a denigrated or simply disowned “other” is created, even as “race”, social class and culture each have their own histories and contexts, defining characteristics, and dynamics’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 81).
Altman’s unification of the psychological processes involved in all these phenomena collapses all questions of history, difference, inequality and injustice into common psychological processes. These processes, especially the misrecognition involved in hostile projections, are indeed very important components of many social and interpersonal situations, which psychoanalysis is well placed to address. However, what sets them in play historically and socially, structures them and maintains them, may be very different in each specific case. For example, the bases of the hostilities involved in homophobia are not necessarily the same as those involved in racism, even if both can involve similar processes of disavowal and projection. The social histories, determinants and felt threats are different, and the various hostilities can involve distinct psychological processes as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s (1998) psychoanalytic study of prejudices suggests.
There are two problems here – one is the elevation of categories of social class to become social class itself, encompassing all its manifestations. The second is that, whereas of course social class categories and people’s perceptions of these do come to serve psychic functions, this is not therefore the source of their existence, nor the sum total of how class has its effects. Social divisions in society are created and driven largely by economic and political forces, although they are lived, sustained, and shaped by how they come to serve psychic functions as well, and by how they cause psychic distress. It may be that much relational psychoanalysis is influenced by American functional sociology. The nearest Altman comes to explicit use of social theory is in his statement: ‘Social class categories, then, are constructed on a social level, serving social functions. They are also constructed on a personal psychological level to serve psychic functions’ (Altman, 1995/2010: 91). This maintains an absolute distinction between what is social and what is psychological, rather than the imbrication and interrelatedness that other writers have argued for.
Layton’s extensive writings on class avoid some of these problems, partly because from the outset she incorporates other aspects of psychosocial, sociological and political thought into her clinical thinking. She situates what she observes in the clinic within her understanding of neo-liberal ideologies and practices. Such interdisciplinarity is essential for a more productive engagement between class and psychoanalysis, and it is instructive to consider the use Layton makes of social theory as well as her understanding of how class is manifested and reproduced in the clinic. Layton has been foremost in demonstrating and critiquing ‘unlinking’, the ‘unconscious pull’ to divorce individuals from their social context, which she regards as a dominant norm (Layton, 2006a). To even speak of these terms as separate is, she suggests, a distortion, except in as far as this reflects the ‘truth’ of society’s dominant culture, appearing to us as obvious or common sense, an argument similar to Adorno’s (1967). Her use of unlinking, with its reference to Bion’s ideas on the fragmentation of thought and emotion that follows from failures and denials of linking, is important in underlining how widely and fundamentally this common divorce operates. It also implies how seeing the social world as only an overlay to the intra-psychic world, as superficial compared to the latter, is not only mistaken, but derives from an untheorised position, in which it becomes psychoanalytic ‘common sense’.
However, Layton suggests that those in subordinate cultures are less likely to ‘buy into the unlinking norm’, being especially and painfully aware of the links between social forces and their individual struggles. This echoes Fanon’s statement to the effect that since the racial drama is played out in the open ‘the black man’ has no time to make it unconscious, something Gurney (2009) applies to ‘class drama’. Such perceptions of the links between social and personal struggles can form the basis of resistance and political activity, but they also can coexist with or be replaced by symptoms of many kinds, and convictions of individual responsibility and self-blame, where the link with the social world becomes lost or repressed. Layton’s suggestion of ‘normative unconscious processes’ captures this well: ‘Because cultural hierarchies split and categorize human attributes and capacities, subjectivity is marked by unceasing conflict between those unconscious processes that seek to maintain the splits and those that refuse them. I call the ones that seek to maintain the splits “normative unconscious processes”’ (Layton, 2008: 67).
Layton (2006b) cites Bourdieu as arguing that many of the processes and markers of class distinction take place below the level of consciousness and language, although she also criticises him for not being attentive enough to emotion, for presupposing only a narcissistic subject and leaving no place for the possibility of caring about different others. She highlights the passages in Bourdieu’s work where he describes the ways in which social relations are objectified in things and in people, and ‘impress’ themselves through often unconscious bodily experiences. These objects, practices and tastes become markers of class distinction. Such unconscious internalisation can lead to the instant, automatic and visceral perception of class difference or similarity that commonly occurs.
Layton argues that the child’s relational world is the basis for an always conflictual internalisation of class, and the grounds for haunting anxiety. She links this to her theory of the normative unconscious: ‘… that part of the unconscious that is produced by social hierarchies of various kinds and that, in turn, works to reproduce and secure a hierarchical status quo’ (Layton, 2006b: 53). This is a more complex version of the reflective model in which social divisions are seen as reproduced in the unconscious, producing internal conflict.
Layton, similarly to Altman, claims: ‘… class identities are formed via a defensive splitting off of parts of self too closely associated with anything felt to characterize other, especially lower-but also upper-class fractions’ (Layton, 2006b: 53). In a later work, she uses a vignette to illustrate the role of fantasy, defences, unconscious collusions and resistances against social norms, which she claims show ways in which children ‘… struggle their way into and negotiate class positions that are simultaneously gendered, raced and sexed’ (Layton, 2014b: 5). Here, the attainment of classed identity is seen entirely in terms of the parts of the self that are repudiated and projected. Thus, the child ‘(O)nly becomes a white, middle-class girl by racializing parts of herself as black and lower class. Ambivalently attached to these repudiated and projected parts of self, she demands that the “Other” live out his or her assigned role. Indeed, when those parts are too anxiety provoking to be owned and integrated, they appear not as intrapsychic conflict but rather as interpersonal conflict that is played out in relationships – over and over and over’ (Layton, 2014b: 6).
There is a resonance here with some of the class-related projections in the interview material of Chapters 6 and 7, and also with the psychosocial work, such as Reay’s, which shows how class fears and hostilities may become expressed in terms of assumed characteristics of others, repudiated by the self. What is underplayed here is the part that class similarity, identification with the white middle-class parents and peer group, the materiality and experiences of class privilege, may all play in the intergenerational formation of such a classed identity. What is also questionable is whether they are built only on difference and not on similarity. Much of the psychosocial work shows how identities are based on particular conditions of life and ways of living, as well as perceptions of different others. Such perceptions can reflect different material realities and cannot always be characterised as repudiation and rejection, even though anxieties of various kinds may involve this, defaulting to an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic. Nor can the totality of class be captured by the notion of identities.
However, what Layton does provide is a rich phenomenology of anxieties concerning class, as well as a framing of these within an understanding of contemporary neo-liberal demands and pressures. This is especially important in bringing class into the psychoanalytic frame. She explores the unchartered emotional and psychodynamic dimensions of Bourdieu’s work via evocative anecdotes of the feelings and anxieties aroused by shopping, a prime point of class distinction, in stores of very different economic and class status (Layton, 2006b). This leads Layton to make several suggestions about how she sees emotions ‘sustaining’ class identifications and distinctions, and how what is repudiated can return in states of anxiety and phobias, especially in unfamiliar classed locations.
Her first observation is the disgust and discomfort felt by an upper middle-class1 friend in a lower-class store, and her own shame and anxiety in an upper-class one, her fear of committing some social gaffe, her sense of not belonging. Layton notes how she can defensively render this as moral disdain (like Bodnar, 2004) hiding any envy she might feel for the upper class’s access to goods she does consider better. She argues that the anxieties that make her stick to cheaper stores ‘… legitimize(s) the upper-class’s right to have more, to have better, and to dominate’ (Layton, 2006b: 54). Here we can see the role of anxiety in reinforcing and perpetuating class inequality. Whereas the shame and anxiety she feels is conscious, what structures the unconscious is ‘the taboo on having a proprietary relation to culture and knowledge’ (Layton, 2006b: 54), ceding that entitlement to the better-off. She illustrates this by Bourdieu’s statement that ‘objective’ limits become ‘a sense of limits’. Disempowerment and lack of entitlement can come to seem fitting or natural; to want more, forbidden, dangerous or pointless, as in the often-reported injunctions in first-person accounts of working-class childhoods to ‘know your place’ or ‘don’t get above yourself’. A ‘propriety relation to knowledge and culture’ can also be embedded in enactments of class privilege that presume the superiority or universality of particular cultural forms.
An informal survey allows Layton to explore further how emotions sustain class identifications and differentiations. In particular, she identifies upper-class abhorrence of poor, working-class shops and goods as involving a fear of contagion, of being too close to need and dependence. In this way distinction is sustained by a fear of falling into a state of necessity, a familiar middle-class trope, amply illustrated in some of the research cited in Chapter 5. The identification of working-class status with unwanted need, dependence and vulnerability is a theme running through much of Layton’s work, and she subsequently relates this to how prevailing neo-liberal economic and social agendas demonise interdependence and promote the notion of self-sufficient entrepreneurial individuals (Layton, 2014a). Here she proposes that upper-class status is ‘attained and maintained’ by disdaining what is connected to the lower classes, thus implying that emotions and behaviour create class status. Here again the relational position is in danger of substituting the emotional and the psychological for the whole of class, which is not to invalidate Layton’s depiction of how dynamic emotional processes are involved in living, sustaining, and reinforcing classed identities. Rather it is to point out the necessity for an approach that can incorporate and move between all the aspects of class.
Layton also notes the sadness and concern felt by some upper-class subjects in her survey at the poor quality of goods, the noises, smells, and crowdedness in lower-class stores. Bourdieu argues that such pity is just another guise of how distinction operates – allowing the dominant classes to impose their values on the lower classes, to create distance from necessity, without any recognition of how this is not objective. Layton, however, argues that such concern opens up a political space for alliance and struggle.
Layton’s account of how class inequalities can be reproduced in the clinic, and the ways clinicians may unconsciously collude with these, is, as previous chapters showed, a central part of understanding class in relation to psychoanalysis (Layton, 2014a). These reproductions she sees as enactments of normative unconscious processes. She frames her accounts in terms of how current neo-liberal pressures may promote specific kinds of enactments and performances of class distinction. She describes how the desire for, and the conflicts of, social mobility were experienced by two different patients, with varying degrees of disdain and ambivalence.
Layton’s first case concerns a woman who rose socially from her working-class/blue-collar background by working very hard to become a highly paid professional. In love with a man from a working-class background, she repeatedly filled the sessions with mocking contempt for his supposedly working-class ways, with which he himself appeared comfortable. Layton, struggling with her own difficulty in bearing the patient’s class contempt, pointed out to her how much she seemed to need to have close to her a working-class ‘other’ that she could denigrate. The patient’s panicky reaction to this interpretation, at the recognition of her defensive use of class mockery and the fear of this defence not being any longer available, led to much productive work on what Layton named as class grandiosity. She and the patient came to understand how this related to a need to dislike and disown her own vulnerability, to disidentify from her working-class mother for whom her socially aspirant father had great disdain. Layton sees this grandiosity as a defence against the patient realising how much her sought-after father’s love was contingent on her achievements and upward mobility, contributing to a fragile, insecure sense of specialness. Layton understands this as the patient’s defending herself against falling back into the lower classes as represented by her mother, disavowing her love for her mother, longing for her father’s love, identifying with his disparagement, and retaliating against her mother’s difficulty in giving love to her upwardly mobile daughter.
This example illustrates well the inevitable entanglement of class matters with the particular dynamic formations of love and desire in any one family, something Holmes from a different theoretical position also depicts (see p. 151). As Layton describes it, the conditional class-inflected nature of the father’s love led to great cynicism about love and to sadomasochistic ways of relating, in which dependency and need were denied. Layton sums this up as the patient having ‘become the kind of non-relational maximizer of self-opportunity described as exemplary in neoliberal literature’ (Layton, 2014a: 11).
Layton’s second example is a man from a working-class family, with a history of previous trade union activism, who was the recipient of somewhat conflictual parental wishes that he rise in class. Although professionally successful, this very success involved great ambivalence and, it transpired, rage, so that he repeatedly got fired from jobs. He loved his work, but his rage at his parents who were felt as unloving and tyrannical, as well as at other authoritarian figures, led to continual self-sabotage. He was much occupied by many protests against abuses of authority, and also by what he saw as the underdog world of patients in the face of analytic authority. Becoming middle class represented to him a loss of integrity. Layton remarks how at times she fell into the trap of unduly pathologising his repeated protests against injustice, unconsciously enacting her own class arrogance, ‘the defensively grandiose aspects of my analytic stance’ (Layton, 2014a: 14). This is another way in which class gets reproduced in the transference–countertransference matrix.
Both these examples are characterised by parental demands for upward mobility, and it is the contingency of their love that Layton sees as the inter-generationally transmitted wounds of being lower class. The consequences are ‘split states of grandiosity/pride and self-hatred/shame’, mediated by the specifics of libidinal investments. All these can determine how class is negotiated, whether with conformity, pride, challenge, shame, ambivalence, resignation or rage. Layton’s first patient identified with upper-class authority and denigrated those lower, the second alternated between deference, rage and panic. Current neo-liberal ideologies and pressures may create such parental demands in which love becomes contingent on social success, one of the pernicious effects of class.
Much contemporary writing suggests that the children of first-generation immigrants may also find themselves trying to fulfil parental wishes for upward mobility, leaving little recognition of their own desires, with the resulting internal and external conflicts. However, there are many families who, while desirous of social advancement, do not make their love so drastically contingent on it. Further, in other instances the upward social mobility of the child may be primarily brought about through his or her own desires and talents, nurtured outside the family, rather than through parental pressure, as in Hanley’s (2016) account. This can engender aspirations that conflict with the family subculture, or the family may be supportive, but because of the huge distance between social classes, painful losses and separations are still experienced, as Chapter 6 has illustrated.
I am familiar from my own clinical practice with how the virulence of the UK educational class system,2 combined with the child’s own talents and interests, can lead to often traumatic experiences of estrangement from the family of origin. In several instances this resulted in considerable fragility and instability, whereby present-day achievements are repeatedly undermined by unconscious self-sabotage, initially hard to recognise as such. This can be accompanied by a confused sense of longing for aspects of the family that is also disdained or that feels too distant, guilt and loss at not remaining close by, combined with hostile ambivalence or lack of confidence towards present-day professional success or values. Thus are social divisions lived out in symptoms that may bring people to therapy. Hanley provides a first-person account of achieving a positive accommodation with this, where she can enjoy her hard-won middle-class position and way of life without losing her accent or her connection to her family (Hanley, 2016).
In Altman’s and Layton’s examples there is very little space, either internally or externally, for a positive sense of being working class. This is portrayed through the perceptions of Layton’s survey and clinical subjects as evidence only of personal failure, weakness and need, to be disdained, pitied and avoided. Whereas there may be much clinical purchase to be had from understanding of middle- and upper-class contempt for the working classes as based on horror of need and dependency, there is a problem with making what are the perceptions, emotions and defences of these class fractions into a theory of class itself, or as an accurate portrayal of being working class now. What we do not hear enough of are the voices of anyone currently working class, or of anyone for whom this is a source of positive identity, self-respect and integrity – something harder to achieve now than ever, perhaps. This is a general shortcoming in the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic literature. Nor do we hear much of strategies of resistance to prevailing ideologies of upward mobility, or of different kinds of accommodations to these.
Hartman’s boldly entitled article ‘Class unconscious: from dialectical materialism to relational material’ (Hartman, 2007) is unusual and thought-provoking in bringing work into psychoanalytic discourse as part of how class is known about and embodied. His article is distinguished by the range of theoretical frameworks he invokes to illuminate the relationship of class and psychoanalysis which incorporate and go beyond relational psychoanalysis.
Hartman notes, quite appositely, that within psychoanalysis contemporary usage of ‘class’ tends to be descriptive for lack of theoretical development. Class background is sometimes mentioned as part of an initial description, but its engagement with dynamic matters is seldom included. Hartman is concerned ‘to give material relations a place of primacy in the unconscious and in the development of our sense of self and other’ (2007: 210). In order to explore how the material world ‘engages’ the psychic world, he proposes a ‘third place’ which he names the class unconscious. This is the ‘unformulated experience of class in unconscious territory’ (2007: 210), a promising depiction, even if the postulation of a new unconscious entity is more problematic. What he calls the ‘class third’ is a material Other: a set of ‘bodily material practices that are only known to us… through work’ (2007: 211) which ‘interpellates’ the worker according to its own logic.
Hartman further proposes that ‘a child receives early knowledge about class through an unconscious communication from his parents about work’ (2007: 211). For the child, such messages may be enigmatic and undecipherable, received as uncontested facts of life that cannot be reflected upon, so that much of class experience remains unavailable to consciousness. In its reified state, he says, the class unconscious cannot be mentalised as a third point of view, otherwise we would be more conscious of the conditions of work and its history.3
Hartman’s estrangement from his working-class father frames his article: ‘Ours is a struggle that bears the strains and injuries of class’ (Hartman, 2007: 209). He discovered the power of his class unconscious ‘by accident’, realising that he had come to an unsatisfactory arrangement with an upper-class, well-off patient. This left him anxiously waiting by the phone in the early mornings, waiting to hear whether the busy patient would be available for a session, before he could leave for his office. Hartman made a link between the dread he felt waiting for his patient’s call, and memories of his father, a roofer, who would pace around in the dark winter mornings, waiting for the phone to ring to hear whether he had any work that day, a scene charged with anxiety and resentment. Knowledge of class was formed as his anxious, beaten-down father, unable to be both parent and worker, waited for the union dispatcher’s call, which mostly did not come. Hartman conveys his sense of his father’s aching body, injured and scarred from industrial accidents. He was, he says, interpellated by the scars on his father’s arms – a useful way of describing the impress not just of his father’s wounds but also of the whole history of class domination and exploitation that led up to this.4
Hartman argues that for his upper-class white patient implicit awareness of class and ‘race’ accrued when his mother placed the fretful baby in the black nanny’s hands. This is an important recognition of work in a domestic setting, and of how the bodily communication of class can be conceived of as starting from the earliest moments within a structure of delegated class- and ‘race’-inflected childcare, as I also argued in Chapter 3.
Hartman’s second clinical example concerns a man whose father was a factory foreman, and for whom his parents’ love was compromised by their hard and unrelenting work. They provided food and shelter, but couldn’t show affection with their bodies. Nor could they show any recognition or appreciation of their son’s sensitivities, aspirations and achievements, a lack that upward mobility can bring. No expression of weakness was tolerated by a father for whom work could signify something deadly. His parents enjoined him to ‘know his place’, as he imagines his present-day clients would, were he to charge more for his highly skilled, much sought-after work, rather than living close to financial collapse. Hartman elaborates on how this man’s desire for recognition from the father, whose love was so compromised by work, played out in the transference, around the constraints of analytic work and love.
Hartman’s article is important for his introduction of work as a force shaping the transmission of class within families, something relatively unusual in psychoanalysis. The notion that for a child there is something enigmatic, mystifying and unknowable about parental work, something experienced through his or her parents’ bodies, affects and attitudes, is an interesting use of the Laplanchian idea of enigmatic signifiers. Like Hartman I suggest that Laplanchian theory, with the emphasis on the primacy of the other, has much to offer in understanding how the often unspoken world of parents’ work and class experience may be bodily communicated – implanted or intromitted, to use Laplanche’s terms. I take up the relevance of Laplanche further on and in Chapter 10, especially as regards how it could be the vehicle for resolving the historic split in psychoanalysis between those theories which prioritise drive and desire, and see these as determined primarily internally and intra-psychically, and those which, taking a more cultural and social perspective, dispense with drive theory and one-person psychologies, as Altman (earlier) and much relational psychoanalysis does.
Hartman however uses the notions of enigmatic signifiers and interpellation alongside an approach which does position the psyche as in some sense independent of the material world. Thus, he maintains that the material world does not structure the psychic world, but rather that it engages it (my italics). Hartman’s notion of the class unconscious is where these interact and psychoanalysis, in his view, lacks but needs a theory of ‘how class works on the body, on the psyche and between psyches… of how the State penetrates the psyche’ (Hartman, 2007: 217). Here Hartman is clearly positing a psyche and a body originally outside history, outside power, not already constituted by these. However, the rest of his writing illustrates the intimate and fundamental structuring of mind and body by class, and indeed he argues convincingly against those who assume too great a degree of autonomy of mental processes from the material world. Hartman seems to prefer a theoretical position that assumes an autonomous originating psyche, in tune with the general position of much psychoanalysis, but it does sit oddly with his creative use of Laplanche and (implicitly) Althusser, an indication of the general theoretical slipperiness of this area.
The injurious nature of work and its relation to class is taken up in a different way by Ruth Fallenbaum in an account of injured workers and the Kafkaesque virulence and inequities of compensation schemes (Fallenbaum, 2003). This powerful article is, as Harris (2003) says, overwhelming at first reading, indicative of the traumatic nature of the workers’ experiences, and the quality of the writing. Fallenbaum describes her psychotherapeutic work with nine federal employees whose workplace psychological and physical injuries entitled them to forms of compensation. In her emphasis on the particular conditions of employment she also supplies a material analysis. All were ethnic-minority women, in mainly manual or blue-collar clerical jobs, whose incomes were vital for the well-being of their families. The injuries they suffered included physical ones, the psychological sequelae of these, harassment, bullying and sexual abuse, leading to diagnoses of depression and PTSD. Access to therapy services took place through the US Institute of Labor and Mental Health, which was founded in 1977 to educate therapists about the realities of class, racism and power in the workplace, as well as providing individual and group therapy to workers.5
Fallenbaum records the workers’ persistence with their jobs despite being at breaking point, their difficulties in recognising that their workplace was so destructive to their well-being and the devastating consequences of not being able to earn. The trauma of this was increased hugely by the hostile, protracted and disrespectful nature of the claims process, often amounting to re-traumatisation, something we see now with the humiliating and punitive ways in which disability and unemployment benefits are administered. Fallenbaum writes how: ‘The shame, diminished self-esteem and blow to the worker’s narcissism that results from being unable to function at work is thus mirrored and reinforced by the… bureaucracy, the examining doctors, and ultimately the workers’ community’ (Fallenbaum, 2003: 79).
Fallenbaum realised that much of what she was hearing clinically echoed some of the literature on trauma, the ways in which destructive external events can affect the inner world and a person’s fundamental sense of safety. She depicts a situation of working-class disempowerment and vulnerability to ruthless employment practices, amounting to class trauma. Many of her patients repeatedly wondered whether what had happened to them was their fault. Fallenbaum observes how extremely painful it was for the workers to acknowledge that the people and institutions they had relied on really were malign, unfair and irrational, leading to loss of any trust in the benign functioning of society. She notes how this disillusionment destroyed belief in the predictability of the world, leaving people feeling vulnerable and powerless, which may partly explain why those in oppressive conditions so readily blame themselves. Her therapeutic approach emphasises the importance of a prolonged process of bearing witness to each worker’s individual stories of ill-treatment, something often emphasised in relation to other extreme situations, as a first step in establishing and validating the reality of their perceptions. In this way enough trust in the therapeutic process and therapist could be established to work further on their grief, alienation and self-blame.
Fallenbaum’s article brings into the psychoanalytic arena a range of experiences and a social context that are too often missing from most psychotherapeutic work. It brings out how both psychoanalytic and social understandings are needed to work well clinically, and it is relevant that her work emerged from a political process of establishing a Section on Social Responsibility within Division 39 of the American Psychological Association (which has psychoanalytic sections). Furthermore she poses the conundrum that faces many therapists working with people in adverse social circumstances, of whether or how to make extra-therapeutic interventions, such as advocacy on behalf of the patient, as well as preserving the frame of the therapy.
Dimen in her comments on Fallenbaum’s paper, asks why it is so difficult for analysts to keep in mind the ways in which: ‘Alienation is the psychology of class’ (Dimen, 2003: 93). She relates this to the white-collar status of analysts, who are relatively more empowered than many blue-collar workers, in doing work that can provide personal enhancement and some control over their time. Yet, as she pointed out (Dimen, 1994), such autonomy is fragile, insecure and always compromised by the need to earn. Professional coyness and anxiety about status can lead to resistances to recognising possible similarities as workers in a capitalist system. This can block identification with or understanding of the plight of blue-collar workers, resulting in analytic blind spots as regards the impact of such realities. Fallenbaum’s article is an important counter to this.
Class is also seen as a source of trauma by Holmes, yet ‘analysts shy away from comprehensive analysis of the influence of race and class’ (Holmes, 2006: 232). Here, the trauma is the accumulation of early destructive experiences, and of the chronic effects of living and working in poverty and insecurity. Writing from an ego psychology perspective, she explores some of the dynamics of ‘success neurosis’ in relation to racism and classism. She combines a Freudian explanation of this in terms of guilt at Oedipal rivalry and Oedipal victory, with the notion of the internalisation of negative societal ‘messages’, where the damage to the self leads to entrenched and fundamental doubting of one’s own abilities, and consequent self-sabotage. This internalisation she sees as operating pre-Oedipally, set down very early, and involving primal wishes to be loved and accepted. This is akin to Layton’s ‘normative unconscious’, although theorised differently: ‘If one is not in the right racial grouping or social class, one is extremely negatively valued, and this valuation often becomes a highly malignant, introjected reality’ (Holmes, 2006: 219).6 This she sees as like the effects of trauma in causing lasting interference with ego functions, even where ego capacities may be intact. Such early internalisation7 can render the desire for and achieving of success as taboo and dangerous, not ‘knowing your place’. Success becomes a conflictful state of affairs, often vulnerable to forms of self-destructiveness, in which one abandons a beloved primary object. Holmes’ use of introjection is valuable in underlining the deep and harmful psychic effects of social forces, creating an inner state of unprocessable harm and suggesting how aspects of class can remain unsymbolised, as Hartman also does.
Holmes uses the Freudian super-ego, whereby what she calls ‘societal opposing forces’ are internalised (similar to Skeggs’ dialogic other, see Chapter 5) to understand the ways in which people can anticipate punishment for achievements considered out of their class, as well as punish themselves. In one clinical example, that of a black professor from a very impoverished background, Holmes understands the patient’s repeated dreams of dead loved family members as illustrating ‘the distortions formed in the patient’s super-ego relating to her lower-class standing, which was represented in her as deadening internal objects that kept her aspirations for success at bay’ (2006: 224). Holmes notes how resolution of these conflicts and greater professional satisfaction were achieved both by work on libidinal issues, sibling rivalry and guilt, and also by a lessening of the severity of her internal representations of ‘structured, institutional racist proscriptions against her success’.
Another clinical example concerns a white woman from an impoverished background who, while academically successful, was experiencing great difficulty in completing an advanced qualification or finding work. The patient felt she didn’t have her mother’s permission to be successful: ‘[T]o succeed is to risk being criticised and rejected by them. So I say, “Don’t worry – see, I’m a failure too. No threat”’ (2006: 230). The patient had a recurring memory of how she had been frequently and hurtfully ostracised at school for acting ‘snooty’, to which her mother’s agitated rejoinder had been to assert repeatedly that they were not ‘poor white trash’. This added to the complexity of her struggle between what Holmes calls a devalued and a more positive view of herself. Holmes links this struggle to the patient’s self-defeating need to return to an impoverished state in order not to experience the ‘disorganized grandiose excitement, narcissistic self-sufficiency, and manic exhibitionism’ (Holmes, 2006: 231) that achievement could bring. This latter description captures well the fragile, conflictful and disconnected states sometimes involved in upward social mobility and success, and also accords with some of Layton’s descriptions of grandiosity in a class context.
Holmes’ clinical examples are notable for the intertwining of class and ‘race’, and for the integration of Oedipal and erotic dynamics with these. Her work also brings the fundamentally damaging or traumatic effects of class and racism in individual histories into clinical purview, similarly to the writings of Fallenbaum, discussed earlier, and Trevithick and other authors (see Chapter 4). Such work provides psychoanalytic elaborations of the ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972). It begins to rectify the paucity of working-class voices and life experiences within psychoanalysis, and is an important reminder of the necessity to address the materiality of class in each history as well as the interpersonal dynamics and relationality that this may give rise to.
It is no surprise that much clinical writing on class concerns the psychic complexities of upward mobility, since one of the barriers to private therapy may be removed by higher incomes. Further, the displacements and conflicts of upward mobility, which previous chapters have illustrated, may also propel someone towards therapy. The displacements of emigration into different cultural contexts can also bring previously unaddressed class issues to consciousness, and/or result in changed class status, as Ainslie’s work illustrates. Downward mobility is much less studied, but as an example in Chapter 7 (p. 130) suggests, it may stem from a conscious rejection of the values and status of well-off parents, combined in some cases with oedipal issues, or, as the psychiatric literature indicates, be seen as a sign or consequence of mental illness.8 These displacements in time and social space suggest both the persistent effects of earlier class identifications and also the ways that these can be modified. As Harris says: ‘We might think of class as having layers of conscious and unconscious meaning, living as encrypted or secret identifications long after the material conditions that shaped them have altered’ (Harris, 2003: 111). And also, I would add, lived in new material conditions, whether those of aspiration and success, or of the loss and insecurity that deindustrialisation and precarity have brought about. This brings out the multiply configured aspects of class, as something lived both consciously and unconsciously, linked to past, present and future, and entwined with many other factors. These multiple identifications provide the ground for various displacements, for example, from ‘race’ to class or vice versa, sometimes reducing one to the other, at other times holding the multiplicity involved. Displacements can also involve gender and sexuality, as other writings (e.g. Layton, 2004b; Maguire, 2004; Botticelli, 2007), beyond the scope of this book, suggest. Eribon’s memoir is valuable in exploring in detail how his sexuality and his class origins (as working class) played out against and alongside each other (Eribon, 2013).
Ainslie, basing himself on Layton’s ideas of normative unconscious processes, argues that powerful psychological processes are mobilised in relation to those who may be perceived as below or above oneself in the social hierarchy, involving both class and skin colour (Ainslie, 2009). He examines in many clinical examples how such processes are at play in the experiences of immigration, where pre-existing class experiences, often ‘deeply encoded’ and significantly unconscious, are activated by contact with new social circumstances. For one man, from a lower working-class background with significant early losses, his experiences of class prejudice and rejection carried over unconsciously into the immigrant context with its many narcissistic injuries. Ainslie writes how ‘his immersion… in American culture and his financial success served to counter the desperation of his class origins… but he could not erase their lingering self-representational implications’ (Ainslie, 2009: 9). He remained intensely ambivalent and distrustful of his family’s acculturation. However, the impact of the many injuries attendant upon immigration lessened through therapy work on the links between his experiences of social marginalisation and familial rejection. Ainslie (2011) provides further examples of how immigrants travel with their social class, whether upwardly or downwardly mobile. In one, a woman moved from a lower-class milieu in America into an upper-class one in another country where her white skin colour was highly valued. Despite the social gratification she obtained which, according to Ainslie, she clung to defensively, this left her with extreme underlying vulnerability and anxiety, and led to devaluing those ‘below’ her. For another woman, immigration brought downward mobility, which resulted in rage and prejudice against fellow immigrants who came from a lower social class in her country of origin, from whom she now felt less socially distant. This, Ainslie says, created regressive anxieties and intra-psychic tensions, which had been held in check by the previous social structure in which her family had lived. Altogether, Ainslie concludes, class identifications are more important and more charged than usually thought, such that changes in class position, even if desired, may feel threatening and lead to regressive responses.
Keith Armitage (2009) provides a clinical account in which he views class as figuring as a site of displacement for other unspeakable anxieties and historic traumas. He argues that too often class is understood not in terms of the conflict inherent in our systems of capitalist production and economic life, but rather is abstracted, understood merely as difference, located in terms only of personal narrative and ‘heritage’. Structural class antagonisms and conflicts of interest are depoliticised, which reaffirms the necessity for accounts that go beyond difference.
Armitage sees the clinical consequences of this as that when class is spoken about it is often to indicate some unlocalisable, unspeakable failure, as an inability to fulfil some norm or ideal. His example concerns a mixed-‘race’ young man with a white, originally well-off father who had fallen on hard economic times, and a black mother who had given up her work to have children. He was privately educated at a school where he was bullied and isolated because, he said, there were no other children like him, by which he meant ‘lower middle class’. At other times when he was talking about perceived inadequacies on his part or experienced injustices, he would also refer this to class. When Armitage suggested that perhaps ‘race’ was also involved, he was taken aback and alarmed. As the therapy progressed, and with the emergence of a preoccupation with a significant black figure, the patient began gradually to be able to speak about ‘race’ and racism, the silences about this in his own family, and the difficulty of being the black son of a white, now dead, father, whereas Armitage says: ‘The dynamics of identification across “race” could never be spoken of’ (Armitage, 2009: 61), to be displaced instead into class issues, in this case the downward mobility of the family.
Armitage’s account also illustrates the importance in a psychoanalytic context of being able to move between the material and the fantasised status of these categories, the social and the intra-psychic. Different intersections of class and race with each other have been threaded through many of the clinical examples of this book. This is not to suggest that they act similarly in the formations of psyches or socially, despite the many entwinements. It is important to maintain the specificity of the historical processes that create and sustain racism and those that perpetuate class systems, not conflate them, at the same time as recognising their conjunctures and intersections. Intergenerational transmission and forms of resistance also take different, if sometimes, allied forms.
This chapter has delineated a multiplicity of psychoanalytic approaches where class has a presence in clinical work. Relational writings have much to offer in understanding how therapy relationships may be structured by social hierarchies and inequality, and by the processes of splitting, projection and disavowal that may ensue. These, if not simply enacted, can offer important understandings about how class structures and pervades relationships, consciously and unconsciously. I have argued however that, important and productive as this has been, it is limited by the (unintended) tendency to re-psychologise social forces, and by its focus mainly on difference. As Layton herself writes: ‘Whilst relational psychoanalysis makes more space for integrating the psychic and the social than perhaps any other version of contemporary psychoanalysis… much of it still participates in the same depoliticizing and decontextualizing that pervade most dominant American discourses’ (Layton, 2004a: 243). Clinical work, rather, needs to be better informed by social and political understandings (as much of Layton’s in fact is) in order to adequately take account of the ways in which the material and social world impinges on and forms people, in particular the many far-reaching inequalities it creates and reinforces. Class, in other words, should not be seen only as difference, however powerfully these differences become psychologically elaborated and operative, as so much literature attests they do. The materiality and the embodiments of class, and the historical legacies at work, all need to find a place in psychoanalytic thinking. The clinical and psychosocial work addressed here and in previous chapters, on the traumatic effects of early and current class experiences, serve as useful indicators of this.
Furthermore, relational psychoanalysis is founded on a rejection and discarding of much classical psychoanalysis, characterised by its writers as drive theory or one-person psychologies. I take this problematic up further in the final chapter. It is clear however that any greater incorporation of the social world into psychoanalysis does require a form of theory that can address how this world impinges upon and constitutes us, a reorientation towards what precedes us and what shapes our subjecthood. Hartman (see p. 148) suggests that Laplanche’s concept of ‘enigmatic messages’ – the unconsciousness of the other, and their otherness to themselves – could illuminate how class, as conveyed through his father’s anxiety and wounded body, was transmitted enigmatically to him. In taking this suggestion further, I propose that Laplanche’s reorientation of psychoanalysis can, at least schematically, provide the basis of a greater incorporation of the social world into psychoanalysis. Laplanche throughout criticises the recentring or ipso-centredness that he sees Freudian theory slipping into, despite its foundational impetus in decentring the subject. Rather, he proposes, through detailed critique and extensive rewriting of much of Freud’s work, a reorientation towards the primacy and the agency of the other as a fully constituted subject. We saw an example of this in Chapter 3 (see p. 41) in Laplanche’s critique of Freud’s scotomisation of a working-class figure, part of my argument about how class became extruded. This reorientation creates a theoretical space, as I elaborate further in Chapter 10, which could be taken up to understand in psychoanalytic terms the forces of the social world, although Laplanche himself does not suggest this. Part of Laplanche’s reorientation of psychoanalysis is also to propose that drives are not primary, and do not come only from internal sources, but are shaped by what impinges on us, and our responses to that. In doing so he provides a way of not having to discard drive theory in order to accommodate the social world, and also suggests detailed ways in which that world can be seen as shaping us, as Chapter 10 pursues further.
1 The different class categories are not spelled out here (nor do they need to be) but Layton’s use of ‘upper’ class may relate more to the US context than the UK one. Whatever the precise definitions, the import of class distinction, especially in relation to poor and working-class people, is clear.
2 Whereby until the advent of comprehensives, and in many places afterwards, children were segregated by a selective examination at age eleven.
3 Which may be the case in some families, see for example Chapter 6, p. 110.
4 ‘Interpellation’ is a term taken from Althusser to capture the ways ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions, constitutes the nature of individual subjects’ identities.
5 One can now only be impressed at the existence of such an organisation, founded at a time of considerable left-wing activity and administered through various unions.
6 Laplanche and Pontalis define introjection as: ‘In phantasy, the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities from the “outside” to the “inside” of himself’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973). The authors point out that while akin to identification it is also close in meaning to incorporation with its bodily model, underlining the unmentalised nature of introjects.
7 Defined as the process whereby intersubjective relations are transformed into intra-subjective ones. Often used interchangeably with introjection, it is also distinct in referring only to a relationship that is transposed, rather than an imago.
8 However, at the present time, with the impact of the global crisis and of austerity politics, many younger people are now unable to acquire the standard of living of the previous generation, however modest, and are effectively downwardly mobile. It will be interesting to see what these experiences bring to therapy – if they can afford it.
Adorno, T. (1967) ‘Sociology and psychology (Part II)’, New Left Review 1(47): 79–97.
Ainslie, R. (2009) ‘Social class and its reproduction in immigrants’ construction of self’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 14: 213–24.
Ainslie, R. (2011) ‘Immigration and the psychodynamics of class’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 28: 560–8.
Altman, N. (1995/2010) The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens. New York: Routledge.
Armitage, K. (2009) ‘Young, lower middle class and black’, Sitegeist 3: 51–64.
Bodnar, S. (2004) ‘Remember where you come from: Dissociative process in multicultural individuals’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 14: 581–603.
Botticelli, S. (2007) ‘The return of the repressed: Class in psychoanalytic process’. In Suchet, M., Harris, A. and Aron, L. (eds) Relational Psychoanalysis: Vol. 3 New Voices. Hillsdale: Analytic Press.
Dimen, M. (1994) ‘Money, love, and hate: Contradiction and paradox in psychoanalysis’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 4(1): 69–100.
Dimen, M. (2003) ‘Keep on keepin’ on: Alienation and trauma’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4: 93–103.
Eribon, D. (2013) Returning to Reims. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Fallenbaum, R. (2003) ‘The injured worker’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4: 72–92.
Freud, S. (1909) ‘Family romances’. In Strachey, J. (ed) (1955) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9: 237–41, London: Hogarth.
Gurney, P. (2009) ‘The ac(ci)dental tourist’, Sitegeist: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy 3: 41–50.
Hanley, L. (2016) Respectable: The Experience of Class. London: Allen Lane.
Harris, A. (2003) ‘Working in the trenches: Commentary on Ruth Fallenbaum’s paper’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4: 104–12.
Harris, A. (2009) ‘The socio-political recruitment of identities’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19(2): 138–47.
Hartman, S. (2007) ‘Class unconscious: From dialectical materialism to relational material’. In Suchet, M., Harris, A. and Aron, L. (eds) Relational Psychoanalysis: Vol. 3 New Voices. Hillsdale: Analytic Press.
Holmes, D. (1997) ‘The analyst in the inner city’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 45: 644–8.
Holmes, D. (2006) ‘The wrecking effects of race and social class on self and success’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75: 215–35.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth.
Layton, L. (2004a) ‘Dreams of America/American dreams’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 14: 233–54.
Layton, L. (2004b) ‘Relational no more: Defensive autonomy in middle class women’, Annual of Psychoanalysis 32: 29–42.
Layton, L. (2006a) ‘Attacks on linking’. In Layton, L., Hollander, N. and Gutwill, S. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. London: Routledge.
Layton, L. (2006b) ‘That place gives me the Heebie Jeebies’. In Layton, L., Hollander, N. and Gutwill, S. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. London: Routledge.
Layton, L. (2008) ‘What divides the subject? Psychoanalytic reflection on subjectivity, subjection and resistance’, Subjectivity 22: 60–72.
Layton, L. (2014a) ‘Grandiosity, neoliberalism and neoconservatism’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 34: 463–74.
Layton, L. (2014b) ‘Performing Class, Enacting Distinction’. Unpublished paper.
Maguire, M. (2004) Men, Women, Passion and Power. London: Routledge.
Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1972) The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf.
Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Women. London: Virago.
Young-Bruehl, E. (1998) The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.