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A conference on ‘Class and Psychoanalysis’ was held at University College London by The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in conjunction with The Freud Museum on Sunday 25 October 2009. With 140 attendees, it was very well supported, delivering seven speakers after Stephen Gee's introduction as Chair of The Site and Course Convener. Those contributing were Keith Armitage (in training at The Site), Stephen Frosh (Head of Department of Psychosocial Studies and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College), Kirsty Hall (Member of the Arbours Association), Paul Gurney (Member of The Philadelphia Association), Alan Pope (Member of The Philadelphia Association), Sally Sales (Member of The Site for Psychoanalysis) and Jeffrey Weeks (Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University). The speakers were followed by a lively plenary. Below is a snapshot of my impressions of the day, rather than any attempt to give a full résumé.
One of the main challenges was whether we as a profession can, paradoxically, examine our tendency towards silence about the continuing significance of class as a large-scale oppressor, even as we remain complicit with both its articulation and oppressive activities. Weeks* suggested that, despite the classed nature of the unconscious itself, the subject of class was not really an operational category for Freud, while, for Pope, the whole of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, starting with Freud, is based on the world-views of people from more privileged backgrounds than large numbers of society. The profession, he claimed, might present itself as egalitarian, but perhaps it posits the specificity of social background and class culture as, in many ways, so much window-dressing to the greater constructs of a universal theory. The general feeling was that some inroads have been made in terms of gender, race and sexual orientation, but very little in terms of class.
Stephen Frosh delivered a scholarly and, for me, blistering critiqu