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Joanna Ryan has written a wide-ranging study of class and the failure of psychoanalysis to engage with this significant aspect of personal identity and lived experience. One might wonder if this is simply because when Freud was developing his theories he only lived and worked with people in similar social circumstances to himself, but this was not the case; he, like all of his contemporaries and the majority of his patients, had a nurse/nanny and other servants in both his family of origin and in his own household. Nor is it the case that he failed to see the differences or recognize the ways in which the relationship with one's nurse, who was often the primary carer, impacted on the psyche.
The author makes specific reference to Freud's emotional disturbance at the sudden disappearance of his own nurse and states: ‘The leap in Freud's text from these vivid memories and associations concerning his nurse to the bald, generalized statement of the Oedipus complex, without even a paragraph break, is indeed an aporia, into which the working class employee is propelled and thus abjected’ (p. 39). Ryan also provides an account of Freud's analysis of the Wolfman, who was compulsively attracted to working class women, and points out that Freud ‘suggests at this point that if all these servant girls were substitutes for the figure of his intellectually superior sister whom he had to forgo, then an intention to debase was contributing to his object choice’ (p. 43, emphasis in the original). This with the accompanying footnote that ‘Freud is pursuing an argument with Alfred Adler and his postulation of the primacy of power and prerogative … Adler, who worked contemporaneously and with a mainly working-class population of patients, described a symptomatic culture of inferiority complex, resulting from their socially underprivileged positions’ (p. 54).
Essentially, the author's argument is that Freud was engaged in disavowal and negation of both the women concerned and the importan