Psychoanalysis, Class Divisions, and the Gift Economy

In writing about class divisions within psychoanalysis and what a gift economy affords this problem, I utilize a spinning method of knowing. This is similar to “yarning,” the collective knowledge and decision making conveyed in the book Sand Talk (Yunkaporta, 2020), or “weaving” multiple lines of knowing together, as put forward in Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013). These examples represent Indigenous forms of knowing, which are not one-directional and are altogether less linear than Western argumentation. Although I am a white woman and have no claim to direct Indigenous knowledge streams, the form they take is recognized to be innate. The decentered form is one I find necessary to developing a model of psychoanalytic care that blends the logic of the gift economy with the current realities of the market economy, and spinning is the way I have come to understand it. By spinning, I mean to suggest a knowing that comes through circularity, a deep connection to multiple threads in a repetitive, recursive fashion. Such as: What is experienced in mothering? As a citizen affected by, and capable of effecting, public policy? In being part of the more-than-human world and observing natural processes? In clinical work, with each case bringing its own idiosyncratic language? From our subjective centers, we can remain grounded yet spin through all of these experiences and identities which in turn shape a psychoanalytic vision. In this spinning form itself there is a gift—back and forth—without expectation but nevertheless with generativity.

For starters, what is a gift? Here I follow on Genevieve Vaughan's (2015) work on the maternal gift economy. It is distinct from the market economy based on monetary exchange and value determined by supply and demand. Rather, a gift economy is based on a recognition of community, disbursement of resources in the community in real time according to who has need and who has excess, and a connection to the inherent and unique