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I am delighted to have the opportunity to review Joanna Ryan’s book, Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality. Ryan’s project is to explore the glaring absence of any serious consideration of social class within psychoanalysis. Her stated intention is to move us to toward becoming what she calls a “class-inclusive psychoanalysis”. I couldn’t agree more. Having come to psychoanalysis from a working-class familial background, and having written about it (Corpt, 2013), I know the effort it requires, both internally and externally, to secure a sense of legitimacy with regard to this topic. From the very beginning, Ryan personally locates herself in her project which, to my mind, is the only way to authentically take on this topic. Ryan explores the way class lives in the culture and practice of what she refers to as the psychoanalytic therapies. Ryan is wise to use psychoanalytic therapies, thereby avoiding the built-in bias at work when we attempt to keep psychoanalysis proper from the rest of psychoanalytically informed clinical practice. I’m also appreciative of her decision to conduct what she calls a “smaller-scale exploration” by tackling this subject from the ground up instead of from big ideas down.
Ryan begins by excavating our history to find the root causes of this blind spot. By walking us through our history, she engages the reader as both witness and bystander to the very act of psychoanalysis severing itself from its early “socialist, revolutionary, democratic beliefs”, and from our ancestors who thought otherwise – Fenichel, Reich, Eitingon, and, yes, the early Freud. This “disarticulation of psychoanalysis from the social world leading to its disavowal of class” (p. 34) is carefully spelled out in subsequent chapters. Particularly stunning is Ryan’s gathering of material from a host of scholars both in and outside of the field who have identified the erasure of the classed subject from Freud’s writings. This stunning chapter alone should be req