This is the third issue of Sitegeist and comprises a collection of the papers that made up the conference Class and Psychoanalysis held on October 25th, 2009. The juxtaposition in this title emerges from a felt disquiet about the vanishing or elision of a fundamental experience within and outside the clinic – that of class, and a need to examine how psychoanalysis can investigate this experience even as it remains complicit with the articulations of class and their suppression.
This raises a central question that is not easy to answer: what is class? The mere enunciation of the term seems to throw us into psychoanalytic territory: mechanisms of resistance, displacement and disavowal are immediately activated. ‘Class’ is obviously there as a determining feature of ‘life chances’ and of the colour of experience, yet to point at it seems to mark one as either old-fashioned – surely class has been undermined as the dominant distinction within society? – or as culpably ‘chippy’ – what special grievance lies below what is always described as ‘the politics of envy’? There seems to be an investment in the denial of the pertinence or power of class. At the same time there is an awareness of how class operates; it suffuses what we might describe as ‘popular understanding’. However, a central feature of our society is resistance to and disavowal of the phenomenon when it is pointed out. ‘Yes, we know that 7% of the population still own 84% of the national wealth; we know that social mobility has frozen over the last thirty years; we know that educational opportunities and life satisfaction are skewed in favour of the minority that go to public school, but …‘.
The classic Marxist definition of class in terms of a relation to the means of production, ownership or non-ownership, is only a useful beginning and leaves us somewhat blind in the face of the complex class order that a country like Britain has developed and constructed over the last half-millennium. Perhaps this is part of the problem: economic power manifests itself at the phenomenal level as rank, status and hierarchy,
and thus in culture in general. The experience of class is the experience of its significations; perhaps there is no more powerful expression of class than the passage between such sets of significations or their complex reconfigurations with wholesale economic transformation. Such (re)significations are supported by powerful productions and inflections of affects, and experienced through the unfolding of fantasy. In the case of the disavowal of class, the projection of envy onto those who question its existence or its naturalised order as meritocracy is a possible clue to the ways in which envy runs deep as a major current in the reproduction of our social and economic order. Together with greed, a particular form of narcissistic jouissance in consumption, contempt, anger and blame towards the disadvantaged, anxiety and insecurity over the precariousness of economic position…. It is not surprising that intense affects are generated which people manage with difficulty or fail to manage at all. These experiences lead them to the clinic, and produce a demand for treatment. Inequality is lived out with all of the damage, the hidden and not so hidden ‘injuries of class’ that Sennett speaks about but is also given meaning through fantasy and embraced or resisted (or both at once) by subjects who learn how to live their ‘superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ and how to justify or reject such positionings.
Psychoanalysis would thus seem to be central to an understanding of how class is lived and reproduced in through its experiential enactment. Bourdieu has alerted us to how ‘habitus’ – that second nature which constitutes the lived unity of subject and object – is socially marked. He relies on an expanded psychoanalytic understanding of drive and institutional satisfaction to generate this notion. But contemporary psychoanalysis itself seems more cautious, even diffident about trying to think through the articulations of class, signification and affect. There are perhaps historical, theoretical and more properly psychoanalytic reasons for this dereliction, all of which are alluded to or explored in more detail in the papers that follow.
Jeffrey Weeks looks at the various rapprochements between psychoanalysis and Marxism throughout the 20th century. From Freud's own politics and its left inflections in Vienna and Berlin, the political somatics of Wilhelm Reich, the complex re-readings of Freud in Marcuse and the trans-Freudian rhizomatics of Deleuze and Guattari, the contradictions and dissonances of such encounters emerge in all their pathos.
Joanna Ryan, by contrast, looks at how class is elided and disavowed in the very production of psychoanalytic theory itself. She takes as an exemplary instance Freud's case study, The Wolf Man, and shows that a splitting through a disavowed class optic of the figure of the mother both registers the class environment of Freud's patients and reveals a certain blindness in Freud to the conditions and implications of his own insights and their loss. Both Paul Gurney and Keith Armitage bring us to the clinic, and at the same time reflect on the ways in which, in postwar Britain, class has become overcoded through race. Gurney examines the different signifiers of class on display in the clinic – especially voice and accent – and how they are perceived and fantasised about by clients. The class presumptions of ‘whiteness’ are explored as are Gurney's own discomforts with them and the asymmetries that are played out in practice. Keith Armitage discusses how class, gender and race are spaces of displacement, where the anxieties that emerge with the blurring of distinctions in one can be played out through another. Armitage's client, ‘Giles’ lives in a world in which ambiguous class-belonging and racial uncertainty can articulate but also disguise each other; both complicate questions of gender identification and identity. Alan Pope revisits a founding document of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart's 1959 The Uses of Literacy, noting how its already nostalgic vision of collective class identity and culture, with its configuration of deference, local pride and reciprocity contrasts with more mediatised representations of the post working classes, which are internalised by these new subjects and enjoyed in often detrimental ways by a mass audience: Pope seems to pinpoint a shift in what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’. The attendant and variegated forms of damage inflicted by class societies are then explored.
Shifting focus, Kirsty Hall looks at the ways in which class emerges as a vector of policy-making, one which unconsciously frames debates about the value and appropriateness of different therapies and prevents a clear-eyed examination of their respective claims. She also looks at the ways in which fantasy is a central aspect of economic and government ‘rationality’, something overlooked in the discussions about the current financial crisis and perhaps also in the responses to government strategies for mental health. Finally, Stephen Frosh discusses the imbrication of psychoanalysis as institution and practice within an unequal society.
Beginning with a reflection on the persistent ‘errancy’ of psychoanalysis, its drive to forget its own most radical insights, Frosh rehearses some of the arguments of Adorno, Butler and Zizek, before considering the role of money in the psychoanalytic encounter: mediation, transaction and exchange. Although he does not use the word, it is clear that for Frosh the several logics of fetishism are in play here. Nevertheless, the ‘session’ cannot be immune to the effects of the wider structures of asymmetric power and advantage. The provocative anecdote about the ‘luxury’ of an examined unconscious at the end of the paper raises serious questions that flow on from Hall's considerations on disdain for particular therapeutic practice.
In their various ways all these papers reveal that the articulation of class and psychoanalysis is long overdue, and that this particular encounter should be the first of many.