I argue in what follows that class is not so much excluded from psychoanalysis as elided and disavowed. That is to say, it is there but not there. The naming of disavowal and elision as the processes by which knowledge of race and racialised difference have been extruded from psychoanalytic theory was initially put forward by Walton (2001) in a re-reading of a classic text on femininity. She highlights how, in Riviere's 1929 account, racialised fantasy and difference form part of the content of the patient's material but not part of either the analyst's interpretation or theorising. She sees this invoking but ignoring of the various racialised identifications and desires as serving the purpose of a universalising account of gender and sexuality that takes no account of significant social formations and powerful social imaginaries. The significance of disavowal is that it involves the holding of two incompatible positions at the same time—a refusal to recognise the reality of a (traumatic) perception—such that neither position can influence the other, and in classical terms, it leads to a splitting and thus weakening of the ego. In the disciplinary field, we can see how such disavowal isolates and weakens psychoanalytic knowledge from the influence of other (disavowed) sources of knowledge, such as that of powerful social forces. I attempt to show how such processes of disavowal operate in relation to class within the psychoanalytic canon and discuss what can be gained from other disciplines.
To focus on disavowal is not to ignore the many exclusions which psychoanalytic discourse and practice have performed over time in relation to class: the many ways in which psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy have been primarily the province of the middle and upper classes, as a matter of both perception and largely fact. Nor is it to minimise the far-reaching impact of its various implicit class based
values and assumptions. However this class inflected history is more complex and varied than a simple exclusionist story would allow—see for example Danto's (2005) detailed account in Freud's Free Clinics of the establishment of low cost and free psychoanalytic clinics in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. These were motivated by the desire of many left and socialist psychoanalysts of the time to widen the class basis of those benefiting from psychoanalysis, along with a commitment to the liberatory potential of psychoanalysis. Since then, there have been many such projects, of diverse kinds, with varying political and psychoanalytic standpoints, in many countries and communities, a history of which has yet to be written. To mention just two such initiatives, Hoggett and Lousada (1985) describe a Marxist and object relations approach to such a project, and Altman (1995) provides a contemporary American account from social democratic and relational perspectives. All such projects provoke many, mainly unaddressed, questions about the sociopolitical status of psychoanalysis, and they often lack any sufficiently informed class analysis. They are nonetheless motivated by a desire for class inclusion, however this is understood.
Botticelli claims, At the mention of class, all progressive heads reverently bow - yet within psychoanalysis, few can think of anything to say about it' (2007: 121). This remark pinpoints the moral ambivalences and the complex emotions that can surround any discussion of class, both of which can inhibit fruitful thought. However I would contend that there is often a wealth of unarticulated experience, knowledge and thoughtfulness on the part of many psychoanalytic practitioners about class in therapy. In my study (Ryan 2006), I show how class was often seen and felt to be at play within psychoanalytic practice. The invitation to therapists from various class backgrounds to elaborate and reflect on class within the clinical context was met mainly with relief, and an outpouring of material and creative thinking. These rich experiences provided food for thought and reflection about the presence and impact of class within the therapy relationship, and also in the lives of the therapists and their patients. Much complexity and intensity of feeling surfaced, along with many examples on how class affected the transference-countertransference matrix. This palpable presence contrasted with the reported absence of discussion of class in many UK trainings and other professional contexts. This silencing and its exclusionary
effects, was much commented on. Such an absence of explicit discussion echoes the absence from the main body of psychoanalytic theory of any attempts to understand how class can be part of the construction of the psyche, how class positionings can structure conscious and unconscious dynamics, and how we become classed subjects. It also reflects the absence of any reflection on the class structures and values of psychoanalysis itself and the impact of this on those not from the dominant class.
This silence and paucity of theorisation about class is increasingly being commented on and challenged in other studies that attempt to understand class inflected dynamics in various clinical situations e.g. Botticelli (2007); Hartmann ; and Mitchison (2009). This extraordinary silence contrasts with the rich literature about class in other fields—in fiction, (auto)biography, social and oral history, sociology, politics, cultural and psycho-social studies, all of which could be drawn on to inform psychoanalytic approaches. We could ask whether there is something specific to psychoanalysis which makes class so often unspeakable.
Here I consider some of the historic disciplinary constrictions that formed the extrusion of class from the central theories and concepts of psychoanalysis and from its notions of child development. In trying to produce a more class inflected reading of psychoanalytic theory some basic questions of conceptualisation arise. To attempt to formulate what Bourdieu in Distinction (1984) calls a truly social psychoanalysis, is to encounter the old individual-society dualism, and the modern psychosocial versions of this. Concepts are needed that do not at some point reduce to one or other side of the dualisms, that adequately capture what Walkerdine et al. (2001) call the imbrication of the psychological, social and material. Hartmann , from a relational perspective, attempts to avoid such dualisms by invoking a third place, which he names the class unconscious, where the material and the psychic supposedly interact; however, such a proliferation of entities only displaces the problem. This paper does not attempt to directly address these questions but rather traces the processes and consequences of the ways in which class is disavowed from the initial theories of psychoanalysis and how it returns in altered forms.
Class is a much contested category, and class ascriptions are often variable, complex and disputable. I am assuming the hybridity, heterogeneity and historical particularity of class categorisations but want to foreground the historical and social facts of the processes of class distinctions, as evidenced in The Civilising Process (Elias ; 1994) and Bourdieu (1984). The emphasis on class as a total figuration leads to including the middle or upper classes as part of class, and to studying the processes by which class positions and distinctions are maintained and reproduced. The inclusion of the socially dominant term (as with whiteness or heterosexuality) enables the often taken for granted dominant positions to be explicitly interrogated. To do so is not in any way to minimise the huge life determining differences—material, economic, social, psychological, etc.—that accrue from differently classed positions, but rather to approach class relationally. Until recently there has been very little academic tradition of explicitly or critically engaging with the middle classes, as opposed to the extensive sociological and psychological literature, variously motivated, on working class lives. However Savage (2000), Walkerdine et al. (2001), and Reay (2005; 2008), for example, all illustrate what can be gained in the understanding of the processes of class division and reproduction, and the personal reverberations of this, by also studying the middle classes. As Reay says, ‘… [C]lass is produced in a complex dynamic between classes with each class being the other's “Other” (2005: 26)‘. In the endeavour to think psychoanalytically about class, we have to be able to interrogate the middle/upper class positionings of its dominant discourses, as well as understand the processes of class othering that permeate its texts and practices. Furthermore, my own biographical positioning as middle class means that I have a particular interest in making explicit what is so often unquestioned in the production of the kinds of class subjectivities that characterise the more privileged classes.
Class was palpably and extensively present in the family lives of many of Freud's patients and in Freud himself. The presence of working class employees within the bourgeois families that Freud's patients mainly came from introduces a significant class presence into the care and development of these children. This is only one context in which class may have been experienced, but it is a key one for psychoanalysis, since this is the context for the formulation of Freud's theories of sexuality
and the oedipal complex. Furthermore, Elias' epic study of class signifiers concerns topics such as hygiene, manners, bodily comportment, clothes taste, many of which have a bodily aspect inscribed early in the care of children, and one which is often unconsciously carried, although instantly recognised. This is part of the territory of the embodiment of class. Hartmann makes a strong case for also understanding the importance of parental work as a conveyor of enigmatic often unconscious messages about class to children through the bodies and affects of their parents.
There are numerous references in various of Freud's case histories and also in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900) to nurses and governesses, working or lower middle class servants and other employees in the households of middle and upper class families. In his letters to Fliess, Freud analyses his own significant early relationship with his nurse, ‘The prime originator of my troubles…’, but also his ‘means of living and going on living’, when his younger siblings were born (Freud 1897: 261-262). These nurses, nannies and nursemaids often had much more bodily and intimate relationships with the various children than with their own parents. Gallop argues that the most insistent locus of intrusion into the idealised family—which she names as the intrusion of the symbolic into the imaginary—is the maid/governess/nurse, whom Cixous, according to Gallop, calls ‘the hole in the social cell’ (Gallop 1982: 144).
Swann (1974), in an attempt to historicise the beginning of psychoanalysis, argues that the figure of the nurse not only played a crucial role in Freud's own development but also in the formulation of his theories. The delegation of early child raising to working class employees creates for the child a doubled and split maternal object, such that the distant mother comes to be idealised and rendered asexual, whereas the nurse is construed as ‘bad’ mother, the source of sexual arousal, humiliation and shame, but also of affection and dependence. This, in such a context, could be one of the prime sites for upper middle class children of absorbing class positionings and differences. Swann argues that the denial of the nurse's importance and the child's attachment to and dependence on her, the depiction of her as a degraded and inferior person, lead to her exclusion from the subsequent theory.
McClintock in Imperial Leather (McClintock 1995) names this as a disavowal of class. She argues that this allows Freud to found his Oedipal theory on the elision of the working class female employee, depriving her of any theoretical status and presenting the Oedipal account as free of any economic or class structures, as natural and universal. The affectionate attachments to and identifications with working class nursemaids etc., are not given their own importance and the doubling and splitting of the maternal figure this may occasion is neglected. McClintock alludes to the nurse as ‘the repudiated working-class other: the expelled abject …’ (1995: 89) who returns to haunt the dreams of Freud himself and also his patients. Servants are seen merely as parental surrogates, that is, temporary intruders into the ‘family romance’, and not themselves as major sources of splitting and conflictual identifications and desires.
One of the clearest examples of this writing out of class from the theory, and its return in another form, is the Freud's case study of The Wolf Man (Freud, 1918). This case, the site of Freud's main theorisation of the primal scene, is also the site of a striking erasure from the theory of the social relations so vividly portrayed in the descriptive case material. The racial (and class) disavowals of this text have received some contemporary critique by Calvo using post-colonial theory. He argues for a reading such that, ‘… [T]he subject is constituted through fantasy scenarios in which difference is conceived as a tangled web of sexual, racial and class positions’ (Calvo 2008: 57), rather than via the traditional psychoanalytic dyadic structures.
The Wolf Man came from an aristocratic Russian family; one of his symptoms was a compulsive attraction to working class women. Freud's account contains many references to various nurses and female servants who played key roles in the child's life and also, it seems, in the construction of his sexual fantasies and later practices. At the outset Freud describes how little the mother had to do with the children of the family, and that there were several substantial and crucial periods when both parents were absent. There are multiple references throughout the text to the various caring and educational roles that his nurse performed, and
also to the roles that various governesses and tutors carried out. There are striking fewer to the mother. The boy was mainly looked after by a nurse, an old peasant woman, ‘…[W]ith an untiring affection for him. He served her as a substitute for a son of her own who had died young (Freud 1918: 241)‘. It would seem that Freud is making some reference here to the nature of the nurse's desire for the boy, which may well have been crucial to their relationship, framed as it was for her by her loss, but giving her no further status as a desiring subject, radier as only an employee.
In Freud's account, the nurse, ‘his beloved Nanya’ (a phrase Freud often repeats) becomes an important object of the boy's libidinal strivings frustrations and conflicts. There is ample evidence of the intensity and loyalty of the boy's feelings towards her, in the face of criticism, undermining and contempt expressed by the governess (another employee) and also his sister. Indeed, it seems that the marked change in his behaviour as a child occurred during the period of conflict between these two adult employees, (also associated by Freud to the earlier seduction by his sister carried out whilst telling him sexualised stories about his Nanya). Freud sees the boy's masturbation in front of his Nanya as attempts to seduce her, only to be met with refusal, disapproval and threats from her. He then begins a secret search for another sexual object. Freud describes the boy's regression to a sadistic-anal pregential organisation in which ‘his principal object was his beloved Nanya’, whom he tormented. The earlier seduction by his sister had, Freud says, forced him into a passive sexual role, and he ‘pursued a path from his sister via his Nanya to his father (Freud 1918: 257)‘. Later Freud describes how he only recovered from the anxiety with which the wolves dream ended by having his Nanya with him. Freud renders this as a flight back from father to nurse, as objects of his desires. In all these many important ways, the nurse rather than the mother appears as the cardinal female object of the boy's early emotional life, yet she is never rendered as anything more than a substitute for the mother.
As the case narrative proceeds with its constructions and reconstructions, another employee, Grusha, enters the account as formative in the Wolf Man's subsequent sexual compulsions. This scene was arrived at by a chain of associations (involving another peasant girl) from a screen memory. Freud describes the scene with Grusha as the first experience
the Wolf Man could really remember, arrived at ‘without any conjectures or intervention’ by Freud, which contrasts with the many conjectures in the text surrounding the alleged witnessing of the putative primal scene between the parents. Freud links the boy's sexual excitement at the sight of Grusha, on her knees scrubbing the floor ‘with her buttocks projecting’, to the posture his mother allegedly assumed in the earlier (hypothesised) scene of copulation from behind with the father, such that Grusha ‘became his mother to him’ and ‘like his father … he behaved in a masculine way towards her’ by urinating on the floor. He earlier remarks, as suggested by a linguistic confusion, how Grusha ‘had become fused with his mother’ in the Wolf Man's memory. Freud continues, ‘The compulsion which proceeded from the primal scene was transferred on to this scene with Grusha (Freud 1918: 332)‘. Freud then goes on to describe the subsequent compulsiveness with which the Wolf Man fell in love with several peasant girls in similar postures and occupations to Grusha, and how this compulsion dominated his love choices. Notably, Freud remarks that it was not just the posture but also the occupation of the young woman that was to have such a decisive influence on his subsequent conditions of being able to fall in love. In this respect we can see that something associated with class (occupation) has made its mark in the text.
Despite these abundant references to many different employees and to the significant roles of the Nanya and Grusha in the Wolf Man's early childhood, they are only rendered as substitutes or surrogates for the mother, a unidirectional displacement without any theorised significance. Freud preserves the primacy of the constructed primal scene by interpreting the significance of the physical debasement of Grusha's kneeling only in terms of the association to the posture of the mother in the parental coupling, not as something in itself full of emotive social meaning and difference. In conducting this argument, he wants to disprove any greater significance of what he calls the Wolf Man's ‘intention to debase’ (Freud 1918: 338) which he sees as a rival explanation to the primal scene one, an argument he keeps going throughout the text. Freud contends that the Wolf Man did not respond in any fruitful way to this alternative interpretation and concludes that this militates against any over-estimation of such an ‘intention to debase’, rather than the primal scene hypothesis. By invoking an ‘intention to debase’ in this way,
Freud is assuming this as a defining property of class relations on the part of those of the upper classes towards those of the working classes; this idea has some plausible resonance, but it is not elaborated. He returns later to the question of the status of the ‘intention to debase’ in a discussion of the importance of the dumb water carrier who Freud says served the patient as a father-surrogate.
Despite the fact that both parents came to be represented by servants with far reaching effects in the adult life of the Wolf Man, class is not given any significance. ‘A child pays no regard to social distinctions, which have little meaning for him yet; and he classes people of inferior rank with his parents if such people love him as his parents do’ (Freud 1918: 338). This seems a strong statement in one of the founding papers of psychoanalysis—that class differences as such cannot be expected to impinge on or affect a child, and that the alleged ‘inferior rank’ of working class employees will not register. The child's supposed lack of ability to perceive social difference contrasts strongly with his argument a few pages later, in relation to the primal scene hypothesis, that ‘[W]e have rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing what they cannot be given credit for (Freud 1918: 344.).’ Yet the early and formative relationships that the upper class Wolf Man had with working class non-family members are dismissed in favour of the parental couple, at the same time as being extensively described. The question of how a child internalises social differences between significant figures and in the wider world, how class becomes part of the psyche, is rendered a non-question within the canon. This is a form of disavowal, of knowing and not knowing, and is a prime site within psychoanalysis for the elision and extrusion of class.
Calvo rereads the Wolf Man case in the light of the racial transference that occurs at the beginning of the analysis, which he claims is disavowed by Freud and leads to the eliding of the structuring role of racial difference. His analysis is valuable for the ways in which he reads Fanon alongside Freud, to emphasise the ways in which subjects are constituted through powerful social imaginaries and the circulation of fantasies of miscegenation. He links his extensive rereading as regards race also to the elision of class. Calvo considers that Freud overlooked the primal importance of the boy's relations with Grusha and other servants, and the structuring rather than secondary role of social difference. ‘These
distinctions of high/low recur as organising tenets of the Wolf Man's desire, demonstrating that social difference and oedipal scenarios are intertwining fantasies and sites of dense condensation. (Calvo 2008: 62). This is a useful way of describing the complexity of social and individual processes at work, in the constituting of subjects, in which social forces and imaginaries are given a dynamic equivalence with the intrapsychic processes. It is an approach which locates the workings of social formations as part of the earliest structuring of subjectivity, rather than as an externally imposed effect on an already existent psyche.
The challenge is to identify such ‘intertwining fantasies and sites of dense condensation’ in the case of class (Calvo 2008: 62). As only one upper/middle class example, class related debasement is also described in Freud's ‘The universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love’ (Freud 1912). Here Freud observes how the frequent choice of a woman of a lower class by men of higher class is a means to complete sexual satisfaction, inhibited with the respected and respectable woman, a splitting between love and sex that has a class dimension, described but not theorised as to its own importance. Instead the debasement that is attached to sex is seen as coming only from internal sources rather than, or as well as, the social configuration. Here, as in the Wolf Man case, we can see how for upper class white males the class and sexual dynamics are intertwined, and McClintock (1995) provides many other examples from the era in which psychoanalysis was first formulated.
I suggest that Freud's notion of the ‘intention to debase’ whilst problematic in the form of its psychologisation, hints at one aspect of class relations and the ways people are constituted by them that has a powerful social significance, both in its materiality and in being one of the many circulating fantasies about class. Because the ‘intention to debase’ is used as a foil for Freud to disprove, (as a putative alternative to the primal scene hypothesis), the significance of it is easily overlooked—namely that the up/down, inferior/superior aspect of class distinctions is central to many aspects of class experience and class relations, however much we may for other reasons wish to resist this. The Wolf Man case itself suggests the early age at which bodily distinctions between high and low, and the accompanying fantasies, are transformed and intermingled with social distinctions. It is at such a juncture that psychoanalysis turned away from any further exploration of what Reay
has named the ‘psychic landscape of social class’ (Reay 2005). It has thereby disavowed the extensive knowledge that could be garnered from other writings of the kind indicated earlier.
Here I wish to indicate briefly how, as well as the works already cited, some contemporary psycho-social and sociological work uses notions of classed subjects that could be useful for a psychoanalysis that interested itself in class. Sennett and Cobb's classic 1972 work. The Hidden Injuries of Class, illustrates the insidious and powerful ways in which position in the social hierarchy comes to be experienced as an aspect of personal worth, how people feel internally divided by social forces and values that they cannot avoid, with far-reaching effects for the working class families in the study. Skeggs' more recent study, Formations of Class and Gender , shows how class is lived through a mixture of ambivalent emotions, comparisons with others, identifications and resistances to these. She argues that for the working class women in this study the presence of a dialogic (imagined and internalised) other, who judges and disapproves, is a part of the ways class constructs and divides aspects of the self. Sayer in The Moral Significance of Class (2005) illustrates the highly charged and anxious nature of attempts to discuss class in a personalised or subjective way (as opposed to in the wider society). From a philosophical standpoint he identifies a range of emotions, or moral sentiments, that surround class difference, and their relationship (or lack of it) to ideas of moral worth and political and ethical beliefs.
Moral ambivalence, of the kind that class is acknowledged as ‘out there’, but less readily seen as part of ourselves, allows us to deny, minimise and finesse, or else be silenced by, the knowledge of differences and inequalities that are at the heart of class and which have such far reaching effects. In psychoanalysis this disavowal results in a failure to use both the rich experiences of its patients and practitioners, and also the knowledge elaborated elsewhere to bring knowledge of class into psychoanalysis.