It's not uncommon for me to find, when I sit down to prepare a talk or a paper, that I feel I know nothing about the topic I have committed myself to talk or write about. The panic this produces is familiar and disarming, and is usually only ameliorated by scurrying around amongst previous papers looking for a link, or immersing myself in the scholarly literature and laboriously putting something together, jigsaw like, out of what others have written. Always, the panic is about my own lack of knowledge and the processes for dealing with it are to take on the routine craftwork of simply getting on with the job, of doing what an academic is meant to do—reading more carefully and thoroughly, trying to think about what I have read and what I know, and putting it together in a form that can be consumed by others. Speaking and writing are, after all, work; and work has to be done, gone through and laboured at.
This time the panic feels more content-specific, however, and to have to do with something more than the sense of fraudulence that is an intimate companion of most of us who put ourselves forward to be heard—the sense, which may be well-founded, that our claims are based on nothing more than narcissism, to be punctured when one who ‘really knows’ enters the scene. I think, faced with the absence of ideas about how to talk about class, what is added to this everyday scenario is a very particular sense of shame: the shame of not knowing much about something that we should all know about, of having forgotten or omitted to include something important; the shame of routinely speaking from an unanalysed, unreflected-upon class position and not having kept this in mind; the shame of offering lip service to emancipation without engaging fully with the issues that it raises; and behind this, something else, a kind of shame that reflects something humiliating in relations of dominance and submission, of resistance and its lack (or ‘resistance to resistance’
as one of my students insisted on always calling it), of avoidance. Perhaps it is the shame of feeling accused of possessing something one is not entitled to, paralleling another transgenerational shame, of moving away from something and forgetting one was ever there. Or perhaps it relates to some contemporary ideas around recognition and ethical violence, in which the act of occluding the other—of, for instance, treating certain groups of people as somehow invisible, their precarious lives not ‘grievable’, to use Judith Butler's (2008) expression—calls into question one's own standing as a human subject, as one who might be able to speak of others with authority, or at least with integrity.
There is a parallel here with the promise and retreat of psychoanalysis. Let us note at the outset that a certain degree of defensiveness is necessarily endemic to psychoanalysis; that retreat from its truths, such as they are, is built into the fabric of its being. This has been talked about a lot, in terms both of psychoanalytic theory and politics. Many years ago, Russell Jacoby (1975) drew on the language of ‘social amnesia’ to pinpoint a tendency in psychoanalysis to back away from its radical dimension and instead give way to adaptational tendencies that might make it socially acceptable in a professionalised and bureaucratised society. His book, focused on American ego psychology, demonstrated how time and again the most demanding, most difficult ideas of psychoanalysis have given way to a kind of conformist moralism, a common sense which one might argue it is precisely the task of psychoanalysis to disrupt. Writ large, this refers to an overwhelming trend in much psychoanalytic work to normalise, to create another edifice that parallels all the edifices of the disciplines and professionals around it, with grades of seniority and legitimate and illegitimate credentials, with graduation ceremonies and evaluation criteria, and with true and false knowledge. Althusser (1969) long ago identified the class elements in this bourgeoisification of psychoanalysis, and how it meshes with professionalisation and what Lacan (1991) would have called the ‘discourse of the university’: some psychoanalysts, Althusser writes, are,
Only too happy to emerge at last from their theoretical ghetto, to be ‘recognized’ as full members of the great family of psychology, neurology, psychiatry, medicine, sociology, anthropology, philosophy—only too happy to certify
Page 100their practical success with this ‘theoretical’ recognition which at last, after decades of insults and exile, confers on them citizen's rights in the world: the world of science, medicine and philosophy. (153)
Adorno too, identifying the loss of direction in psychoanalysis since Freud as being a matter of a revisionism that has lost the critical edge of social understanding, notes that what happens is a move that leaves untheorised the contradictions in society, and instead develops a mental health view that pushes towards integration of the personality—an impossible (or what should be impossible) aim in a society that is itself contradictory. Attacking this idea, Adorno presents an argument that has become emblematic of his overall critique of the administered society and of a rallying point for those opposed to the psychologisation of contemporary culture:
The well-balanced person who no longer sensed the inner conflict of psychological forces, the irreconcilable claims of id and ego, would not thereby have achieved an inner resolution of social conflicts. He would be confusing his psychic state—his personal good fortune—with objective reality. His integration would be a false reconciliation with an unreconciled world, and would presumably amount in the last analysis to an ‘identification with the aggressor’, a mere character mask of subordination. (Adorno, 1967: 83)
Amongst other things, Adorno is emphasising here the necessity of continued negative critique—perhaps akin to a genuinely ‘analytic’ attitude in which therapy is less significant than ‘truth’—and also the dangers of an adaptational position that has infected psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but which is concerned with reconciling human subjects to an intolerable social reality rather than changing that reality for the better. He writes:
If, for instance, the appeal goes out today for the all-round personality as opposed to the specialization inseparable from the division of labour, this merely sets a premium on
Page 101the undifferentiated, the crude and the primitive, and ultimately exalts the extroversion of the go-getters, those who are atrocious enough to adapt to an atrocious life. Whatever qualities at present genuinely anticipate a more human existence are always simultaneously, in the eyes of the existing order, damaged rather than harmonious things. (Adorno, 1967: 84)
Validating these ‘damaged things’ as in fact commentaries and critiques of social oppression is part of the point; Adorno's argument implies that psychoanalysis, by revealing the impact of social suffering through the psychic domain that it unveils, can contribute to such critique so long as it staves off the temptation to be briskly ‘therapeutic’, to seek integration and harmony of the individual with the social world. The problem, or one problem amongst many, is that holding onto such an austere position—as Adorno did throughout, from his own position of class privilege—is a lonely and hard thing to do; though abandoning it, as most of us are tempted to do, produces the kind of shame that I mentioned before.
More recently than these external commentators, the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1999:60) has dissected what he calls psychoanalysis' tendency towards ‘going-astray’ from its own most radical insights ‘the wrong path taken’ each time it was faced with its own decentring trends, its own revelation that the human subject is not at the centre of its own concerns. Laplanche's reference to the ‘wrong path’ is a technical one, about holding onto the radical awareness of the causal nature of otherness that psychoanalysis makes possible, yet it has another resonance: one in which ‘self-centeredness’ is a mode of conformity, a political self-centredness that backs away from engagement with the other and in doing so loses its principles. The starkest instance of this in the history of psychoanalysis is its failure in Germany to appreciate the implications of Nazism and to take a stand against it, despite the fact that prior to the advent of the Nazis the German Psychoanalytic Society (especially the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) had been a shining beacon of socialist thought and action, offering low cost therapy as well as intellectual leadership in this area. As a consequence, psychoanalysis lost its moral valence, and can be thought of as taking a ‘wrong path’ that was very much a ‘going astray’ (Frosh, 2005). If one is trying to hold
onto what might be called the ‘critical tradition’ in psychoanalysis, which pays full dues to its capacity for resisting conformist pressures, one has to ask about the connections between theoretical ‘going astray’ and such wandering down blind, or at least morally questionable, political alleys. This is one of the issues taken up by Jacoby (1983) in his account of the fate of European psychoanalytic socialism (embodied especially by Otto Fenichel, who had been a leader of the Freudo-Marxist trend in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute before the Nazis came to power) once transplanted into America, so the point here is not only about Nazism, but about all occasions on which psychoanalysis loses its capacity to withstand the bureaucratising and conformist pressures placed upon it. Laplanche comments, ‘One could endlessly demonstrate how the domestication of the unconscious never ceases to operate in Freudian thought, and this with regard to each of the foremost aspects of its alien-ness.’ (Laplanche, 1999: 67). , as well as ‘scientifically’, one might then say that each of its most profound inventions or discoveries is a threat to ease-of-mind, whether personally (as each individual analysand comes across something troubling in their speech to the analyst, for instance the racism that slips out, or the unwanted wish) or ethically/morally, as one comes across a ‘scientific’ claim made by psychoanalysis that disturbs the vision of human subjecthood that one would rather have. In each case, individually or institutionally, there is a tendency to ‘wander’, to back away from the insight that might itself have been painfully won, and take refuge instead in the safety of a knowledge that seems whole and reassuring, but instead is based on a damaging self-willed blindness towards what has already been seen.
Some famous radicals have taken up this point and emphasised the requirements of a ‘return to Freud’ that, as Althusser puts it, is a ‘return to the maturity of Freudian theory, not to its childhood, but to its prime, which is its true youth—we must return to Freud beyond the theoretical childishness, the relapse into childhood in which all or a part of contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly in America, savours the advantages of surrender.’ (Althusser, 1969: 152). The singularity of psychoanalysis, like any other discipline, did not come at the first, when it was in a mode of ‘relapse into childhood, i.e. into the preconceptions of its elders and their descendants’—not just inheriting their preconceptions, but also created according to their desires (as Lacan points out, the
infant is already formed according to the desire of the other); it came later when, at least in part, it could wrest itself free of these preconceptions, but always with the tendency of falling back into them. Althusser identifies this tendency as psychologism and pragmatism, producing an acceptable psychoanalysis that can take its place amongst the bourgeois professions of the soul; not surprisingly, his analysis places the great sacrifice as that of a social perspective, a class perspective, in which the structuring features of sociality are given centrality. The appeal of Lacan here, for Althusser, is precisely in this structuring tendency, despite the abstractness of his language oriented system and, it seems, because of the abstruseness of his writing style, which leaves it able to struggle free of appropriation and banalisation (though whether this has turned out to be true is a moot point). For Althusser, the great advance in Lacan's return is the recovery of the specific object of psychoanalysis, which he describes as situated outside of biology, psychology or sociology and is the consequence of the transformation of the ‘small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child.’
One of the ‘effects’ of the humanization of the small biological creature that results from human parturition: there in its place is the object of psycho-analysis, an object which has a simple name: ‘the unconscious’. (Althusser, 1969: 157)
It is not that the unconscious stands outside history; quite the contrary, the mark of the history of humanization lies heavily on the unconscious. Rather, it is that the unconscious lives in its particularity: Althusser denies a space in knowledge of the unconscious for any other discipline (he lists ‘the biologist, the neurologist, the anthropologist, the sociologist, the psychologist and the philosopher’, Althusser, 1969: 158-9) arguing instead that what it covers is the move from the animal to the human, or as might be argued today, the human being's capacity to ‘bear witness to the inhuman’ (Agamben, 2002: 121). This human is gendered: speaking of the primacy of the formal structure of language in Lacan, Althusser stresses ‘the forced “humanization” of the small human animal into a man or a woman’ (Althusser, 1969: 160). But what Althusser draws on most is what he sees in Lacan as an emphasis on the way the ‘transition from (ultimately purely) biological existence to human existence
(the human child) is achieved within the Law of Order, the law that I shall call the Law of Culture, and that this Law of Order is confounded in its formal essence with the order of language' (Althusser, 1969: 161). The primacy of language here makes the Law of Culture ‘absolutely effective’ in humanization; that is, it makes the social central to the humanisation of the subject. In Althusser's Lacanian rendering, what lies at the basis of all such subject-formation is a Law that forms a symbolic third; as he points out, even the apparently two-person relationship of the pre-Oedipal dyad is exempt from this structuring principle only in fantasy (the exact meaning of the Imaginary relation).
Lacan demonstrates the effectiveness of the Order, the Law, that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his birth, and seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence his fixed destination. Each stage traversed by the sexed infant is traversed in the realm of Law… (Althusser, 1969: 163-4)
Out of this comes the sexed human child, subjected to the Oedipal structure of thirdness that lies behind all engagement, a thirdness that for Althusser is universal even if the particularity of every human subject is due to the variations in how the structure is applied.
There is much that remains of interest in Althusser's old paper, which promoted an engagement between neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis that has lasted to this day. But amongst the striking characteristics is its relative abstractness: whilst there is reference to the workings of sexual division and the mode of action of the Law of Culture in forming a sexed subject, there is little by way of detail as to how this might happen, and more to the point, there is no recognisable political analysis, or at least no class analysis. Clearly, at the level of general theory, the reading of Lacan's reading of Freud perpetrated by Althusser allows one to argue that at the source of human subjectivity is the social order as a structure—the workings of a third that stands behind everything that looks like unmediated experience or relationality and fixes it in place. This Lawful third, the Oedipal third in classical terms, produces the sexed human subject out of a bundle of impulses that can be said only to be ‘animal’; and one is left to glean from this that the mode of operation
of this third—the manner of interpellation of the subject, to use Althusser's famous terminology—is one which will leave the subject inhabited by the contradictions of the social order, holding in mind something enigmatic and disturbing that at a ‘basic’ level is foundational for the split subject. The problem is not that this reduces social conflict to Oedipalisation, a familiar tactic in psychoanalysis as a product of the application of an essentially bourgeois family model and a crude notion of transference (the worker cannot deal with the boss because of unconscious hostility towards the father). Rather, the Oedipal is the form taken by the third, but the third has primacy over it; the structure of language is something broader than that which inhabits particular family configurations. But speaking in this way of structure asks for the details to be filled in: does the Law embody class conflict as well as what appears more basic to psychoanalysis, sexual difference (the phallus and castration may be extendable to social class, but are clearly first and foremost to do with gender)? That is, is Althusser picking up a basic problem here, whereby to preserve the radical potential of psychoanalysis one has to move to a level of abstraction that actually loses it again? Or is he drawing attention to the way psychoanalysis operates with a model of social conflict and societal contradiction that focuses on sexual difference alone (after all, not only do we have the Oedipus complex in individuals, but we have the primal horde and the slaying of the father as the posited originary act of culture in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheisim)? As an aside, though perhaps a relevant one, the use Freud made of notions of the ‘primitive’ and the embeddedness of early psychoanalysis in secular Jewish culture have meant that there has been attention paid to the racialised elements of psychoanalytic thinking and practice, with a growing postcolonial critique as well as widespread interest in psychoanalytic psychotherapy across ‘cultural’ and ethnic boundaries. But as a bourgeois speaking to and about other bourgeois, there is much less valency in the class elements of Freud's work, despite his own interest in promoting ‘mass’ therapy through low fee clinics of the kind that were set up in Berlin in the 1920s. Freud's personal marginality was of an ethnic rather than class variety, and the problematics of psychoanalysis have reflected this from the start; and there is even the possibility that the gender fascination of the theory has some relationship to this, as Jewish male femininity was a widespread accusation
If Althusser laid the foundations for a Marxist account of subject formation that draws on psychoanalysis as an abstract theory of thirdness, a lot more water has travelled under the bridge created by the encounter of social theory and psychoanalysis, to produce additional and alternative views. Not only does this include the derivatives of Frankfurt School thinking (Adorno's (1967) account of the administered society and Marcuse's (1955) Eros and Civilization come to mind), but also the emergence of ‘intersubjectivist’ and relational thinking out of object relations and interpersonal psychoanalysis (Benjamin, 2004), and recent constructions around identity issues that depend on Laplanchian and post-Lacanian articulations of ‘recognition’ and ‘ethical violence’ (Butler, 2005; Zizek, 2005). The last of these is a particularly significant debate that arises out of concerns over otherness and the relation between justice and love. Butler's interest lies in recovering ‘ungrievable’ and precarious lives, which she links, through a sophisticated rendering of psychoanalytic (Laplanchian) theory and Levinasian philosophy, with an assertion of recognition as a practice based on acknowledging the necessary ‘opacity’ of the other who is nonetheless formative of the self. ‘Ethical violence’ is understood here as the action of forcing a narrative of being on the other—of making the other into something which can be understood in narrative terms, rather than allowed to speak from the position of one who is never fully knowable. Zizek insists that the failure of intersubjectivity is essential, that there must indeed be an ‘ethical violence’ that refuses to make special the relation to any particular other in the face of the requirement for just treatment of all as equals). That is, justice relies on setting aside love, understood as the selecting out of a specific ‘other’ who has a call on the subject. This work has considerable theoretical weight and also engages practically in a debate about ethics that has ramifications for thinking about violence and war, as both Butler (2008) and Zizek (2008) have made clear. It also has implications for questions of domination that can be made to reference class—the poor might well be understood in connection to notions of precacity/precariousness and in many places their lives are indeed ungrievable. But this is not the main impetus of this hegemonic work: it is much easier to see the impact of postcolonialism,
In a couple of useful papers on money and class collected together in the book Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics (Layton et al, 2006)—itself an unusual title for an American book on clinical psychoanalysis—Muriel Dimen (1994) and Lynne Layton (2004) explore some of the class-based issues that arise around money and cultural capital in relation to psychoanalysis. Dimen's piece is more directly concerned with the clinical work of psychoanalysis and revolves around the anxieties produced by the position of analysts as members of a professional-managerial class that does not produce anything, but instead in a way lives by its wits—by a particular sleight of hand in which mental labour is central and which, ‘because it involves conceptualizing other people's work and lives… confers authority and influence’ (Dimen, 1994:33). The problem with this is that it gives rise to an endemic sense of the precariousness of one's knowledge and skills (these people are amongst the most highly educated in the world, yet hardly know how to do anything) and of fraudulence. Dimen comments
This kind of work renders the professional-managerial class a highly anxious elite. Its members know that their power, privilege and authority can make their clients envy, resent and hate them (and, analysts would add, idealize them). Also, like their clients, they sometimes suspect that because they do not produce anything visible or tangible, they do nothing real; as such, not only does their work seem worthless, it also cannot meet their own or their clients' idealization. Because their only ‘capital’, so to speak, is ‘knowledge and skill, or at least the credentials imputing knowledge and skill’ (Ehrenreich, : 15), their high status is insecurely founded… Rooted in the very work of professionals, then, this anxiety about felt fraudulence and looming loss is actually built into the role of analyst in a class-structured society. (Ehrenreich, : 33-34)
Dimen goes on to explore the way in which money in the psychoanalytic encounter intervenes in what purports or is imagined to be a love relationship, and how this commodifies psychoanalysis in a way that feels uncomfortable to analysts and patients alike, yet is symptomatic of a social situation in which all labour—and perhaps all love—is translated exactly into a commodity to be exchanged. She is clearly working with the assumption of private practice, but perhaps one could argue that all therapeutic relationships are mediated by money even in the public sector, where the therapist is still ‘paid to care’ and would cease seeing patients if her or his salary was stopped. Dimen writes
When money is exchanged in a capitalist economy, both buyer and seller—patient and analyst—come to be like commodities, or things, to one another because they enter into relation with each other through the mediation of a third thing (money) that, simultaneously, separates them. As money wedges them apart, so it estranges them from themselves, a distancing that creates anxiety in both. This theft of the personal satisfaction you take in work and in your relationship to those with whom you work is alienation, the process by which your labor and its fruit become alien to
Page 109you because of the very socioeconomic structure that lets them be. (Ehrenreich, : 35)
The presence of money in itself makes the psychoanalytic relationship one that is different from the fantasised ideal of love; this not only creates a kind of moral revulsion in many analysts, but also breaks into the analytic relationship as a marker of the way it is shot through with the class contradictions of a money-oriented society. Dimen identifies the class anxiety that permeates the work of analysts in this, as well as advocating what reads like a somewhat imaginary route out of it through an identification of the ‘paradox’ of love and hate as a resolution of the ‘contradiction’ of love and money. For her it seems clear that money is an important element in analysis both because it reflects the material basis of society and also allows a way to work with it, to bring it into awareness—a point that was implicit in Freud's own thinking, as was his recognition that psychoanalysts, like other tradesmen, ‘lease’ their time . The class issue involved here is both one in which envy from one's patients might have to be tolerated (and in which envy of one's financially more successful colleagues might also have to be managed), but also in which the psychoanalyst's own ‘fear of falling’ into a class abyss can be mobilised at any moment—by a patient leaving, but also by the repeated exposure of a presumed care for the other as just another commercial exchange. Layton (2004), drawing on Bourdieu's (1984) notions of distinction and habitus, offers a similar account addressing broader questions of how to understand class mobility in psychoanalytic terms. For her,
If one casts Bourdieu's description of distinction into the terminology of a dynamic unconscious, one could say that class identities are formed via a defensive splitting off of parts of self too closely associated with anything felt to characterize other, especially lower- but also upper-class fractions. One distances oneself from the lower class's closeness to necessity, but that very splitting creates a haunting anxiety about necessity that is ever-present and must be vigilantly guarded against. (Dimen, 1994: 53)
Perhaps, as Layton says ‘The emotions that underlie the internalization of class relations… entail a great deal of anxiety about being contaminated by poverty, of getting too close to need.’ (Dimen, 1994: 63) This might be reflected in psychoanalysis itself: dealing with the sordid, the disreputable, the uncertain, the passionate and the supposedly perverse, it takes a lot of work to maintain its credentials as a legitimate bourgeois profession, and this is accompanied by a fear of falling into the ‘necessity’ of working class life—a term that seems to have numerous other harmonics in words to be found in psychoanalysis, such as ‘primitive’ or ‘unanalysable’. Necessity means connection with the fundamental elements of capitalist exchange, in which it is clear that one works because one has to, because money is needed to keep one alive—and not because one ‘cares’ or ‘loves’ or seeks to ‘recognise’ the other. Could it be that part of the psychoanalytic occlusion of class in favour of other elements of identity politics is due to the way class issues throw up this discomfort so clearly?
As is often the case, Slavoj Zizek makes an outrageous statement, infused this time with an antisemitic resonance that he barely bothers to disguise, yet which puts this issue of the sordid reality of economic necessity right at the centre of psychoanalysis. Objecting to Foucault's idea of the analyst as confessor or priest, he claims that psychoanalysis is born out of the capitalist spirit of ‘thrift’, of hoarding and spending only with reluctance—not the passion of desire or love, of giving or staking everything for the sake of truth or beauty or some other absolute, but the careful management of desire, in which the one who has gives to the one who needs, but only in exchange—as a way of exerting power, perhaps, or in order to get something even more valuable in return.
The link between psychoanalysis and capitalism is perhaps best exemplified by one of the great literary figures of the nineteenth-century novel, the Jewish moneylender, a shadowy figure to whom all the big figures of society come to borrow money, pleading with him and telling him all their dirty secrets and passions… this figure is a disillusioned wise man, well aware of the vanity of all human endeavour, hidden from the public gaze, with no visible power, but
Page 111nonetheless the secret master who pulls all the strings of social life. This figure, cruelly indifferent, deprived of all compassion and empathy, is much closer to the analyst than the Church confessor or the wise old trustee… For Lacan, it is the miser rather than the heroic transgressor who goes to the end, violating all moral constraints, who is the exemplary figure of desire… (Zizek, 2006: 305)
In this nasty passage, Zizek suggests something important about the relationship between psychoanalysis and its materialist base: that in the exchange that goes on in the psychoanalytic encounter, what is reproduced is the way ‘capitalist discourse epitomizes perversion’ in that it makes what the Lacanians call jouissance—the excessive enjoyment that is the subject of desire—the object of an accumulative process. The analyst who is caught by the patient doing his accounts instead of listening to the patient's talk, may in fact be enacting the norm of psychoanalysis rather than breaking its rules. Zizek states that Lacan ‘demonstrates how a pervert acts as if one can accumulate zero(s) or lack(s), as if a zero plus a zero plus… is more than a mere zero’ (Zizek, 2006: 305). If this is the case, if the claim that psychoanalysis in a capitalist society involves the reduction of jouissance to trade, then maybe it is no surprise that analysis, confronted with class, might back away from the realisation of what it has done, what it is about. Bringing class into the picture, with its dramatisation of necessity, inequality and fundamental need, punctures the imaginary situation in which analyst and patient can pretend that the analytic relationship is one of love and care separate from material reality; or that the peculiar structure of the consulting room, which has its own efficacy, amounts to more than a selling technique, a kind of showroom or commercial trompe-l'œil. For Lacanians, this effect is not something to be deplored, for it has the important function of denouncing the fetishising of psychoanalysis itself as something that can offer a full answer to the questions of existence: if, amongst other things, the big Other exists, in this case as the structure of society, then nothing escapes its gaze, including the apparently private encounter with an analyst. Class, entering this private space, dramatises the way all intersubjective interactions are enfolded in the space of the Other, and the fantasy that this can be done away with—that class and other divisions can disappear
in the pure contact of two reciprocal subjects—is precisely a mechanism of apparent escape through which the social order is preserved. To put this slightly more clearly: the intervention of money and economics into psychoanalysis shows the impossibility of a pure relation of love in a society which is structured around dominance and inequality.
Perhaps this does, finally, lead back to the point about shame. At its simplest, the shame is about exposure of one's investment in not confronting class issues: it is hard to take responsibility for the damage one does by virtue of being in a position of dominance, and to hear that others' needs (which psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are supposed to ameliorate) are produced by their closeness to necessity, which itself is part of the fabric that keeps one's own comfort secured. There is a kind of betrayal involved in this, in which behind the public position of the caring subject lies the one who needs the other to suffer if she or he is not to suffer too—a variant on the usual Master-Slave dynamic in which the master needs the slave as much as the other way around. (It should be noted here that, obviously, I am not talking about bad faith: those who do not mind being in the oppressive position do not feel shame about it.) Secondly, the shame concerns the anxiety of falling, of acknowledging that one's fear might be that of contamination, of being brought down to the level of the necessitous other, and this anxiety is fuelled by the constant awareness of how precarious one's being is, how unsafe the livelihood of the psychoanalyst. I do not here mean only that there is a competitive marketplace for paying clients, though this is part of Dimen's (1994) point; in addition, psychoanalysis itself is a precarious profession (an ‘impossible’ one in Freud's (1937) famous words), deriving its force solely from the capacity to offer something intangible and to gain the participation of others in that process. At some point, each psychoanalyst will have a crisis of faith and will become one who ‘knows nothing’, and whilst this might be the desired end point for both Bionian and Lacanian analysts, it is not a comfortable state of affairs for someone who has a life to live. Thirdly, perhaps the shame is institutional too, and derives from psychoanalysis' own unconscious understanding (if one can speak that way of an institution) of the way it is embroiled in processes of commerce and exchange which represent its own relatively successful route out of the basic neediness of human
subjects. I have always been impressed with the conservatism of most psychoanalysts, their focus on the tight regulation of acceptable versus unacceptable practice (the standardised ‘fifty-minute hour’ of treatment, for example), the compromises wrought by private practice, training regimes that reward conformity and militate against creative and critical thinking, and an aura of stiffness, fear of spontaneity and social conservatism that seems to pervade psychoanalytic societies. It does not take much imagination to see this as another manifestation of Laplanche's ‘wandering’: faced day-to-day with the slipperiness and determined challenge of the unconscious as it manifests in speech, with the disturbance it engenders and the erotic or aggressive embarrassments it perpetrates on, against, or in collusion with the analyst (not to speak of the unconscious and what it acts out in the clinical situation), perhaps it is not surprising that a covering-over and turning-away is provoked, so that there is not too much evidence left behind that something extreme happened here, something worrying and discomfiting. Living their professional, bourgeois lifestyle, perhaps it is too much to require of analysts that they should remain permanently plugged into the life-energy so delicately and waveringly uncovered by Freud, that their world could be restlessly populated by desire in all its peculiarities, without judgement or moralism, without platitude or denial. How does one go home to one's spouse and children, how does one remain a respected member of the community of doctors, lawyers and teachers, after a day spent so relentlessly grubbing around in the dirt? Perhaps it is only by dressing conservatively, metaphorically as well as literally, that this can be managed, that the veneer of respectability can be maintained, for oneself as well as the world. The sheer involved in remaining attuned to the surprises, insults and affections of the unconscious—again, one's own as well as one's patients—is exhausting and potentially personally damaging, as one struggles to withstand the assaults on one's identity and sense of coherence, on one's in every sense of the word. I have never quite put this together with class injuries before, but now it seems obvious: the neglect of social class in psychoanalytic theory and practice, which is not absolute but is nevertheless real, might have something to do sociologically with the wish on the part of analysts and psychoanalysis itself to maintain its position amongst the salubrious ‘professions’, and something to do dynamically with the fear that if one does
Belinda Mandelbaum, personal communication 13th September 2009.
that amongst other things made male Jewish hysteria possible, disturbing Jewish gender consciousness from the start.
queer theory and feminism in discussions of the occlusion of certain identities under the specific conditions of power characteristic of late capitalism, than it is to see the influence of studies of, for example, working class life (though these do have some presence, as in the repeated references to Barbara Ehrenreich's writing (e.g. 2001)). That is, what characterises the new psychoanalytically inflected relational ethics—even in its most personal and evocative form—is a relatively abstract appeal to social structure that puts questions of subjectivity, subject-hood and identity at its centre, exploring otherness and neighbours, the Lacanian Thing and the enigmatic signifier, without recourse to simple categories of class (though with plenty of reference to gender and ‘race’). In the work of these major psychoanalytically informed philosophers and political critics, the identity-categories chosen to carry the burden of the new relational ethics are either fundamental ‘human versus inhuman’ or those that are fought over in the sphere of biopolitics: specifically, gender, sexuality and race. The sphere of class consciousness has itself been occluded; the question now is, what effect does this have and—given that we are discussing psychoanalysis—what affect does it produce?
not do this, the sheer materiality of class—and with it of degradation, humiliation and basic need—might become one's own lot too. Recently, a Brazilian colleague wrote to me about how middle class psychotherapists ‘from the South Zone of Rio (the nicest part of the city, where the beaches are) tend to think that poor people have a poor psychosexual life, because they don't think and fantasy so much on their sexuality as those people from the beaches do.‘1 It is not an unknown thought that the luxury of having an unconscious depends on having leisure time to do psychoanalysis; but this is not a game, and the writing-off of class experiences actually has effects in preserving domination and in voiding psychoanalysis of its social concerns.