Reading Joanna Ryan's 2017 book on Class and Psychoanalysis* today is a peculiar exercise. That is because, over the last couple of years, a conference series on the theme, co-organised by her, at the Freud Museum, gathered over 300 analysts, scholars and curious from around the globe debating past and present initiatives of psychoanalysis ‘for the people’. More so as now and for the next five years, these colleagues, others and myself are involved in a publicly funded large research project on the legacy of psychoanalytic free clinics, aiming at reorienting our praxis from a radical perspective. We are, if anything, one cluster amongst many efforts to discuss or reinvent a psychoanalysis committed to speaking to its times. Joanna's book, then, reads like a good omen.
Her elegant efforts of interrogating ‘psychoanalytic silences around class, its hidden and yet omnipresent nature, the many disavowals involved from the earliest days of psychoanalysis until the present’ (p. 1) put into question not only the symptomatic (and problematic) nature of such disavowal as well as the creative losses that followed as result.
Often, when psychoanalysts enclosed in bourgeois private practice elaborate psychosocial theories, their diagnoses of the present are disastrous. To refresh our minds, we don't need to go very far: Charles Melman in the widely read L'homme sans gravité, from 2002, blames ‘homosexuals’ for the destruction of necessary family structures in the life of infants in the face of neoliberalism; in 2019, in Le Monde, eighty French analysts condemned decolonial studies for reinforcing narcissism1 and in February 2023, a rare group of Lacanians and Kleinians gathered for their ‘Sexual Identities in Transit’ at UCL, in Central London, to share all their psychoanalytic feelings about ‘trans’ resulting in what Ian Parker (2023) calls a right-wing cross-orientation alliance.3 We seem not to be helping ourselves.
Our inability to listen, which also crosses inequalities around race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, as Ryan carefully punctuates throughout her book, might be epistemological (related to the anchors of our discipline)
or historical (related to events such as wars but equally the promotion of a supposedly class-less welfare estate). Both axes are explored by Ryan in the book. She mixes a thorough close-reading of Freud's dismissal of class matters in cases such as the Wolf Man as well as in his self-analysis notes in Chapter 3 with dialogue with several authors, noticeably Anne McClintock, who, in her 1995 book Imperial Leather, argued that ‘Freud founded 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 universal’ (p. 37). Such radical diagnosis of our canon still has not found its way to everyday syllabi.
A sobering historical account is provided in Chapter 2, where, in closer contact with Elisabeth Danto's 2005 tome Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918–1938, Ryan argues that ‘Post-war psychoanalysis largely “forgot” its radical potential and social openness in the increasing conservatism and professional marking out of territories of much American and British practice, legacies which are still with us’ (p. 25). Taking us by the hand to the early decades of psychoanalysis, the author rescues important historical figures such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, as well as Marie Langer. All had first-hand experience of transnational practice under dramatic difficulties and creativity, both theoretically and in opening novel forms of social clinics.
In Europe, as she points out, both the Berlin Poliklinik and the Vienna Ambulatorium registered having offered treatment to about 1500 patients between them in the period from 1920 to 1938, roughly seeing around forty patients for free psychoanalytic treatment at any one time. In Latin America, Langer, who first went to Argentina but had to flee the military Junta once again, proposed a true Marxist-Feminist praxis of emancipation.
The first half of the book lays the ground for us to understand that there may have been theoretical and contextual contributions to such ‘disavowal’ of class in psychoanalysis. Yet, as all things unconscious, its most potent ‘quantum of affect’, in a Freudian sense, also manages to see the light as it has been, for the last century, alive in all cracks and margins.
What follows then is an interesting overview of the presence of psychoanalysis in public health care and community care in the UK. Surprisingly, Ryan cites data that reveals that whilst ‘Psychoanalytic therapy in the UK, following the 1929 settlement with the medical profession, was never fully integrated into state provision’ (p. 59), ‘25 per cent of registered psychoanalytic therapists work in the NHS, in some way’ (p. 59). In a way, what she calls ‘psychoanalytic therapy’ is already inventive and critical. One of the book's key claims is that the division between ‘Psychoanalysis’ with capital P, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, psychoanalytic counselling and so on is the result of a problematic allusion to an idealised five-times-a-week on-the-private-couch analysis in contrast with ‘all else’ that, as she claims, finds little ground in historical evidence. Ryan affirms: ‘I suggest that the forces driving these distinctions, and those between “pure” and “applied’” clinical work, are part of the hierarchy whereby work outside long-term intensive private practice is seen as lesser, a form of symbolic violence that perpetuates internal class divisions’ (p. 4). In this sense, whatever ‘the people’ get, is not ‘the real deal’. Such debate, whilst threading the whole book, still leaves knots and tangles to the reader. It is not infrequent for conversations about what psychoanalysis really is, or what a psychoanalytic interpretation ‘interprets’, to emerge during clinical seminars of the psychoanalytic training at the Site. On this point, therefore, I was left curious – even more so since there are contemporary matters of regulation of psychotherapeutic practices in the UK, such as SCoPEd, and overall questions about training (who and how one gets to it) and our ability to listen as a professional category. 2
This second half of the book is made even more interesting by the vignettes and memories shared by Joanna from her own practice, which stemmed from intense participation in collectives and social justice groups since the 1970s and various types of free clinic established across the years in the capital and beyond. Chapter 7, specifically, brings together a wealth of quotes shared by practising clinicians Joanna Ryan has invited to research interviews about the presence of ‘class’ in the transference, broadly speaking. The middle-class vs the working-class therapist/
patient relation may be more than a matter of imaginary identification or projection, as seen in such accounts. There is something about class that ‘is a prime example of the past operating in the present, and thus could be of great psychoanalytic interest as to how it constructs and endures within the psyche, even with huge changes in social circumstances’ (p. 6). In other words, there is something about class that, as basic as that, cracks open landscapes of subjectivation and relationality into a profound realm of inequality.
Ryan's view on the seeming lack of materials on psychoanalysis and class and the occlusion of class matters from psychoanalytic milieux is poignant, if not slightly contentious if taken out of context. She states that:
Class, it is widely acknowledged, disappeared from political and academic discourse in the recent past, with the supposed era of the classless society, where class could not be named as such, but was rendered only as social exclusion, if at all. The demise of Marxist thinking, the influence of postmodernism and the privileging of identity politics, all led to a focus on other forms of difference and diversity, while generally ignoring class (p. 6).
It is interesting to read this in times such as ours, during what has been dubbed ‘the cost of living crisis’ where class seems to be vivid everywhere. Yet there is something perhaps too UK-centric in this line of argument, to my perception at least, which needs further unpacking. For me, having grown up in Latin America, ‘a supposed era of the classless society’ has never been any form of even discursive delusion. Equally, when observing those cleaning, cooking and caring around London (keeping Life alive, despite all difficulties), it is undeniable that there are genders, colours, shapes and accents, as well as migration statuses, separating the haves from the have-nots.
Invoking Laplanchean and relational models as forms of implicating practice from a psychosocial perspective as a way into such matters of difference in the clinic, this is a useful book, brimming with insight.
What is evident, in Ryan's generous writing is, in her own words, a concern over ‘how to work psychoanalytically in a way that includes a greater recognition than is usual of the social world, without losing the complexities and nuances of psychoanalysis, in its focus on unconscious processes’ (p. 12). The way into such a riddle seems to be less of a question of ‘which orientation’ and ‘format’ can do the job, but a matter of ethics and engagement with the implications of our times.
Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, by , is published by Routledge (2017), .
Class and Psychoanalysis, previously discussed in Sitegeist 13, is here re-reviewed from the perspective of this issue's theme.
See Le Monde 25 September 2019: lemonde.fr (accessed January 2024).
See Ian Parker's powerful account of this event on: (accessed January 2024).
A continuous response to plans to regulate the field can be found in the College of Psychoanalyst's website on: (accessed January 2024).