Landscapes of inequality or arenas of conflict? Review essay of ‘Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality’ by Joanna Ryan. Routledge,Oxford. 2017

Introduction

This is an important book because, as far as I know, it is the first of its kind, certainly in the UK. While there have been previous attempts to bring together the subjects of ‘class’ and ‘psychoanalysis’, including a special issue of this journal, (Stork, 2002), this is the first book devoted to that connection. However, it is very much a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it puts the issue of class on the psychoanalytic agenda albeit in a somewhat marginal place in relation to its mainstream. On the other, it locates the issue of class within a particular framework which is seriously problematic. As a pioneering book it is likely to set the stage for the way in which class is located and discussed within the psychoanalytic discourse, so while it should be welcomed for raising the questions, its approach to generating answers needs to be seriously challenged.

The first problem is the title. It should have been ‘Psychoanalysis and Class’ not ‘Class and Psychoanalysis’, because it is really about how psychoanalysis deals or fails to deal with class issues, and particularly how it relates to the so called ‘working class’, rather than, as might be expected from its title, comprehensively addressing the class issues and then proceeding to their relationships to, and manifestations within, psychoanalysis. More precisely, it might have been ‘Psychoanalysis and the Working Class’ because it has relatively little to say about the middle and upper classes. The second part of its title, ‘Landscapes of Inequality’ spells out Joanna Ryan’s focus on and preoccupation with ‘inequality’, the needs of the working class and the consequences of ‘upward mobility’. This largely excludes other readings of the issues, particularly more multicultural and dialectical readings.

Her primary concern seems to be how to make psychoanalysis more accessible to the working classes as patients and as therapists. And, in so far as accessibility is a problem, she does an excellent job of spelling out some of the issues, problems and experiences of those involved—up to a point. But as I argued in my own contribution to this journal’s special issue on class, (Blackwell, 2002), to present the class issue in terms of a hierarchy of status and privilege, ignoring the fundamental issue of conflicting interests between classes and the cultural manifestations and consequences of those conflicts, tends to generate a deficit model in which working class culture and experience become objects of condescension rather than respect. Moreover, the whole approach asks for ‘increased flexibility’ from psychoanalysis rather than a radical rethink. It wants to extend psychoanalysis to be more incorporative rather than to challenge its prevailing ethos and cultural assumptions. As in so many of its manifestations in the social world (presented by its practitioners and adherents), psychoanalysis appears often as the doctor but seldom as the patient, and the socio-cultural reality it takes as given remains un-interrogated.

A further problem concerns the extent to which the observer position of the author is taken into account, or not. Joanna Ryan (JR) writes as a middle-class, intellectual, white woman. But there is little consideration given to how this might shape her perspective on her subject matter. Yet the discourse of psychoanalysis is firmly rooted in the culture of a white, professional, middle-class within a post-colonial, patriarchal social context in which class exploitation, sexism and racism are intimately entangled and are necessarily the backcloth against which, and out of which, the struggles of psychoanalysis with class, and of class with psychoanalysis, must be fought out.

However, it is important here not to allow criticism to overshadow JR’s achievement and her commitment to getting a better deal for the working classes within the psychoanalytic discourse. The book is an impressive piece of scholarship, tracing the history of the ways the working class has appeared within the psychoanalytic discourse and the ways it has been recognized, ignored or sidelined. She readily challenges the ways in which psychoanalysis has failed to engage with the working classes and the simplistic assumptions it sometimes makes about them. (If only she was not herself contributing to some of those assumptions).

The book

Her introduction is engagingly self-revealing. She grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, with what she describes as an ‘upper middle-class mother’, but, ‘mainly looked after, loved and nurtured by a working-class woman of limited education’, who ‘had started in service aged 14 as a kitchen maid and without any formal training had managed to become a nanny’. JR writes, ‘From her I absorbed in vivid detail what it was like to have grown up in rural poverty, sometimes going hungry, to leave school at 13 with very little possibility of any social power, yet still have a zest for life and love’. She goes on to describe the way in which many middle-class families like hers relied on such ‘working class’ labour to meet their domestic needs and the way their dependency on this labour was projected onto the supposed ‘dependency’ of the working classes. It was her own experience of feeling divided between two ‘mothers’, the gap in values, and the glaring inequalities in opportunities and life experiences between them, that led her in the 1970s into libertarian socialist political activism, developing an understanding of the structures and operations of capitalism and class struggle.

The introduction goes on to grapple with the theoretical problems of relating the psyche to the social, with which most group analysts have some familiarity. Although JR makes various references to group analysts in her acknowledgements and in the subsequent text, she makes no reference here to the extensive group analytic literature on this issue. Moreover, she drifts away from the concerns of her socialist activism—class conflict and struggle.

Her next chapter takes us back to the earlier days of psychoanalysis detailing the now mostly forgotten/overlooked activities of Freud and his colleagues endeavouring to make their work more widely available. Quoting Elizabeth Danto’s Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, she tells us of the Berlin Polyclinic in 1920, and the Vienna Ambularium in 1922; both offering free and low cost psychoanalysis. There were also what she describes as ‘shorter lived clinics’ in Budapest, Frankfurt and London. There are echoes of the 1960s counter-culture in her description of Fenichel, Siegfried Bernfeld, Wilhelm Reich and Annie Reich being radicalized by the youth movements of the day in the aftermath of the First World War. This includes the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolution in ‘several countries’. But while she gives us a review of the work of the clinics in Berlin and Vienna along with the work of Reich and Fenichel, she does not connect this to the attempted/aborted revolution of 1918–19 in Germany. It is, nevertheless, a fascinating account of that early history.

The following chapter describes the way psychoanalysis in effect escaped from the class issue by avoiding or disavowing the role the ‘nurse’ might play in the formation of the Oedipus complex. She notes particularly the social significance of the Wolfman’s attraction to women who were ‘servants, whose education and intelligence were necessarily far inferior to his own’ as Freud himself put it. But Freud’s interpretation was that these women represented his intellectually superior sister: keeping it in the family, so to speak. This chapter will entertain anyone interested in the construction of psychoanalytic theory from its early case studies and the ways that a class bias can be read in those early theorizations.

Chapter four, ‘Psychotherapy for the people’, discusses the emergence and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the UK’s National Health Service and in public hospitals and clinics in the USA. It also includes Marie Langer’s work, first in Vienna, then in Buenos Aires, Mexico and Nicaragua. JR describes the kind of flexibility and adaptation involved in bringing psychoanalysis into settings other than the private consulting room and developing psychoanalytically informed approaches in contexts of deprivation and oppression. She further brings to light some of the class based assumptions rooted in the psychoanalytic discourse and the difficulties for many psychoanalysts. She writes

Analytic resistances also include too much adherence to theory and mistaken diagnoses; too much emphasis on differences, which can entrench stereotypes and distance. Listening can become unbearable for the analyst because of the extremity of pain and deprivation involved and also because of the potential for feeling complicit in the social order that produces these circumstances, by reason of being more privileged. This I suggest is an insufficiently acknowledged source of therapist confusion and dysfunction. (p. 71)

I found this a particularly interesting observation, echoing the comments of one of my colleagues (Jeremy Woodcock) working with survivors of torture who were virtually all refugees. As the asylum policies of the British Government drove our client group further into the ‘underclass’, he suggested that many of our colleagues felt, in some sense, ‘terrorized’ by the levels of current deprivation they encountered on top of the horrific ordeals of torture and violence already being recounted.

This chapter also echoes much of my own experience of developing psychotherapy in different settings and sometimes with populations traditionally deemed unsuitable for it, who were usually offered little more than medication and occupational therapy. Though, tellingly, JR clings to the idea of ‘interpretation’, while my own approach has been to think psychoanalytically but not necessarily to interpret or talk psychoanalyse.

There is recognition here of the emergence of ‘anti-psychiatry’ and ‘Women’s Therapy’ and of some commendable work in working class communities, but only very passing references to family therapy and group analysis. This is a pity because the whole development of family therapy which took off through the 1970s and 1980s happened almost entirely in the public sector and succeeded in bringing psychotherapy to substantial numbers of people who would not otherwise have encountered it. While in many of its manifestations it shed its psychoanalytic links and denied its psychoanalytic roots, those roots remained influential, and it is disappointing that JR effectively affirms the split that has now become institutionalized. Similarly, group analysis which has made such a significant impact in the public sector also gets only a passing mention and no real discussion.

Lastly, and notably, Jafar Kareem’s radical conception of ‘Intercultural Therapy’ and his organization, NAFSIYAT, gets no mention at all. Jafar saw the negotiation of cultural difference as being, in itself therapeutic, and indeed placed it at the heart of therapy. It has, therefore, a major significance to projects such as those JR discusses, involving middle-class psychotherapists struggling with cultural dissonances between themselves and working class clients/patients. So it is particularly disappointing it should have been overlooked.

The next three chapters might be regarded as the real meat of the book. First there is the ‘Lived Experience of Class’: This is a review of sociological studies of class which are described as emanating from the recent ‘affective’ turn in sociology. This is another impressive survey referring to many tensions and conflicts in this lived experience without ever really addressing their structural foundations.

The two following chapters are ‘Class and Social Mobility within the Psychoanalytic Field’, followed by ‘Class Within Therapy Relationships’. Both these chapters are based on JR’s own research and contain numerous quotes from therapists she has interviewed. This is very important and significant research in so far as it shows the powerful feelings and difficulties around class and class identity within the therapy profession, and the ways these play out in the therapy itself. Notably, it is not just the therapists from working class backgrounds who have problems about class. It is full of heartfelt testimonies from both the analyst and analysand roles. If readers read only two chapters, then these are the two to read.

Next comes a review of ‘Contemporary Psychoanalytic Writings on Class and the Clinic’, where, amongst other concerns, she draws attention to a distinction made by Harris (2009) between ‘guilt’, which might be appropriate, and ‘guiltiness’: the latter described as ‘a form of anxiety, a defensive shame-laden stance, lacking the possibilities for ‘mature remorse’ or ‘effective reparation’. This chapter includes other descriptions of the complex psychodynamics of relations between people from different classes; though always the emphasis returns to the inequalities and the disadvantages of the working class, shifting the focus away from any real conflict of interest.

The ninth chapter is an excellent survey of the vexed issue of ‘money’ in the psychoanalytic discourse. Amongst all the different meanings attached to it by different practitioners, there is the amusing report of ‘Lacan’s reputed refusal to give change for larger denomination notes, and to interpret such payment as an indication of the higher fee the patient unconsciously wanted to pay, and therefore should pay’ (p. 165). (It is not reported how he responded to patients who forgot to bring any money at all!)

The final chapter, ‘Speaking Class to Psychoanalysis’ is a challenge to the psychoanalytic discourse to recognize and think more deeply about class and how it might be better addressed within psychoanalytic theory, and how the discourse might be enriched by listening to the somewhat unheard voices of ‘therapists of working class and non-white backgrounds’. There is also a suggestion that histories of colonialism, class domination, exploitation and resistance might be appropriately included in therapy trainings, and a mention of the vitally important question posed by Gurney (2009) as to whether it is possible to be a psychoanalyst and not be symbolically middle-class?

JR further raises the ambivalent and ambiguous socio-political position of psychoanalysis: ‘On the one hand, a counter normative, marginalized and subversive enterprise but, on the other, one which can reinforce normative cultural values’. But the line I liked best on this topic is a quote from Bennett (2012: 21) that it is

hard to imagine any professional analyst today insisting, as Fenichel insisted in 1938, that the ‘correct’ application of psychoanalysis to social issues is that of investigating how the dominant ideology of exploitative class-society is reproduced in the psychology of all classes. (p. 161)

Curiously, JR includes this gem in the chapter on money rather than putting it at the centre of her ‘speaking class to psychoanalysis’ chapter.

Despite falling short of pursuing such important issues the book still adds up to an impressive piece of scholarship on the history and development of psychoanalysis in a wide range of settings, taking it well beyond its essentially middle-class private practice base and discussing the many struggles and difficulties involved in relating it to the question of class.

A subaltern view

But writing about the working classes from a middle-class psychoanalytic point of view is not the same as writing from a working class point of view. And, despite the research and interviews with psychotherapists from working class roots, there are dimensions of working class life and experience that go substantially if not completely overlooked. Most importantly, (and distressingly), you can read this book from cover to cover and scarcely find one good thing, one thing to celebrate, about being born and growing up working-class. Nor can you find much suggestion that any of JR’s psychotherapists from working class backgrounds are happy about where they have come from or still consider themselves to be ‘working class’. Or that they have any conception of themselves practising ‘working class psychotherapy’.

At the May 68, 50th Anniversary workshop on ‘Race, Class, Gender and Marginalisation in Group Analysis and the wider world’, one of our Black colleagues talked about a particular group analytic training institute having ‘no place for Black Pride’. Similarly, that same institute has little time or space for Working Class Pride either. And, disappointingly, neither has JR’s book. Instead, she seems preoccupied, if not obsessed, with the ‘landscapes of inequality’ in her title. This places the working class inevitably and necessarily below the middle and upper middle-classes, (and, of course, the upper classes) in just about every respect. There seem to be no advantages, no benefits, no joy and no pride in being part of what Karl Marx regarded as one of the two great moving forces in modern history.

A recent Guardian obituary for the Black novelist Paule Marshall who died last year emphasized her commitment to creating ordinary characters who did not necessarily ‘go through all those terrible things that are supposed to happen to black people’. Committed to writing for the benefit of her community, she believed it was empowering to reveal to her readers the truth about themselves. While being Black may entail suffering racism, that does not have to define one’s whole identity as a victim. Yet JR’s working class seems defined by its victimhood or its ‘lack’ on her scale of inequality. We proles all, it seems, grew up either in rural poverty or on bleak council estates, poorly educated with few opportunities to choose the directions of our lives, with abiding feelings of inferiority and lacking the language skills to express ourselves properly.

Weegman (2014) writes,

Richard Sterba (1982) in his fascinating recollection of the early Viennese days, talks about the analysts like himself, as a group of exceptional, ‘gebildete’ people, individuals who are well educated, able to speak languages, and are familiar with high culture, literature, and art—and of course, in this regard, ‘Sigmund Freud was above us all’. (p. 8)

There is something about the way JR frames her ‘Landscapes of Inequality’ that makes me feel perhaps we are still in an analytic world where that same high culture characterizes the upper echelons of psychoanalysis, below which lie the less educated and less cultured, right down to the semi-literate working class, some of whom are hopefully clawing their way upwards towards the pinnacle of Freud’s coterie of culturati.

It is informative here to examine the use JR has made of my own work. In her chapter on social mobility she has a quote from my article Out of their Class (Blackwell, 2002). There I argued that classes were shaped and determined by their relations to the means of production, distribution and exchange, and that there was a fundamental conflict of interest between labour and capital. Moreover, that the middle classes were essentially the managers of capital and of the social/economic/political system in which they flourished, and they were the producers, reproducers and recyclers of knowledge/power and the regulators of what counts as ‘knowledge’ within the prevailing ideology. Thus, whatever instances there might be of co-operation between middle and working classes, there was always an essential element of conflict and opposition, and an element of cultural imperialism and indeed colonization. I also argued that there is no single ‘working-class’ culture but instead an assortment of working-class cultures or sub-cultures, based on a variety of activities, interests, identities and experiences. There are also internal hierarchies based on the workplace (from skilled, to semi-skilled to unskilled manual workers) and housing (from home ownership to private renting to council housing). Then there are differences based on nationalities and cultures, experiences of migration and exile, and various subcultures based on different sports and recreational activities all with their own richness. Importantly, I further criticized the ‘deficit’ model (referred to above) of perceiving the working classes primarily in terms of what they lack—money, education, opportunity, ‘culture’, etc.

JR quotes my article, in the course of describing the problems and difficulties involved in ‘upward mobility’ and how upwardly mobile people are characterized by enduring ambivalence, which, along with lack of self-confidence, makes the achievement of professional success even harder. So she alights on one or two sentences of mine and takes them out of context.

From within the psychoanalytic field, Dick Blackwell also foregrounds a sense of betrayal accompanying his class mobility. He criticizes how upward mobility is seen only positively so that its difficulties and losses are not sufficiently recognized (Blackwell, 1998, 2002). This leaves no adequate space for mourning, and instead creates a confused longing for what had been lost, alongside the experiences of being uprooted and replanted ‘with no original soil’ which I would render as a kind of melancholia. He comments on how there is no meaningful transitional space for these psychosocial issues to be addressed—something that it might be hoped therapy or training would provide. Depicting the discontinuity of experience in moving from a working class coal mining community to being a New York psychoanalyst, Susan Bodnar remarks how she is haunted by her grandmother’s injunctions to ‘remember where you come from’. (p. 108)

The words ‘with no original soil’ are not accurate, but that is a minor quibble. More important is the misunderstanding/misappropriation of my main point. Certainly, I was saying that upward mobility has its problems. But I was also questioning the assumption of its virtues; most particularly the virtues of becoming middle-class. In the preceding passage, I referred to the way psychotherapy can become an assault on working class identity, promoting the idea of upward mobility as ‘success’—the ‘hasn’t she/he done well!’ syndrome—and affirming the ‘deficit model’.

Here is what I actually wrote:

He who has done well is expected to be pleased with his success and grateful to have had the opportunity to succeed . . . Indeed he is often pleased not to have to work in a factory or on a building site and to have instead an interesting job and a relatively good income. But there is a corresponding loss that is seldom recognized much less mourned, and a confused longing for what has been left. The factory and the building site, the pubs and the football terraces, have their own specific camaraderie, their own bonds (as well as bondage), their own lexicon of meanings, their own sense of solidarity, their own political causes and, as important as anything else, their own humour. It may not be all wonderful and there may be many good reasons for escaping it, but it just happens to be ‘home’.

It is a strange thing to shift from one matrix to another . . . to be uprooted with whatever original soil as might still be clinging to the roots brushed hastily away before replanting. Yet however well the plant grows in the new soil, the roots remain restless, and memories survive in an old language . . . when they resurface (s)he can find her/himself curiously adrift between two cultures . . . it seems to be a state of permanent transition, a cultural transition . . . a state that could be described as exile. And always there is that sense of conflict; the sense of having gone over to the other side; or has one become some strange kind of prisoner of war? (Blackwell, 2002: 375–376)

What JR has done is subtly alter the main thrust of my argument. She presents what I have written as a plea for understanding of or even sympathy for the problems and difficulties of upward social mobility. I meant it as a challenge to the assumption that climbing some sort of social ladder was necessarily a valuable and beneficial achievement and that what one gained by joining a middle-class profession outweighed what one had lost. I am actually talking about a longing, which is a longing to go back, or to bring my culture with me into a place where it is not welcome. I am talking about alienation and exile, and, in my reference to being a ‘prisoner of war’, to the class conflict which was central to my article, to my encounters with this middle-class profession and to my world view. JR attempts to depoliticize all this, to psychologize it, and turn it into a problem. She then follows on with Susan Bodner’s grandmother’s injunction to, ‘remember where you come from’ (Bodner, 2004) as if such remembering must necessarily be problematic. She replaces what might be regarded as, at the very least, nostalgia for a better time (and a warmer, more comradely culture with a better sense of humour) with her own term—‘melancholia’.

How are we to understand this rewording? Is it the turning of political conflict and political relations into psychopathology? Or is just helping out a prole who did not have the benefit of a middle-class education, by providing a better word than he appeared to have readily available in his limited working class vocabulary? An echo of Basil Bernstein perhaps? ¹ It needs to be noted that this is not merely a personal matter between myself and JR. This is class conflict!

And how are we to read the term ‘haunted’ in Susan Bodnar’s statement of being ‘haunted’ by her grandmother’s injunction not to forget where she came from. It seems to turn the memory of a working-class upbringing into some sort of malign constraint. But it could be good advice! Advice not to forget the virtues of working class life, the valuable lessons in humility and solidarity so readily challenged by the narcissism and individualism of many middle-class professional communities, particularly the psychoanalytic community.

It is worth recalling that three of Britain’s most successful football managers, Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein, all not only came from mining communities but had actually worked down the mines. This experience gave them a profound understanding of the teamwork on which their lives underground depended, and which of course was the essence of a successful football team. I have, in recent years, heard of the manager of another professional football team taking his young players on a visit to a coal mine where they went down in the lift to the coal face. His aim was to remind them how fortunate they were to be able to earn a good living playing a game they loved rather than having to risk their lives underground as many of their forebears and contemporaries had to do. It was not his purpose to ‘haunt’ them with memories of where they came from, but to help them recognize and appreciate their good fortune and not take it for granted.

I was born into a trade union family and regard those roots as a source of pride, affection and inspiration. I have no wish at all to forget where I come from and no wish to have come from anywhere else. My problem in the psychoanalytic community is that all this makes a number of my colleagues uncomfortable. And it took me a while to be absolutely clear that it is their problem not mine.

Sadly, reading JR’s book took me back to that old feeling generated by early encounters with the middle-classes that maybe something was wrong with my roots; some fundamental lack that had to be compensated for; a feeling that I had to try to fit in, to emulate the effortless confidence and sense of entitlement of middle-class colleagues and teachers. It takes time to recognize how hollow so much of that ‘confidence’ really is and how often unearned is that sense of entitlement. To understand that one of the things middle-class people learn very early on is how to talk with confidence about things they do not really know a lot about. One of their many entitlements is to be listened to and taken seriously when they are simply reciting received wisdom without ever going to the trouble of thinking it all through carefully and critically and reaching their own conclusions. Another entitlement, is to believe and to act on the belief, that their own version of manners, courtesy and indeed of civilized conduct is definitive rather than relative.

There are moments when JR gets close to the money, only to miss the point. On page 111 referring to therapists from working class backgrounds she refers to the ‘often difficult personal impact of the milieux they encountered, and anxieties about being accepted’. One of her respondents says he ‘was fearful of overstepping certain boundaries, your sense of humour being out of place, would I fit in . . . it demands a personal transformation’. She then quotes Skeggs (2004) on how excess, vulgarity and stasis are projected historically onto the working classes leaving the (psychoanalytic) middle-classes to occupy the grounds of discretion and politeness. But then, right away, she switches to another theme—the ‘markers of class’ encountered by working class trainees in analysts’ consulting rooms. So near yet so far! She is so sympathetic to the guy worried about his sense of humour. She is even onto the projections from the middle-classes. But she does not discuss middle-class humour or the lack of it. She does not discuss the centrality of ‘havin’ a laugh’ in most working class cultures—especially havin’ a laugh at the expense of bosses, foremen, managers, politicians and others in positions of power and authority. She does not discuss the incipient totalitarianism of much psychoanalytic culture and the way in which masquerades of diagnosis or interpretation promote and maintain a hegemony of ruling class/middle-class ‘normality’ and conformism, to return to Fenichel’s question.

Some relevant political history

At a certain point, reading this book, I found it necessary to survey some working class history to remind myself that we are, and always have been, something much more than the plaintive creatures struggling for a place in the sophisticated world of psychoanalysis, that JR depicts.

A L Morton in his Peoples History of England (1938) writes

From the earliest times in which wage earners have existed as a class, they have formed associations to defend their interests and their rights against their employers. Such associations, whatever they may have been called, and whether nationwide organizations like the Great Society of the 14th-century or local craft bodies like the Yeomen Guilds, were in essence, Trade Unions. (Morton, 1938: 423)

Morton takes us to the early 18th-century and traces the development of trade unions to the end of the 19th-century, by which time the movement was on the verge of forming the Labour Party to establish representation in Parliament. Half a century later, that party gained power and created the ‘Welfare State’.

Clem Attlee’s Labour cabinet in 1945 was mostly composed of men (and one woman) who had left school at 13 or 14, and joined trade unions or other political groupings. These were the people who created the Welfare State and the National Health Service for which the UK has for many years been justly proud.

The definitive work on the conduct of meetings remains ‘The ABC of Chairmanship’, written by Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the TUC, 1926–46, which was originally titled, ‘The Labour Chairman’. Citrine was another boy who left school at 13/14 and learned his business in the trade union movement. Anyone familiar with the management and running of modern psychotherapy training institutes and the manner in which their business meetings are regularly conducted (or misconducted) will know how badly such expertise is needed. But of course, it is difficult for middle-class psychotherapists to learn from working class trade unionists.

Indeed, most psychoanalytic psychotherapists are very wary of trade unions, viewing them with intense suspicion if not distaste. Whenever middle-class psychotherapists gather to discuss social issues, mention of trade unions is virtually guaranteed to provoke an instant avoidance and change of subject. JR reports with approval the founding and development of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union in the UK. But as a member of that union, I can emphasize how important it has been to have some members with experience of blue collar unions. Trade unionism is not learned in most psychotherapy trainings.

This is where we need to acknowledge the conflict of interest and ideology. Psychoanalysis currently derives much of its status from its conceptualization of ‘society’ in a way that is in line with the basic tenets of liberal democracy. Its claims to neutrality and scientific objectivity align it with a western philosophical tradition and a logical positivist epistemology. This persists in spite of what we might argue are its dialectical roots. So, to refer back to the quote from Fenichel, it has become one of the means by which ‘the dominant ideology of exploitative class-society is reproduced in the psychology of all classes’.

Moreover, there would appear to be a fundamental conflict between on the one hand, an ideology for which salvation or redemption is to be sought through self-awareness and identity pursued through dyadic analytic/therapeutic relationships (or even small group relationships), and on the other, an ideology in which salvation/redemption is to be sought through collective social, industrial and political action. This is essentially an individualistic ideology versus a collectivist ideology.

Obvious propaganda is often less potent than the assumptions, taken as axiomatic on which it may be based—the ideology disguised as neutral science and objectivity. We see this in the work of philosophers and psychologists who through their theories labelled the victims of slavery and colonialism as inferior peoples, deserving or in need of domination. The ‘civilizing mission’ of Empire thus became enshrined in a wider presumption/presupposition/definition of ‘objectivity’ and ‘science’, not to mention ‘received wisdom’ and ‘common sense’. Freud’s reference to female sexuality as a ‘dark continent’ indicates an early association of psychoanalysis with the presumptions and language of colonialism and racism.

Central to this project of defining ‘reality’ is the assumption/presumption that there is just one reality. As family therapists discovered in the 1970s and as postmodernism has convincingly argued, as soon as you recognize the possibility of multiple viewpoints producing different ‘realities’ the system of domination is destabilized and becomes vulnerable to critique and deconstruction. Feminists particularly have led the way in arguing that to be a male is to inherit a particular understanding of ‘reality’ which is different from the ‘reality’ encountered and lived by females. Additionally, we have had for some years the discourses of ‘post-colonial studies’ and its offshoot, ‘subaltern studies’, demonstrating that there is a very different viewpoint and experience from the top of any system of domination and subordination from what there is at the bottom. The colonized see and experience colonialism very differently from the colonizer.

I suspect JR knows all this, particularly from a feminist viewpoint. Yet though positionality—the assumption that the experience and the perception of reality is determined by one’s position in the system or social field—would seem to be so obviously applicable in the consideration of ‘class’, she seems to abandon it in favour of an assumption that we can discuss ‘landscapes of inequality’ as if we can occupy a neutral objective position’. Psychoanalysis has its own version of ‘reality’ with its theories and categories of psychopathology, and we could argue that the ‘Controversial Discussions’ provide some evidence of the difficulty psychoanalysis has had entertaining and containing different ‘realities’. JR talks about the importance of theorizing ‘class’ within psychoanalytic theory. But what is to be the ‘reality’ status of this theorization?

To move from the working class into the middle-class discourse of psychoanalysis is to be confronted with a different ‘reality’—a different perception of the world. It is moreover a different perception that insists that it is right. It has little interest in exploring the difference between working class perceptions and its own middle-class perceptions, nor in exploring the ideological underpinnings of its own discourse. So, there is a somewhat coercive invitation to be colonized. Take our ‘reality’ or leave it! But disputing it or deconstructing it is not an option.

During the 1990s there were annual conferences called Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere. One of their features was the struggle between those who wanted to involve and integrate psychoanalysis with the public sphere and those for whom it rapidly became psychoanalysis of the public sphere. This insistence on meta-theory status is not simply a result of the explanatory power of psychoanalytic theory. It is deeply rooted in the social position of Freud and his followers amongst the European intelligentsia at the height of the global domination by the European empires. The authority of the analyst cannot be separated from Said’s suggestion that the authority of the author of the 19th-century European novel is derived from the authority of Empire, (Said, 1994). And the class struggles of the 19th-century cannot be separated from the colonialism that facilitated class exploitation.

Behind this lies a profound insecurity about the explanatory power of psychoanalysis. Despite its powerful perspective on the human condition, it nevertheless has severe limitations, not least the position from which most of its practitioners observe the world. Things become visible from a working class perspective that cannot be seen in the same way from a middle-class viewpoint. The post Second World War cultural revolutions in music, literature and film were significantly driven by an emergent working class. Rock ‘n roll, new working class novelists and playwrights, photographers and film makers generated a new energy and consciousness. ‘May 68’ and its global impact with youth uprisings and protests around the world followed. Many middle-class people participated in these new movements often labelled as the ‘Counter-Culture’. But many were left out. As a discourse, psychoanalysis can be said to have ‘missed the boat’, (Blackwell, 2003).

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the central political issues of industrial relations in the UK, the Vietnam war and the protest movements against it, the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, the decolonizing and independence struggles across the world seem to have left psychoanalysis (at least in Europe and the US) substantially untouched. Even now, a central myth about trade union power being the major cause of an alleged economic crisis in the 1970s remains not only unchallenged but unquestioned within the psychoanalytic discourse. A discourse, it should be noted, in which the distinction between reality and fantasy play a vital part. Yet the confusion of reality and manufactured fantasy on a massive social scale remains unanalysed.

EP Thompson in his History of the English Working Class, wanted to establish that the working class had made its own history rather than having been simply swept along by it. Those of us who come to psychoanalysis with pride in that tradition of resistance to exploitation and domination, with a sense of having created our own culture in that spirit of resistance, have serious problems with a discourse that negates our history. Others for whom such traditions are repressed or unconscious will find their social unconscious is not analysed but simply over-run by the cultural imperialism of psychoanalytic theory and culture permeated by middle-class tones, idioms and innuendos.

A further problem concerns the whiteness of the picture painted by JR. It appears as if all therapists from working class backgrounds are white. So the problems encountered by Black, Brown and other non-European therapists are seen as having similarities but as essentially different and separate. Yet for more than half a century, since the Windrush generation the English working class has been obviously ‘multi-racial’ and multi-cultural.

I have written before in this journal (Blackwell, 2018) about the model of inclusion mostly to be found in group analysis. ‘You can join us, provided you become like us’. Something similar seems to be at the heart of JR’s project. That is to extend psychoanalysis a bit, in order to include more therapists from the working-class, who will then become more like middle-class psychoanalysts. But some of us want to retain our working class identities and the language, norms and values of the cultures from which we come.

The problem here is that to acknowledge the limits of a middle-class view of the world, to give up the fantasy of having a privileged meta-theory, a better education, a deeper understanding and many of the other presumptions of the psychoanalytic discourse, may be experienced by many psychoanalysts as a humiliation. There may be shame attached to the discovery of having presumed so much for so long. And there may be unmanageable envy for those whom Gramsci described as ‘organic intellectuals’ who have an insight based on their social position and experience, their class, their ‘race’ and their culture of resistance, not readily available to those from more conventionally privileged backgrounds.

CLR James (1963) argued that the colonized should not reject everything the colonizer offered, simply because it came from the colonizer, but they should instead take from the colonizer’s discourse whatever could be useful to them in their own liberation struggle. So I will end with two questions. When we talk about psychoanalysis in relation to class conflict, which side are its institutions and its discourse on? And, for those of us continuing an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class struggle, how can we decolonize psychoanalysis to give it a useful role in that struggle?