Chapter 10

Class in the clinic Class in the clinic

Enacting distinction *

In her introduction to the 2005 special issue of Sociology on Class, Culture

and Identity, Lawler (2005a) briefly reviews the history of sociological
work on class. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Lawler notes, research on
class and research on other identity categories, for example, race, tended to
develop separately. However, the title of the 1991 volume Bringing Class
Back In (McNall et al.) suggests that even outside of sociological work
on identity, class had fallen off most sociologists’ research agenda after
the late 1960s and early 1970s. In part due to its antipathy to sociology,
psychology has largely ignored class altogether, with the very important
exception of those critical psychologists, e.g., Walkerdine, 1986, 1992;
Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989, for whom class was never off the agenda.
Lawler is nonetheless correct to highlight the general disappearance of
class as a category of identity research. Outside of work focused directly
on identity, what became prominent in sociology in the post-Marxist and
increasingly neoliberalizing academic milieu of the 1980s and 1990s was
work on de-traditionalization and individualization (Giddens, 1991; Beck,
1999; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Intentionally or unintentionally,
this work contributed to the mainstream consensus that class affiliations
(like religion and other traditional collective identity categories) no longer
effectively or affectively bind people together. As those who write about
neoliberalism and class suggest (e.g., Walkerdine, 2003), this sociological
literature “disappeared” class by focusing on the contemporary Western
demand for self-invention, do-it-yourself biography, “self-fashioning”
(although, to be fair, individualization theorists did emphasize that the
absence of collective support systems, and the increasing shift of risk
 Class in the clinic 139

from the public sector onto the individual, created a tendency for “do-it-
yourself” biographies to issue all too frequently in “breakdown” biogra-
phies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 7)).
The publication in English of Bourdieu’s work (particularly Distinction,
1984) proved crucial in expanding the concept of class beyond definitions
centered on job category or income. Bourdieu’s relational definition of
class, which understands class position to be a complex amalgam of eco-
nomic, social, and cultural capital, lived as differentiated and embodied
versions of habitus, enabled researchers to articulate class with such psy-
chosocial variables as taste, affects, and competition for educational and
social networking advantage (see, for example, Bennett et al., 2009; Reay
et al., 2011). Drawing on Bourdieu, Skeggs (2005) and others have per-
suasively argued that class has hardly disappeared: rather, it is expressed
as differences in taste, differences that are used to pathologize the working
class as subjects with bad taste who make bad moral choices. As Lawler
(2005a) writes, by the end of the 1990s (probably due to the noticeable
effects of new levels of income inequality), class had once again become
central to several theorists, many of whom were themselves working-class
in origin. By the time the 2005 special issue appeared, there was a consen-
sus among feminist (and other) theorists that (1) class is a category that
can only be understood relationally; (2) subjectivities are not only raced,
sexed and gendered, but also classed, i.e., class is integral to the construc-
tion of subjectivity; (3) class is a dynamic process, a “site for political
struggle, rather than . . . a set of static and empty positions waiting to be
filled by indicators such as employment and housing” (Lawler, 2005b,
p. 430).
By 2005, a powerful means of researching class had emerged from psy-
chosocial interview work aimed at understanding how class is lived. Class
researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the particularities of
class cultural practices and how they are forged in relation to the practices
of other class fractions. Given the increasing interest in investigating class
as lived relational experience, it has been surprising to me how few psy-
chosocial theorists of class have taken into account the power of uncon-
scious process, unconscious affects, and unconscious intergenerational
transmission. As noted in the last chapter, Bourdieu (1984) himself had
called for a “social psychoanalysis” in Distinction (p. 11), and there, as
well as in The Weight of the World (1999), he pointed to various effects of
140 Normative unconscious processes

unconscious process on the way class is lived: for example, he described

unconscious effects of disavowed histories of class struggle, embedded
in the very concept of habitus; he also elaborated the internal conflicts
and self-repudiations inherent to moving up in class. Although Bourdieu
linked “distinction” specifically to the habitus of the bourgeoisie, he also
described the way each class makes a moral virtue of its own way of
being, shaming and repudiating the ways of other classes both higher and
lower (Skeggs, 1997; Lamont, 2000; Sayer, 2005; Reay, 2015; Aarseth
et al., 2016).
Among psychoanalysts who write about class, few, until very recently,
have grappled with how class relations play out in the clinic (exceptions
in contemporary psychoanalysis include Samuels, 1993, 2007; Altman,
1995; Whitson, 1996; Bodnar, 2004; Hartman, 2005; Layton et al., 2006;
Ryan, 2006, 2017; Botticelli, 2007; Corpt, 2013). Danto (2005) has use-
fully traced the history of the psychoanalytic establishment’s relation to
class, highlighting Freud’s endorsement of the early twentieth-century free
psychoanalytic clinics in Berlin and Vienna. Altman (1995) wrote of the
many class and race issues that emerged in his work in a clinic in a poor
area of New York City. Hartman (2005), elaborating on my concept of a
heterosexist unconscious (Layton, 2002), wrote about his own conflictual
class formation and how it affected his clinical work. Ryan (2009, 2017)
chronicled the elision and disavowal of class in psychoanalysis, while
she herself (2006) significantly advanced work on class and the clinic in
her study of middle-class and working-class clinicians who described the
kinds of transferences and countertransferences they experienced when
working with patients from classes different from their own. Among
Ryan’s fascinating results was the finding that middle-class patients often
were contemptuous toward their working-class therapists, who then had to
work very hard not to retaliate (2006, p. 132). In what follows, I look at
classed clinical enactments of normative unconscious processes, focusing
specifically on how class identities are subjectively created and relation-
ally lived in our particular historical moment.

Class struggles in neoliberal times: enacting the

demand for upward mobility
Two vignettes drawn from my own clinical work illustrate some of the
effects, as Walkerdine (2003) has put it, of the neoliberal intensification
 Class in the clinic 141

of the demand for upward mobility. Set against a backdrop of a decline in

working-class collective institutions; the fraying, if not rupture, of a social
safety net and the accompanying “responsibilization” of the individual;
a growing consensus that competition is at the heart of an intensely indi-
vidualistic conception of human nature; the conviction that a successful
human is a rich human; and the high value put on self-fashioning (or, as
some have put it, e.g., du Gay, 2004, on being an entrepreneurial self), the
following vignettes demonstrate how the demand for upward mobility in
a culture of increasing class inequality promotes sadomasochistic patterns
of relating that are part and parcel of class formation and class struggle.
The two patients I shall describe came of age in the post-1970s U.S.
atmosphere of neoliberalism and neoconservatism (the vignettes were
first reported in Layton, 2014a). Both of their families, conflictually to be
sure, demanded that they show their worth by rising in class status. Sandy
was born in the late 1970s, the first child of a white mother who grew up
in poverty and a white father who rose from blue collar to bureaucratic
white collar. Father never let mother forget where she had come from, and
much of Sandy’s specialness to father was wrapped up in his often-stated
aspirations that she rise in class and status. Because she was so special,
he asserted, she could do and have whatever she wanted. Intuiting this
source of father’s love, Sandy worked much harder academically than any
of her peers, and she did indeed rise to become a professional in a high-
income field. She thus secured her place as her father’s favorite – which
involved joining together in denigrating mother. What Sandy always
knew, but couldn’t really know until therapy, is that her father’s capacities
for love were rather damaged, and a largely unconscious part of her greatly
resented what felt like a love contingent on performance. Her fragile sense
of specialness was bolstered by her utter disdain for peers who didn’t work
as hard as she: “someday they’ll be cleaning my toilets,” she thought when
she saw them out having fun while she studied.
Sandy fell in love with a working-class man who himself had risen to
be bureaucratic white collar. As her therapist, I listened over and over
again to her mocking denigration of his working-class ways. I surmise
that Sandy thought she was bonding with me and my, in her view, exalted
class position when she was denigrating the classlessness of her boyfriend.
But, of course, it was her own anxiety about not being classy enough that
she feared would be revealed – and dreams did at times reveal it. At the
point where I could no longer bear her contempt and could find a way to
142 Normative unconscious processes

confront it calmly, I pointed out to her that she seemed to need to mock her
boyfriend, and we ought perhaps to look at why. The first time I brought
this up, she practically had an anxiety attack on the couch. She had an
instant moment of recognition that, in fact, much of her sense of who she
was rested on this defensive kind of class mockery, and she suddenly felt
herself unraveling at the prospect of being shorn of this defense. It took
much work to understand where her class distinction had come from, how
it related to class disidentifications with mother and identifications with
father’s disdain for what, in mother, reminded him too much of his dis-
owned class insecurities. More importantly, she came to understand how
the class grandiosity was a defense against recognizing that father’s love
was contingent on her achievements – her mockery was aimed as much at
hated parts of self that she had come to associate with classlessness as at
her boyfriend.
Class wounds run deep. When it feels like love is contingent on perfor-
mance, love itself gets tangled up in sadomasochistic enactments. Indeed,
until she met this boyfriend, Sandy was entirely cynical about love. For
years, she had been cheating on her previous upper middle-class boyfriend
with a lower-class man she’d dated in high school – another way of exter-
nalizing and interpersonalizing her class struggle. But Sandy’s denigration
of love was abetted by a fairly new subject position offered to profes-
sionalizing women, one formed at the intersection of neoliberalism and a
middle-class version of feminism. Here, dependency is denied and care-
taking capacities devalued in favor of a single-minded focus on career
goals – and, indeed, before analysis Sandy occupied this position without
seeming conflict (see Chapter 8). Love was for fools, she would often
say. In her determination to rise in class, Sandy had become the kind of
non-relational maximizer of self-opportunity described as exemplary in
neoliberal literature. She had come to hate her own vulnerability and to
project it onto her boyfriend and lower classes in general. But we might
guess that she fell in love with this boyfriend not only to have an object
from whom she could distinguish herself and whom she could denigrate,
but also because he was comfortable with his class, with all she had come
to call not-me, other. She would try repeatedly to get me to laugh with her
at him for wearing a gold chain or showing some other sign of belonging
to the white working class, but she was head over heels in love with him
and she had never been in love before.
 Class in the clinic 143

Sandy’s case illustrates that disgust and distinction can operate not
only between classes but within class – and that here, too, the “disgust-
ing” other has to be kept close. Sandy was not only defending against her
fear of falling back into the lower class, represented by her mother; she
was also disavowing her love for her lower-class mother and retaliating
against that mother’s difficulty giving love and nurture. Sandy became
a “disgusted” subject (Lawler, 2005b) and expected to find in me some-
one who would share her disgust for the lower class. When I did not play
that part, her defenses and the form of classed subjectivity she performed
began to crumble.
Another patient, Paul, was born in the early 1970s and was the second
child of a working-class mother from several generations of working-class
and unskilled laborers. His father was a white-collar small business owner,
but he had left when Paul was three, plunging the family into poverty.
His mother’s grandparents had been proud working-class union people,
but his maternal grandparents and his mother, the people who raised him,
aspired, unsuccessfully, to rise in class (a generational shift perhaps due,
in part, to the declining political and collective power of unions – see
Lamont, 2000). Although he was only occasionally present in Paul’s life,
from time to time bestowing a bit of money and heavy doses of advice, his
father stood as a family example of someone who had “made it” – but also
as someone who was felt to be immoral, irresponsible, and an object of
family derision. Paul, who did very well in school, seems to have been the
target recipient in the family of the (conflicted) parental wish to advance
in class. Like Sandy, Paul, too, had a vague feeling that the love of both
parents was contingent on rising in class, on bringing the family a more
legitimate social status.
The arena in which Paul chose to rise, academic science, was one that
truly was dear and meaningful to him, but the rage at the almost desperate
demand put on him to rise kept getting in the way of achieving what he
hoped to achieve. The question “who am I doing this work for?” plagued
him constantly, and because he perceived his parents as tyrannical and
unloving, achievement always had the flavor not of self-fulfillment but
rather of submitting to a rejecting, judgmental authority. An important
basis of his sense of self involved a constant courageous fight against
parental and other unjust authorities. But what we began to recognize was
that part of the repeated transference scenario entailed a need to turn any
144 Normative unconscious processes

authority perceived as “higher” than he into a potential immoral tyrant;

more than once Paul was fired from jobs after getting explosively angry
at a superior.
For Paul, the very structure of analysis frequently and painfully evoked
the feeling of unjustness, for while the caring attention of analysis prom-
ised love, each of its many limits were felt as unduly punishing and
rejecting – although he rarely acknowledged that he felt hurt by these con-
straints. Rather, from time to time, we became engaged in a struggle in
which he defended the underdog world of patients against the injustices
of arrogant analytic authority. Notable in Paul’s case was a need to see me
as powerful and punishing both so that he could have a perch from which
to feel justified waging battle against the perceived (and real) injustices of
the analytic situation AND so he could keep me at a distance so he would
not be at risk of being overtaken by me, swallowed up, and destroyed. At
the same time, his exquisite sensitivity to abuses of authority forced me
repeatedly to examine the defensively grandiose aspects of my analytic
stance. More than once, I wounded Paul when my own class-blindness
was enacted unconsciously as class arrogance, for example, by pathologiz-
ing some of his protests against injustice.
Sandy and Paul’s ways of living class illustrate how split states of gran-
diosity/pride and, on the other side of the split, self-hatred/shame can
ensue when children perceive that parental love is contingent on rising
in class and economic status. The parents in these cases carried the inter-
generationally transmitted wounds of being lower class and treated by
multiple authorities in degrading and condescending ways. Their way of
loving their children produced different kinds of wounds that issued in
split relations both to authority and to those lower in class. Such are the
narcissistic wounds that create class character. But, as Ball et al., 2004,
and Vincent and Ball, 2007, have suggested, even within the same class
fraction class can be lived quite differently, depending not only on varia-
bles such as gender, age, geography, history, and politics, but also on what
Levine-Rasky, 2011, pp. 247–248 (citing Anthias), describes as a distinc-
tion between social position (differences in resources) and social position-
ing (how one deals with those differences). In other words, even within the
same class fraction, differences in libidinal loyalties and investments affect
whether and how one challenges, conforms to, or otherwise negotiates
class inequalities. Sandy identified with professional class authority and
generally denigrated those lower. Paul’s relation to authority alternated
 Class in the clinic 145

between deference, rage, and panic. What crippled Paul was precisely an
intergenerationally transmitted split relation to authority.
As is so often the case, both Sandy and Paul had made a virtue out of
the very place in which they had been wounded: Sandy, encouraged by
a neoliberal culture that can only envision winners and losers, felt those
who achieved middle-class status were better humans than those who had
not, and yet, as in all cases of splitting, she had to keep the degraded other
close so as to continue to feel special and perhaps, as I suggested, also to
stay close to some part of her that, in her class rise, she had lost and not
grieved. Indeed, along with therapy, it was her love for him that offered an
opportunity to heal her classed psychic splits.
Unlike Sandy, Paul had made a virtue of refusing to comply with author-
ity, of rebelling against rules, of NOT seeking accolades. The cost, how-
ever, was high: he could neither shake a pervasive sense of being unlovable
nor a conviction that culturally-sanctioned middle-class ways of doing
things were the “right” way and the only way deserving of reward. Thus,
he would repeatedly use his academic credentials to enter an upper-class
world, and then he would fight with the boss about all the injustices he
saw, thereby risking, and often incurring, either demotion or expulsion.
For Paul, entering the middle-class world meant a loss of integrity. For
both Sandy and Paul, the splits and projections resulting from the way
class wounds were lived played out interpersonally in sadomasochistic
relations, central to which were enactments externalizing internalized
“distinction” between inferior and superior. Sandy’s were performed in
the relation with her boyfriend rather than with me. Paul’s were performed
with me. Indeed, as sadomasochistic forms of relating began more clearly
to define my relationship with Paul, I was able to see that one thing that
continually got in the way of his ability to work on his projects was inextri-
cably tied to class inequality: feelings of illegitimacy and the simultaneous
impotent reverence for and hatred of power WERE and ARE his maternal
family’s way of living class.
As I’ve said, Sandy and Paul came of age in an era in which U.S. parents
of all classes are anxious about whether or not their children will “make it.”
Their stories illustrate some of the psychic fallout that can arise from the
demand to rise in class, and they clearly reveal how class gets connected
to particular ways of being, knowing, and loving – and how the demand
to rise can cause one to hate those parts of self that are connected to the
practices of the “inferior class.” Neoliberal regimes publicly sanction the
146 Normative unconscious processes

repudiation of vulnerable and dependent psychological states, and thus

render such states shameful (for an example, see Jimenez and Walker-
dine, 2012). Indeed, Chase and Walker, 2012, p. 740, describe poverty as a
“meta-arena for the emergence of shame, especially in contemporary Brit-
ish society where success is largely measured according to the attainment
of economic goals.” In such conditions, certainly true as well in the U.S.,
ordinary human self-states like dependence, exacerbated by the inequali-
ties of neoliberalism, are likely to become “not-me,” other, dissociated and
then associated with those others who are lower on the social scale.
In conclusion, I hope not only to have demonstrated the significance of
unconscious process in the creation of conflicted class identities and class
distinctions, but also to have suggested some new avenues for thinking
about how class struggles are historically specific and both driven and
perpetuated by vicious circles of sadomasochistic relating. In Section III,
I explore further the sadomasochistic individual and large-group effects of
neoliberalism.

Note
* Used with permission. Adapted from Layton, L. (2014) Grandiosity,
neoliberalism, and neoconservatism. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 34(5): 463–474.