Abstract
In “The future of an illusion” (1927), Freud writes about the defense of civilization through instinctual renunciation, a task so difficult for the “masses,” who lack both education and the will, given that they have done so much work to build civilization but have little access to its rewards. He points towards an educational pathway that might lead such masses to the possibility of reason. This approach has dominated modes of population management through liberalism to neoliberalism. That the “masses” are taken to be dominated by instinct and lack intellectual ability is a position that still haunts debates about class today. In contrast, Althusserian (1971) theory marshaled an account of ideology inspired by Lacan in the context of what is often considered as the failure of workers to join students after the May 68 uprisings.
This chapter discusses what a psychosocial approach to class might look like, methodologically and theoretically, including a discussion of the absence of any serious consideration of the middle and upper classes from most work on class in this field. In this vein, it also discusses classism.
Moving from the consequences of Freud’s (The future of an illusion. London, Hogarth Press, 1927) position, the chapter considers the difficulties and possibilities for working psychosocially on class. It also considers a tradition of work on what we might now term psychosocial research in this area, from Lilian Rubin’s (1976) Worlds of Pain and Sennett and Cobb’s (1973) Hidden Injuries of Class to more recent work in the field, often undertaken by working class academics. Working through research which began in the 1960s through to the present day, the chapter also considers work on deindustrialization, intergenerational transmission, and the importance of Deleuze and Guattari for an understanding of classed territory. Moving towards a future with even less secure employment than the present of neoliberalism, it considers the significance of exploring psychosocially the new relational dynamics of class.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that not all countries have the same class system, but modes of population classification and stratification exist everywhere. The histories and modes of stratification and classification are different, however. For example, caste in the Indian subcontinent – the emergence of a class system in postcolonial countries crosscut by systems of colonial governance, with stratifications and classifications by race. This makes the examination of class more complex, and, as we shall see, within the UK in later years, there is a tendency in some quarters to describe the working class as white, exemplifying the problematic relation to race, ethnicity, and colonialism and its specific historicities.
- 2.
Lacan’s work uses semiotics to get beyond Freud’s biologism.
- 3.
The 2003 book consists of extracts from all the books in the Children of Crisis series.
- 4.
To demonstrate how far the field has come I add as an aside that during the 1980s when I was due to deliver a paper on class at a left wing conference, an upper middle class male colleague remarked “YOU! What do you know about class?! Oh, yes hidden injuries” and with a sneer, walked off. I never forgot the remark and that there is now so much work on class that could be described as psychosocial, I celebrate with great joy.
- 5.
In the sense that the psychic and the social are understood as separate realms.
- 6.
At the time, this difference could be encapsulated by the journal Feminist Review, on the one hand, and m/f on the other.
- 7.
We could also think of Richard Hoggart in this context, whose work on workingclass lived experience was closer to the American work. He founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University.
- 8.
During this time, I made a documentary “Didn’t she do well” (Working Pictures), which explored the experiences of a group of working class women to professional work via higher education and the uncertainties of place “I know who I am in that place, I know who I am in that (other) place, but I don’t know who I want to be just for me.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hshXr61ydPU
- 9.
Though see the edited volume by Patricia Gherovici (2019) on psychoanalytic work with working class Latino/x patients in the barrios in the USA, where they make a concerted effort to work with the specificity of this experience, devising new concepts and ways of working. We can also point to the edited collection by Layton et al. (2006) that makes greater reference to classed experience in the consulting room.
- 10.
At the time of undertaking the fieldwork, in the early to mid-1990s, the term “psychosocial interview” was not in usage. The team used a technique of asking a single question – “what happened to you in the last ten years?” With grateful thanks to Janet Sayers for helping us think this through. We then went on to use what we called “three levels of analysis,” as described in Walkerdine et al., 2002.
- 11.
That much of it refers to Bourdieu is not surprising given his work on class and habitus. However, Bourdieu’s work tends to operate in terms of the cultural reproduction of classed relations. We might ask if class is always reproduced in the same manner. A more poststructuralist framework would think about production as always changing given historical and locational differences.
- 12.
It is based on reading of Beradt’s (1968) The Third Reich of Dreams, a book put together after WW2 but contained the dreams of Germans during the 1930s, which already foreshadow the rise of Hitler and the events that follow even though these are expressed within dream imagery. Gordon Lawrence developed that idea as a kind of groupwork practice.
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Walkerdine, V. (2022). Social Class. In: Frosh, S., Vyrgioti, M., Walsh, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_18-1
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