‘You were not born here, so you are classless, you are free!’ Social class and cultural complex in analysis

Abstract

The unconscious impact of differences in culture and social class is discussed from the perspective of an analyst practising in London whose 'foreign accent' prevents patients from placing her within the social stratifications by which they feel confined. Because she is seen by them as an analyst from both 'inside' and 'outside' the British psycho-social fabric and cultural complex, this opens a space in the transference that enables fuller exploration of the impact of the British social class system on patients' experience of themselves and their world. The paper considers this impact as a trans-generational trauma of living in a society of sharp socio-economic divisions based on material property. This is illustrated with the example of a patient who, at the point of moving towards the career to which he aspired, was unable to separate a sense of personal identity from the social class he so desperately wanted to leave behind and walk the long avenue of individuation. The dearth of literature on the subject of class is considered, and the paper concludes that not enough attention is given to class identification in training.

Healing cultural trauma and its application to the Router programme

“…More recent contributions on the theme have been those by Singer (2010), Kaplinsky (2015) and Rasche and Singer (2016). But it was Weisstub and Galili‐Weisstub (2004) who aligned cultural complexes with what they called ‘collective trauma’ and this has grown into an expanding Jungian discourse on working with ‘cultural trauma’ (including that to do with refugees) as seen in Goboda‐Madikizela (2008); Gudaitė and Stein (2014); Tsivinsky (2016); certain focusses of the Zurich Trauma Group (Maercker & Heim 2016; Maercker & Meili 2018); Kiehl (2016); Luci (2017); Stein (2017); Ghate (2018); Tyminski (2018) and in the ‘Trauma’ section in Roesler (2018). Some of this interest is no doubt due to the growth of the IAAP’s Router training programme, which began in European countries where cultural trauma has been prevalent following World War II and in certain totalitarian Communist regimes.…”

Editorial

“…This edition is one contribution to that process of engagement – hoping to stimulate the interrogation, exploration and challenging of the embedded beliefs and value systems within ourselves, our culture, and our society as well as our analytic institutions and practices (and I am reminded of Emilija Kiehl's excellent paper in this Journal (Kiehl ) which did just that for the issue of class). This is how culture changes, and thankfully it does, even if that change is not always linear and uniform, and even though that change is sometimes unbearably slow.…”