I work with affluent, educated, professionally successful people in private practice in San Francisco. One of the best parts of my job is that I learn a lot from my patients. Every day, patients teach me about suffering and resilience, love and hate, mundane habits and spiritual transcendence. They think critically about technology and culture, sexuality and gender, race and politics. They relay deep and nuanced conversations with friends and spouses about the opportunities and perils of technology, about parenting and partnership, foreign affairs and climate change. They can talk at length about myriad dimensions of their personal identity. But they don’t seem to know how to think about class. There are comments about the distress of witnessing extreme poverty and homelessness, and about the “insane” or “obscene” cost of basic items and services in the Bay Area, yet the word “class” rarely surfaces, much less receives sophisticated analysis.
I grew up in a poor community. Money and power and class preoccupied my thoughts. I had questions about how much things cost, how much people earned—and why. My father, whose parenting style could be generously described as hands off, did not appreciate this. In a formative moment, he pulled me aside at a social gathering to scold me: “Do not talk to people about money! It’s impolite!!”
Now, I live in a wealthy neighborhood in San Francisco—which is to say that I am surrounded by people who have a lot more money than I do. One wouldn’t necessarily know that, however. I can pass. I wear the appropriate attire. I can discuss art, literature, politics, restaurants, foreign travel. Passing feels a little disingenuous, a little anxiety-inducing, and a little pleasurable, all at once. It also makes me mad. I feel mad at the pseudo-sameness, the overlooking of significant distinctions.
My patients seem to implicitly assume that I occupy the same class position that they do. They reference financial privileges and challenges as if we inhabit the same world. Upper class patients discuss luxury hotels, exclusive social clubs, managing wealth, and so on, as if I am experiencing the same sorts of things. They casually name drop, as if I am intimately familiar. Professional managerial class patients, meanwhile, express their frustration with the city’s expense, and the tradeoffs and challenges involved in buying houses or raising kids as if we’re in the same boat. “I’m sure you know how it goes, try to go out for a simple, nice dinner, and the bill is like. . . what happened?!” People who own homes seem to assume I do—and it’s the same with people who rent. This is quite different from the curiosity I experience about whether or not I have kids, where I grew up, what religious beliefs and traditions I hold, and so on.
As a psychoanalytic therapist, I present myself as a relatively neutral canvas, ripe for projection. I actively practice nondisclosure. This can stimulate all sorts of fantasies that reveal something about patients’ inner worlds. With both class position and political orientation, however, there is generally a presumption of sameness that forecloses this sort of revelation. Patients don’t seem to wonder about my political views, because the majority of San Franciscans are broadly liberal, and they therefore not irrationally (nor inaccurately) assume me to be. The unthinking, uncurious attitude towards class position makes less sense. I could easily own or rent, struggle month-to-month, or live quite comfortably. Curiosity about what is actually true could stimulate fantasies. And, if someone were trained to mentalize class, to think in terms of class position, they would quickly categorize me as part of the PMC, a wage laborer in a high hourly bracket, able to afford a nice office, but most likely not a mortgage, burdened by self-employment tax, myriad insurances, student loan debt, and so on. No bonuses, no paid vacation.
Mark Fisher coined the phrase “capitalist realism” to describe the way in which late-stage capitalism, through its obliteration of alternatives, creates a powerful, invisible barrier to thinking cogently about class. Because capitalism has been hegemonic in the Western world for many decades, with alternative economic forms seemingly vanquished, concepts for critiquing capitalism and imagining a different reality have atrophied through lack of use. We can’t see things in plain sight. We lack the mental architecture to perceive and discuss the economy we inhabit–including class dynamics–in accurate, nuanced ways.
A patient who grew up lower-middle class, and whose job barely allows her to scrape by, married into formidable generational wealth. When her in-laws bought her and her spouse a house, she felt excited and grateful, but also inextricably uneasy. Was she guilty? Anxious? “It’s just not really mine, I didn’t buy it,” she explained, “and everyone knows that. Or maybe they don’t! I don’t know! It’s obviously not something you talk about, so . . . Of course, lots of people my age only buy houses with their parents’ help. So I shouldn’t feel guilty? I feel kinda like I’m getting away with something, but I don’t rationally agree with that.” We discussed the identity adjustment involved in moving into a different social class, compounded by the lack of explicit acknowledgement of this change. Whatever her friends, family, colleagues, and so on thought or felt about her change in fortune, it wasn’t communicated to her directly. Naming and increasingly accepting her shift in class position in therapy did help, but she continued to experience nagging discomfort: “I still keep thinking about how I didn’t earn it, and that makes me feel bad.”
Belief in meritocracy—the idea that the United States is a nation of equal opportunity in which effort, talent, intelligence and so on translates into wealth and prestige—remains powerful. This fosters a judgement of failure or inadequacy towards those less successful, and a need to justify privilege by linking it to individual effort or genius. Despite ample evidence that meritocracy today is much more myth than reality, the fable of the American dream continues to obfuscate class, making class position appear more fluid and malleable than it is, and generating personal, emotional sentiments about class that inhibit clear-eyed assessment. Perhaps this is especially true in San Francisco, where startup culture billionaires seemingly corroborate this fantasy (rather than evidencing the structural elements of capitalism that create immense wealth for the few, at the expense of the many).
Another patient, an attorney at a lucrative firm married to a woman wildly successful in tech, felt that something was off between him and his best friend from law school. His friend, who worked for a non-profit, kept declining invitations for gala dinners, weekend trips and so on. “We were so close in school, and now . . . something is up. Or maybe he’s just busy? There’s always a good excuse . . . But I don’t know. I asked him if there’s anything going on between us and he said no.” This patient tried to accept his friend’s statement and forget about it, but the issue kept troubling him. When I wondered if this friends’ disinclinations had anything to do with money, his first response was, “Oh, no, he’s a lawyer!” Followed by, “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve never thought of that, which makes me feel like an asshole, but yeah, that’s probably it.”
My patient wanted to talk about money and class privilege with his friend, but broaching the subject felt challenging. Like my father, he seemed to feel that talking about money was generally impolite, but recognized his resistance was beyond this taboo. The risk of humiliating his friend felt enormous, as if making their differential class position explicit would be shameful for him—a signal he had somehow failed, or at least been less successful than his best friend. As we probed deeper, my patient became aware that addressing the subject of class directly would likely feel shameful for him, too: it would force an encounter with the reality that he had more financial privilege than his friend by means other than merit. Although the two men attended the same law school and were both working equally hard and succeeding similarly in their work, their economic realities were very different. This situation was objectively “nobody’s fault,” yet it felt like a sensitive personal topic. The conversation never happened. In a society where we can’t think critically about class, yet harbor all sorts of semi-conscious, shame- and guilt-laden personal feelings about money, avoiding the topic often feels like the safest option, perpetuating the problem.
Another patient earns an annual salary of $500,000, in addition to ample stocks, at a major tech company. But he feels poor. He feels stressed about money constantly. He and his husband own a beautiful home. They take expensive vacations. Their daughter attends an expensive private school and does expensive extracurricular activities. I hear of expensive weekend get-aways, expensive meals, expensive clothes—and so on. I wonder if it ever occurs to him to cut back. “Of course it does,” he tells me, “but not seriously. Where would I start?” The really big expenses feel non-negotiable, and the smaller ones feel too trivial or too painful to cut. Budgeting on this big of a salary feels almost insulting, incommensurate with his putative class position. His friends and colleagues do all the same things he does; his lifestyle feels like it should be a given, yet it is actually financially straining. Taking this seriously would mean admitting something uncomfortable to himself and his friends. Again, it might feel humiliating.
It might also materially undermine his class position: the class fluidity that does exist in the United States allows people to pass—to gain access to a higher class than they might actually belong to. Unlike the friend described above who declined costly invitations, this patient says yes to things he “can’t afford”—giving the appearance of a true elite—and reaps many rewards as a result.
I can relate. Passing in the way I do, spending money on things beyond my prudent means, is a significant factor in building and sustaining a full practice with patients who can afford high fees. If the “myth of meritocracy” is one piece of the puzzle of a uniquely American blindness to class, another is the relative fluidity of class position, or at least the accessibility of the trappings of true elite affluence. For example, I will most likely never be able to buy a house in my neighborhood, but I can rent there and dine and shop there, alongside my neighbors. This relative accessibility, the tantalizing possibility of meritocratic wealth, keeps the shine on capitalist realism: whatever the downsides, we’re trained to believe this is the best system we’ve got. We remain invested, and therefore prone to denying its obvious, terrible inequities and unnecessary suffering. Thinking and talking more directly and complexly about our economic realities is challenging, but it’s an essential first step.
