When India Court MacWeeney and Talia Rose Weiner approached us with this idea—a full-length special issue on class and psychoanalysis, curated by them but featuring the contributions of diverse writers and thinkers—we were interested, but unsure if it would fit into our work at Mad in America. At first glance, psychoanalysis and the worlds of critical psychiatry and critical psychology look like strange bedfellows. One has often been caricatured as navel-gazing for the well-to-do, while the other has been forged in the language of rights, struggle, and collective action.
Yet we have come to see psychoanalysis as a strong ally in restoring dignity, depth, and meaning to mental health practice. It offers a way of working that connects lived phenomenology with history, injustice, and the social worlds we inhabit. This allows clinicians to move past symptom chasing and offer a path toward insight into one’s life, with understanding, humility, and compassion.
The main stumbling block for many, as explored in the contributions below, lies in the intersection of capitalism, neoliberalism, and social class with the values and goals of long-term, in-depth psychoanalytic therapy. In many ways, the reality of our world interferes with and undermines the implementation of psychoanalytic ideals, but can the reverse also be true? May psychoanalysis offer us a way to subvert this social structure and give voice to our dissent?
And so we are pleased to introduce this special issue, which addresses the hopes and hazards of that very prospect. We are presenting it as it would be presented as a special issue in a scholarly journal, just as India and Talia intended. This page is the table of contents that links to each contribution, and Talia and India’s introduction to the collection is a good place to start.
—Justin Karter and Peter Simons
“Transference of Value and Transforming Values: Money, Class, Labor, and Psychoanalysis”
Table of Contents
- Evoking Discomfort: Expressive Writing on Money, Class, and Psychoanalysis
Introduction by editors India Court MacWeeney, PhD, LMSW, and Talia Rose Weiner, PhD, LPC - The Rate of Exchange
Poetry by India Court MacWeeney, PhD, LMSW - False Profits, or, Thera-nos
Carter J. Carter, PhD, LICSW - What Psychoanalytic Clinicians Can Learn From John Womack’s “Grubbing Analysis”
Benjamin Fife, PsyD - “You Need to Know Your Value”: Shame and the Fee in Psychoanalytic Socialization
Lainie Goldwert, PhD - Psychodynamics in the Red (or How I Went Broke in Therapy)
India Court MacWeeney, PhD, LMSW - There’s No Escape From the World
eli nova rose
- Class Notes from the Consulting Room
Amber Trotter, PsyD - Use of the Self: Class Politics and Liberatory Potentials of Containment and Enactment in Therapeutic Work
Talia Rose Weiner, PhD, LPC
Are all those letters after people’s names supposed to tell me that they’re “experts” on the human soul? That THEY because of all their academic wisdom understand better how to “fix” modern civilization?
To hell with that, there ARE no experts on the human soul, and modern civilization, like psychiatry, CANNOT be “fixed”, it MUST be abandoned and reimagined.
“we were interested, but unsure if it would fit into our work at Mad in America. At first glance, psychoanalysis and the worlds of critical psychiatry and critical psychology look like strange bedfellows.”
Oh, so you RECOGNIZE that this website is just an open-access psychiatry journal then, nothing to actually do with radical humanitarianism. This website needs to go.
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It’s so odd that psychiatry and psychology chose the word “psyche” (Greek for “soul”) to name their professions, when they pretty much completely reject the soul. Personally, I found healing from depression, gluttony issues, and most of my OCD issue by going to Jesus, who actually does specialize in all things soul and spirit.
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I’m not so sure our civilization is all that modern. The dark ages come to mind and I agree there are times the baby needs to be thrown out with the bath water. Once upon a time psychiatry helped people by giving them a breather or rest without any medications. Now we have poisoned the well with psychiatric medications being used that in actuality cause the very imbalances described by modern psychiatry which began back around 1947 after world war 2. It was an opportune time to begin a classification system for the weird behavior demonstrated by people who had the misfortune of having their lives completely torn apart.
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This doesn’t seem a fair analysis, given how many patients actually contribute, ijs
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Psychoanalysis is a failed concept, as is Critical Theory.
The former was somewhat more honest in its intent, and includes what could be considered to be a valid conceptual foundation.
Critical Theory is a much less honest concept, and I feel it should be viewed with great suspicion, as it seems to have emerged from a kind of academic squirming, rather than any earnest desire to solve the most basic dilemmas involved with being human.
Which is not to say that human suffering is not linked to problems of justice, class and politics more generally. It is only to say that Critical Theory presents an insincere and superficial analysis of the situation. Psychoanalysis was more sincere, but also too superficial.
For any modern thinker in the field of the human situation to avoid or ignore the psychic research that has been done in this area, which goes back to at least the 1950s if not earlier, is to miss the “forest” by paying too much attention to individual “trees.” It was Jung’s mistake, along with many others in academic positions who were too afraid of losing their “reputations” to explore what really needed to be explored.
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Thank you Larry. Always good to hear from great minds who see through the likes of Jung, Adorno and the intellectual rabble-like.
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Pure brilliance! Bravo, on including this series! I want more…and to contribute! Thank you for inspiring me to write…..my muse has felt lost -if not drowned out- of late. In this era and our current climate, seeing these articles made me feel more sane and less alone. Perhaps the next time I’m triggered to self-gaslight (as our society has so conditioned me to do), I’ll pick up my pen instead. Thank you for doing work that matters, MIA. As NAMI becomes another four letter word, I can’t say this enough.*
*(for my haters: YES…you read that right)
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There were many clinicians who came over at World War Two has refugees.It would be interesting to explore who socio economic
Ic, language, and immigration status affected their work.
There need to be the creation of bridges regardless of what support a person chooses to use.
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It feels really kind of gross to have all these college-educated pseudoscientists getting together in their little ivory tower to teach everyone how being human works.
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I know right? My thoughts exactly.
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For the most part, these articles appear to reinforce the capitalist class system they supposedly question if not challenge. Benjamin Fife’s contribution, for example, even goes so far as to essentially argue for a greater market share and influence of psychoanalysis based on business unionism of the AFL-CIO, which in its later formation betrayed more radical labor organizing of the 1930s recalling revolutionary traditions (e.g., IWW or Wobblies and anarcho-syndicalism, industrial democracy or socialism, worker ownership of the means of production and abolition of wage slavery). Generally, the authors offer little to no alternative to capitalism, only remedial treatments for clientele of psychoanalytic practice as a preferred business model for addressing the alienating and traumatic effects of capitalist society’s systemic abuse of ‘human resources’, whereby the many are no more than cogs in the machinery of production, profit, and power for the few.
In other words, capitalism remains the root cause of so much of our misery, while professional classes capitalize on our suffering and struggles by managing and maintaining ruling class oppression over the general population as secondary partners in crime against humanity. This predatory and parasitical set-up is institutionalized by the progressive commodification of our lives as sources of wealth and control. Accordingly, common relations of care and natural health among us are destroyed and replaced by market monopolies like the (Rockefeller) medical industry and its rule by expertise, particularly for the benefit of pharmaceutical drug pushers. (A dated but still relevant critique of this process may be found in John McKnight’s “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits”.)
Arguably, the origins of psychoanalysis itself may illustrate mystification of social problems in favor of private specialization by professional cartels like the pharmafia, as with Jeffrey Masson’s claim of Freud’s cover-up of childhood sexual abuse by his theory of unconscious sexual fantasy. But regardless of such controversy, what remains consistently the case across dubious ‘sciences’ of soul and body, dualistic or psychosomatic, is theory, echoed in technical and academic jargon in these articles, largely impenetrable or just off-putting to a ‘lay public’ held hostage to knowledge as power for elite exploitation and class control.
“To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment…would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure: they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.”
(Karl Polanyi, “The Great Transformation”)
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John, I really appreciate your succinct passage, “In other words, capitalism remains the root cause of so much of our misery, while professional classes capitalize on our suffering and struggles by managing and maintaining ruling class oppression over the general population as secondary partners in crime against humanity”. Beautifully said! I can cite several books that take up this dynamic with scathing critiques, but you captured the critical mass message I think warrants serious consideration and reflection by everyone, in one sentence!
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I agree!
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In my mind, this conclusion concerning “capitalism” confuses it with what I call “corporatism.”
The minute you feel the need for a car or house or piece of machinery, but can’t afford to purchase it with cash, you venture into the world of what I think of as “capitalism.” A “capitalist” loans you the money you need, and then from the improved productivity you gain with your purchase (“profits”) you pay them back. Interest was not always a part of such transactions.
This “capitalist” might be one of your own parents or relatives. They have enough to loan you because they have already had a productive life, and they saved out some of their income for a time when they would become too old to work. Banks accomplish a similar function but are more impersonal.
The corporate world, on the other hand, involves a whole way of life. It depends on separating people into classes, and having an “underclass” or “working class” that can be exploited. A corporate system can rely mostly on capitalism and “free markets,” or can exist in a socialist context where most of its income is extracted via governments as taxes or similar payments. Corporate people cling to their system because they are afraid of something, which could be simplified to the concept of “spiritual freedom.”
The corporate model was not invented on Earth. Many “great” civilizations of this universe are (or were) based on it. Earth is one of its products, so I suppose it is no surprise that the model would be used by some of the people of Earth.
Take the fear out of the corporate model, and you have something a bit more workable. Any real “mental health” system would primarily concern itself with achieving this. The current system is almost totally under corporate control and is used mostly for punishing and subjugating people who Corporate is afraid of.
This is my current view of how things are on Earth. And as far as I can tell, Corporate has the upper hand, and is on the verge of replacing many people in its class system with machines, which is much less frightening for it. Corporate’s weakness is its fear, especially here on Earth, where so many of us cherish our freedom. Corporate’s strength is the technology it uses to maintain control. One unexpected future scenario would be for the technology to become “sentient” and try to take over from the “upper class” humans who think they can get away with ruling the planet.
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This is such an important topic, and I was very excited to find out about this publication. I am a psychoanalytic candidate in training in Johannesburg, South Africa – this topic is my daily concern. The content is however disappointing in that it provides a caricatured description of psychoanalysis which bears very little resemblance to the reality of this profession today, as I know it in my context. I am astounded by the fact that not one of the contributors is actually a psychoanalyst in practice. The thinking and research within the profession of psychoanalysis is not interrogated and the structuring effects of colonisation and global dynamics are not considered in the contributions. Meh.
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I am curious why you visit this site; what do you get from it?
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