1. Whose Family? Working class lives and the emergence of Psychoanalysis 2. Whose Development? Whose Childhood? Class and psychoanalytic accounts of early life 3. The Making of Docile Working-Class Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Disappearance of Class 4. 'Psychoanalysis is not as alien to middle-class people': Class and the psychoanalytic clinic 5. Intensely in danger, intensely attached: Class and new practices of mothering in a contemporary culture of risk 6. Cultures in conflict: Psychoanalysis and rural working-class life 7. Classed Hierarchies: the institutions of psychoanalysis 8. Conclusions
Biography
Dr Sally Sales is chair of clinical training for the Society for Social & Critical Psychoanalysis and a psychoanalyst in private practice. Her research primarily addresses the neglect and marginalization of class in the field of psychoanalysis and child welfare work. She has numerous publications including Adoption, Family and the Paradox of Origins: A Foucauldian History (2012).
'Sally Sales reminds us to pay attention. Class may be considered invisible or no longer relevant but it’s imprint is a powerful social structure and a lived psychological reality, shaping what feels possible, permissible, and imaginable. A thoughtful and necessary contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.'
Susie Orbach
'Reading this book is a humbling, but much-needed experience for the white, middle-class clinician. Drawing on high theory as well as personal and clinical examples, Sales exposes the multiple ways that psychoanalytic theory, practice, trainings, and institutions assume a middle-class subject, thereby repeatedly failing working-class patients and trainees, consistently pathologizing and mis-recognizing their subjugated and different ways of knowing and being. Examining the way our theories and practices ally with middle-class norms by, among other things, excluding the effects of the social world and positing separation as the sine qua non of healthy development, Sales offers us a chance to re-imagine our field in ways that will most definitely benefit all of us.'
Lynne Layton, PhD, psychoanalyst and author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character and Normative Unconscious Processes
'Alongside Joanna Ryan’s Class and Psychoanalysis and Daniel Gaztambide’s A People’s History of Psychoanalysis, Sally Sales’ splendid study now forms a contemporary triad of rigorous, rousing and persuasive calls to psychoanalysts to address hidden class biases both within themselves and in the consulting room, and for the good of all parties. A thought-provoking, heartfelt and sobering testament even for readers in utmost agreement.'
Kurt Jacobsen and David Morgan, co-editors, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics
