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Tracy Sidesinger Psychoanalysis, Class Divisions, and the Gift Economy
able to make a “good living,” where now, even though the bombs have much diminished, many would rather not leave, and for good reason. However, we now know in the après coup that the mental death caused by the pandemic is high, that countless lives have been lost here, and that in some ways, we remain with the walking dead, particularly in ourselves. We are going to have to confront this when we “go outside.”
I wonder if the impact of the psychic-somatic threat of the pandemic, a kind of structural violence inflicted on everyone, which catalyzed the recognition of other structural violences, is what opens the way to a psychoanalytic response that shifts the aims of psychoanalysis. When psychoanalytic thinkers introduce notions of community psychoanalysis, they index the idea of community that the director of the institute cites when he says, “We have always worked in the community.” They also respond to the radical disruption of Western ideals that the pandemic brought to group consciousness by putting into question who and what psychoanalysis serves. Are these thinkers in community psychoanalysis saying that in the era of civilizational globalization (mondialisation), we need a psychoanalysis that transcends ideals for all? If so, then we have a mutant psychoanalysis for sure.
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By introducing new things, elements of otherness not already represented in American psychoanalysis, actors involved with community psychoanalysis enact a kind of coolness, bringing air into Melanie Klein’s stuffy rooms. Otherness, however, is not a domain unique to psychoanalysis, but to every field of exploration. Psychoanalysis uniquely deals with psychic-somatic otherness, which has been, for quite a while, easily locatable in psychoanalysis with respect to the constitution of a self. What happened to the integrity of this psychic-somatic self when everyone’s ability to think and live, to “breathe” in the metaphor of the pandemic, diminished, reduced to a matter of life and death, all separate from one another?
For some reason, a reason not necessarily known to us before or after the event of an après coup, we became worried that breathing together would not be possible again. We needed to breathe together, because we weren’t sure that we could continue to breathe apart, at least not on land. Psychic-somatic otherness escaped the self and leaked into the whole world, or perhaps it was the ocean, filled with plastic, which sprung a leak… z
REFERENCES
Aciksoz, S. C. (2016). Medical humanitarianism under atmospheric violence: Health professionals in the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey. Culture, medicine, and psychiatry, 40(2), 198-222.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
Desjarlais, R. R. (2011). Shelter blues: Sanity and selfhood among the homeless. University of Pennsylvania Press.
González, F. J. (2020). First world problems and gated communities of the mind: An ethics of place in psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89(4), 741-770.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror (Vol. 98). University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton.
Gherovici, P., and Christian, C. (Eds.). (2018). Psychoanalysis in the barrios: Race, class, and the unconscious. Routledge.
Librett, J. S. (2019). The subject in the age of world-formation (mondialisation): Advances in Lacanian theory from the Québec Group. In Aner Govrin & Jon Mills (Eds.), Innovations in Psychoanalysis (pp.75-99). Routledge.
Throop, C. J. (2022). Looming. Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 5(2), 67-86.
Psychoanalysis, Class Divisions, and the Gift Economy Tracy SIDESINGER
In writing about class divisions within psychoanalysis and what a gift economy affords this problem, I utilize a spinning method of knowing. This is similar to “yarning,” the collective knowledge and decision making conveyed in the book Sand Talk (Yunkaporta, 2020), or “weaving” multiple lines of knowing together, as put forward in Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013). These examples represent Indigenous forms of knowing, which are not one-directional and are altogether less linear than Western argumentation. Although I am a white woman and have no claim to direct Indigenous knowledge streams, the form they take is recognized to be innate. The decentered form is one I find necessary to developing a model of psychoanalytic care that blends the logic of the gift economy with the current realities of the market economy, and spinning is the way I have come to understand it. By spinning, I mean to suggest a knowing that comes through circularity, a deep connection to multiple threads in a repetitive, recursive fashion. Such as: What is experienced in mothering? As a citizen affected by, and capable of effecting, public policy? In being part of the more-than-human world and observing natural processes? In clinical work, with each case bringing its own idiosyncratic language? From our subjective centers, we can remain grounded yet spin through all of these experiences and identities which in turn shape a psychoanalytic vision. In this spinning form itself there is a gift—back and forth—without expectation but nevertheless with generativity.
What is a Gift?
For starters, what is a gift? Here I follow on Genevieve Vaughan’s (2015) work on the maternal gift economy. It is distinct from the market economy based on monetary exchange and value determined by supply and demand. Rather, a gift economy is based on a recognition of community, disbursement of resources in the community in real time according to who has need and who has excess, and a connection to the inherent and unique value of gifts themselves that cannot be reduced to money. Vaughan’s theories are based in anthropological studies, while also offering a critique of the gift as it has been studied in the patriarchalized anthropology of Mauss and others who followed him. Gifts, she argues, do not expect a return. They are a precondition for the other’s survival and depend upon the care one can give to another. In bringing a long-neglected maternal sensibility into economics and anthropology, Vaughan considers the real possibility of a unilateral gift that expects no return, the necessity of mothering and being mothered, as foundational to social life.
Furthermore, need for the other is not something that occurs only in infancy, but follows us in different ways through life’s development. If you consult a financial advisor in the market economy, you will almost certainly receive advice as to how to accumulate and hoard wealth for yourself and your direct lineage. This is premised on the idea that there is no hope of care for you and your family outside of monetary exchange; you forego interpersonal need for a large bank account. By contrast, the maternal gift economy is premised on distributing excess in the present moment according to need. Excess yield, it has been said, need not be stored in private silos where it can rot, but in the bellies of one’s neighbors, where it can see its fullest value realized (Vaughan, 2017/2019). Value, through the gift, never exists in the token,
but in the other themselves. We don’t have to expect a return of our value if we see that it is already there in the one we have given it to.
Such an orientation is hard to fathom inside a market economy that focuses on scarcity, fear, and safeguarding one’s own resources. What if I see value in the other, but no one sees it in me? Dare I be the first one to give? Even if we theoretically believe in unilateral gifting, it is a stretch to consider it professionally. How will we make a living? How will we pay our educational debts? How will we take care of ourselves as we age? Let us pause those private questions for a moment to consider collective need, and where value might lie at times more in the other.
Making a Living
When I’m not working, I often follow a fascination of forests and the interconnected tangle of trees and mycelium. Suzanne Simard (2021) studies the collaborative nature of this web. In her book Finding the Mother Tree (arguably another iteration of the maternal gift economy) she posed a question that stopped me in my tracks: “What were the fungal threads of this odd-shaped mushroom doing, and how were they helping the coral fungus make a living?” (Simard, 2021, p.49). That turn of phrase, to make a living, seems to mean something entirely different in the context of a forest than that of a consulting room. Or does it?
Obviously, nothing in a forest is making money (not for itself, at least). The living to which Simard is referring has to do with vitality. Moreover, in her observations of species helping each other make a living, she has demonstrated that trees don’t only look out for their own survival or even that of their own kind, but that they collaborate to support others in their ecosystem. For example, water and nutrients can be carried from mature trees through mycelial networks to younger trees of various species to aid in their development. So at least in some corners of the world, making a living doesn’t have to do with money, and it doesn’t have to do just with oneself.
In psychological and analytic corners, however, we feel the tension between generating wealth and contributing to vitality. I don’t want to suggest that our profession as a whole operates against vitality to the extent that we are engaged in financial exchange. We can’t bypass the systems of our civilization. However, the dictum that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer” can only grow more true the longer capitalism continues, where wealth is built from legacies and investments that expand prior wealth, fees are set by those competing to survive on top, and those who have no wealth to build on get drowned out.
Is psychoanalysis only for the wealthy? Recently, this question has received more attention as the community psychoanalysis movement has experienced a resurgence. In Freud’s Free Clinics, Elizabeth Danto (2005) showed how in its early years, psychoanalysis was practiced as an agent of social change intended to be accessible to all, based significantly on the assumption that everyone has an unconscious. It is neither the origins of analytic work nor the inherent structure of the mind that necessitates class divides; rather, our acceptance of the capitalist model has furthered the divide between those who can and those who cannot experience psychoanalysis. Private practice itself isn’t the enemy; but as it becomes increasingly the last place where psychoanalysis can be found, it can’t benefit anyone but those who are able to pay for it themselves.
Are Class Divisions the Last Frontier in Psychoanalysis?
Many things can be said to be the last frontier of psychoanalysis: gender; race; religion; class. All of these are routinely kept out of the canon of psychoanalysis, despite the ways the profession as we know it is constituted by certain positions around them. There are journals and departments dedicated to gender in psychoanalysis, and yet how we understand gender identity or the mother’s position in Oedipal development is fraught. Even among training institutes that intentionally strive toward a diversity of voices, BIPOC candidates are hard to recruit, not seeing themselves reflected in theory or practice, and historically even considered to lack an unconscious (Stoute, 2017). Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927/1961) established religious belief as pathological and childlike in a way that we have not recovered from, despite a swelling mysticism in the field (Grotstein, 1981).
Psychoanalysis no longer has a unified theory. In my understanding of psychoanalysis as working in an unconscious that is multiple and fundamentally beyond total knowability, there cannot be a single theory. Unified theories sustain their unity by force of domination and repression. Theories of difference are thus required. Furthermore, how we understand where differences arise, and what we do with difference, are the significant issues.
What about class difference? Do we believe in clinical practice that class difference exists, or do we pretend it doesn’t, assuming that anyone who needs treatment can get it at the market rate? Do we believe that class differences are innate, and anyone without sufficient funds to seek treatment at the market rate doesn’t have the mind to benefit from it anyway? Do we believe that class difference exists as a problematic cultural construct, but turn a blind eye to it so that we can keep afloat in our own private lives? I suggest that class is yet another underexplored facet of psychoanalysis. In our failure to explore class divisions, we both deny the interpersonal role culture has in constructing difference and remain inured to capitalism as the rules of play.
But what kind of difference is class? I do not believe that class differences are innate aspects of identity. Herein lies the distinction between identification and identity (see Zong, 2021 for a historical discussion of these terms). In my view, identification is a social-interpersonal construct that may be internalized, whereas identity is what remains in an individual authentically even as the social layers are worked through. Class distinctions are identifications writ large; they are defined by one’s relationship to the collective perhaps more than any other. This is what makes class—and therefore the accessibility of psychoanalysis across class divisions—so hard to talk about in a field which has tended to think of minds in isolate form, identity and identification being one and the same. Because the social-interpersonal construction of class is so strong, it may well be the final frontier in psychoanalysis, which is now also rediscovering multiple layers of external reality that are relevant to the internal mind.
Just as no single theory can make sense of all psyches, no aspect of identity is the total fundament of being, and I stand with others who see an intersectional approach as necessary to understanding identity in the individual and the collective (Kanwal, 2021; Butler, 2006). Theories that expand our understanding of gender and race as culturally constructed also force us to move the needle on how we understand class identities and the degree to which we see collective, external determinants of such identities as relevant. Indian psychotherapists have begun to address the complex issues of class and religion as a necessary response to early psychoanalytic thought in India, which was aligned with the hierarchical and oppressive caste ideology (Davar, 1999). Theories being developed by others in areas of explicit oppression and classism are no less relevant for those of us who have class mobility. In the United States, our American dream is a reinforcement of classist division, albeit with the built-in illusion that we can achieve victory if we exclude others enough.
Not only does oppressive classism occur in public life, but it is also endemic to the fabric of European and American psychoanalysis; in the language of Lynne Layton (2020), we are implicated subjects even if we are not directly causing harm to identifiable others or acting out of malevolence. Here, I follow the guidance of Hassinger and Pivnick (2022), who respond to this implication not with blame but with curiosity as to how to care for the well-being of others given the ways we are each uniquely situated in society.
Addressing blindness to racialized identifications, Stovall (2019) discussed how whiteness has been left out of psychopathology training and is routinely avoided on the analytic couch, yet it exists as an influential group cultural reality. Also speaking of race, O’Loughlin (2020) considered the ways racialization is deeply embedded in the psychoanalytic imagination, centering whiteness and otherizing non-white experiences and structures of mind. While these authors consider race, perhaps the same could be said of class: there is a significant group cultural phenomenon that conveniently evades individual scrutiny.
Where we do consider financial issues of a treatment, it is likely to be on a personal level and not a systemic one. In an economy of supply and demand based on scarcity, might we instead wonder how one person’s having is premised on another’s not having? Why don’t we? Several contemporary interpersonal analysts including Kuriloff (see Fuchsman, 2022) and Philipson (2017) have discussed the ways in which survivors of World War II shaped an individualistic psychoanalysis as it defensively protected them from confronting the too-raw traumas of social influence. This war led to a diaspora of analytic minds; the closure of many free clinics, which were developed after the first World War to create social change through analytic engagement (Danto, 2005); and a concurrent doubling down on psychology as intrapsychic. All of these forces together reinforced the privatization of care. We have turned our eyes away from social forces for too long, understandably because sometimes it has been too hard. But it is also the case that not contending with the social forces influencing class inequities is tantamount to compliance with and adherence to classist domination. We have a choice about what we are willing to sacrifice here.
In Eula Biss’s (2020) collection of personal essays, Having and Being Had, she explores capitalism, work, and class by interrogating troubling facts, such as the extractive source of the Guggenheim Foundation funds that enabled her to do her work. In it, she painstakingly observes how capitalism is built on an ethic of exclusion, a system of hoarding wealth and having more than one needs to prove one’s value as a matter of comparison against others. Of the title, we can imagine she refers to the individual compulsion to work and possess increasingly more capital, which has us instead; but we can also imagine a more collective interpretation, referring to those who are had as pawns in a game, left to suffer as if their psyches did not matter.
Who, in the working through of an analysis, would release themselves from social class identifications to recognize themselves as inherently “poor,” “middle class,” or “wealthy?” Seeing that class is something constructed, categories remaining outside of identity; we may well have to see the individual beyond the intrapsychic and do something external to the consulting room to address it.
Clinical Unfoldings
Eric is a white, unemployed gay man who is sustained by a trust fund. He originally came to treatment to deal with traumatic losses in his family, for which he saw himself as “cursed.” For many reasons, he felt unacceptable and even poisonous to others. He was harassed for his sexual orientation. Several years into treatment, however, it became clear that despite all of these concerns, the most shameful and hidden identification for Eric was his wealth. This was the single issue that he refused to tell his friends about. He was entrusted with decision making about his family’s charitable giving, but this only caused more angst. He saw the social divide between those who were socially conscious (his friends) and those who were
wealthy (his family) as irreconcilable. Eric’s unease about accumulated wealth suggests that class divisions need to be addressed inside his mind as an individual, while also pointing to a larger problem of polarization in the collective.
Amy is also divided about her class identifications, though seemingly from the other side of the chasm than Eric. She received governmental assistance to feed her family, and when this was revoked, she began to shoplift from grocery stores. She is troubled by the fact that she looks wealthy (and white) enough to not be suspicious, because she wants others to have the same opportunities she does. Wanting to believe that there are enough resources to be distributed evenly, she collapses her class conflict and resigns herself to thinking, “Maybe I just don’t understand economics.” Vaughan (2015) has a different answer for Amy when she writes, “The economy of the economists is a false slice of life.”
Jessica shares with me a recurrent thought after years of working together: “Therapy is bad for my mental health when I have to figure out how to pay for it.” She is one of many patients who don’t want to devalue therapy by paying a reduced fee but spends more time than she can afford fighting her insurance company to reimburse her according to their stated policy.
And lastly, Theresa sees the conversation of family wealth as pertaining to more than just her family. She refuses her family’s offer to pay for her graduate school tuition, which they see as a gift that only makes sense to be given to her. Wealth is a legacy they didn’t have the benefit of as immigrants. They worked hard to achieve this legacy for their children, so they see Theresa as the rightful recipient of it. Theresa, in contrast, wonders about her peers. Why does this legacy not belong to them? Why, when her rent is already paid for, should she have an extra boon above her classmates? She read her family’s financial gift not only as a token between parent and child, but as a communication in collective space about who does and does not deserve resources. After long deliberations, Theresa decided to sever herself from all her parents’ financial resources at age 26. This also meant she was only able to pay one-sixth of the fee she had previously paid me.
Here, I find myself at the crossroads of making wealth or contributing to the vitality of another. At the moment when Theresa asked to reduce her fee, she recalled that she went out of network to get adequate care when she was having a life-threatening breakdown. At that time, she remembers her therapist troublingly offering her smoothie recipes to help her cope with wanting to die. I see that she is worried about a flaccid response to her great need, whether from her parents or from another provider who is lowfee or low-value. To find vitality, she needs a way out of the market economy she knows. The most important thing I can bring to this equation isn’t measured in dollars.
Many readers may recognize themselves in providing pro bono and sliding scale fees for some. We often frame this as an exception to the rule of our standard fee. Instead, might we see this as the beginning of a new rule? Practicing a psychoanalysis that addresses class divides means not only providing free or pro bono therapy for some, compensated by higher fees from others, but also by bridging these disparate identifications in our consulting rooms. Working with people of different class backgrounds who see each other in the same waiting rooms, who engage in group work and face their unequal class standings with one another. While the foundations of a gift economy may seem idealistic when we have become accustomed to capitalism’s profit drive, and while
there is no easy transition to a psychoanalysis that confronts classism, this transition is already alive in the minds of our patients.
What Do We Do With Excess?
Analytically speaking, we are psychologically composed to have not only lack but also excess. We long for what cannot be fulfilled, yes; and we also experience more than we need, but it is excess that has been pathologized and misunderstood in psychoanalytic theory. I have written elsewhere about a feminine return to excess as necessary to experiencing multiplicity without domination (Sidesinger, 2021). Here, I would like to take that argument one step further to suggest that what we do with excess is the difference between a market economy and a gift economy, between a starving psychoanalysis and one that can help culture thrive. A market economy depends upon scarcity (lack), whereas a gift economy is predicated on having more than one needs (excess) and therefore the ability to place that value in the other. Excess is not the chaotic original past that needs to be separated from the present reality of lack; rather, they are true in parallel, in pragmatic and enigmatic ways.
Here, I need to tell you the story of my home, because my home itself is a gift of excess that holds me and allows me to hold others. Shortly before Covid erupted, I went looking for a home in the Catskills where my children and I could have a long-term respite away from our unpredictable Brooklyn life. I didn’t really have the money for it, but with uncanny timing and the combination of a persuasive realtor, a contractor friend, a thoughtful seller who saw my potential for carrying on the home’s legacy, and an unexpected loan from my mother, one of the oldest homes in the region came under my care. I was told several years prior by a financial advisor that I would never have enough money to buy a home under the existing circumstances. Some might have suggested that what I needed wasn’t a home, but to reckon with my lack. However, a home and more came to me in a way that is beyond reason. I learned that it used to be an informal inn when there were no other homes nearby, which explains why it feels so natural to host retreats and friends. The longer I live in this house, the more I experience how not only is it under my care, but I am being cared for by the land, the house, and the surrounding community.
In this home, I have the security like never before that I am loved, full stop. Out of this security flows the potential to be stability and love. Other people experience this in different ways: in the abiding presence of a parent, a partner, a community or workplace in which there is a strong sense of belonging and acceptance. However, one knows that they are held in this life is a gift. For me, it is my home and the land that gives a sense of belonging. Psychoanalysis ought to give us the tools to reckon with where we have not had love, where we crave it because we are ashamed of not being enough or of being abandoned, but not by way of further deprivation. It ought to help us find our solidity wherever it does exist. Can psychoanalysis give us that? Can we be solid enough in ourselves to know that what we have to offer is a gift, and not demand a return from it?
Eula Biss says that everyone practices a gift economy for those they consider to be in their inner circle. Those lines, however, seem increasingly drawn around the individual or perhaps the nuclear family, in contrast to the coded laws and tokens of exchange that grow out of living in unfathomably large civilizations. How we open back up the parameters of who we consider to be part of “us”—who we consider our community, and how large of a community our human minds can tolerate—perhaps needs to be another discussion altogether. For now, let it suffice to say that I believe the containment of a nuclear family is an illusion to the extent that our psyche’s excess extends beyond a few people. Our larger communities already contain much of our identifications projectively and have the capacity to contain and receive far more if we expand our conscious identities to include them.
My main premise is this: I have been given many gifts, even in nonlogical ways from the land and people around me. I am taken care of and I have more than I need. I don’t see life as scared or as scarcity. With this security, I trust that I will continue to be taken care of, and on that basis, I am free to take care of others.
To be clear, this is not self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It is not punishment or naivete. Practicing a gift economy is trusting that there is enough for all parties and acting out of that trust as both recipient and giver. It is based in the fact of excess. Sometimes we find ourselves with more than we need. What do we do with it? Do we hoard it for some future version of ourselves, fearing that we won’t have enough then, but failing to realize that money is a false guarantee of security? Do we hoard it for our children, enlarging our gift circle just the tiniest bit, so that they can benefit more than our neighbors from what we accumulate? Do we buy nice things or have nice experiences for ourselves, exchanging money but still keeping it to ourselves? As a child of the market economy, I admit to doing all of the above. But increasingly I realize there is more than enough, and that another economy exists in the space of excess. That is the economy of giving, which reinforces and adds sinew to the circle of trust. Not everything can be bought, after all.
Practical Considerations
In graduate school, I was taught principles of psychotherapy in a form that was insulated from any reality principle. I need not criticize my graduate program in specific, because this is common practice. Learning how to be a therapist doesn’t include considerations of how to earn a living, i.e., how to set the fee and ensure oneself a living wage within private practice, or where one can do sustainable clinical work that isn’t private practice. I spent my first decade as a clinician learning how much I got taken advantage of and could build resentment when I didn’t charge a fee commensurate with the attention put into my work, and then of how rewarding it could be for everyone involved when I did. I learned how to find my true value in a market economy.
But what about the original urge to offer what I saw to others in their suffering, simply because I saw it? To not link work and money? To see the cure as rooted in love? Are those urges only naivete and martyrdom? In their infancy, there was always the germ of something more. What led to resentment in early work is partly that I allowed patients to take the gifts of therapy without honoring its relational components. It’s time to return to the original desires many of us had in choosing to enter psychotherapy and analysis, this time not from a position of self-sacrifice, but of strength. I am not interested in representing a profession that is either misaligned from dominant culture because it does not know how to communicate its value there, or that is overly identified with a dominant capitalistic culture. I am interested in a psychotherapy like that of the analysts of the 1920s and 1930s, which can offer its unique value to shape society.
I write to you while engaged in my own seeking how to flesh out this archetypal reality, not from having found the answers. How we reenact a maternal gift economy within psychoanalysis is a work in progress that needs many minds. However, the most effective how starts with a why, and if the reason is grounded and important enough, we will find a way.
Primarily, we are concerned with making a living; that is, supporting work that is conducive to meaningful living for ourselves and the entirety of the communities we can effectively broaden ourselves to. As my clinical examples have shown, this work of disrupting classist structures and seeing excess and need simultaneously occurring is already happening in the psyches of our patients. Theory emerges of necessity from experience.
Examples abound, if quietly, of those who practice analytically out of a maternal gift economy ethic that excess is to be given and that value inherently resides in the other. In researching how to develop a community-based psychotherapy center, I’ve spoken to many who offer psychoanalytic therapy within community mental health settings but do so
