Like all good books, the reader wants to continue the conversation with the writer – and others – after finishing it. Towards the end of the work, Ryan points out that ‘Many class-inclusive efforts have raised questions of whether psychoanalytic technique needs to be altered in different circumstances’ (174). This left me wondering what a working-class generated psychoanalysis might look like. Ryan, in discussing Reich’s work, lists several characteristics for which working-class clients have historically been pathologised, including being ‘antisocial, uninhibited and instinct-driven’ (27). Sounds like me! This led me to reflect that I had often in the past tended to pathologise elements of my own character when they manifested themselves with clients: my quick temper, my impulsive warmth, my tendency to ‘self-disclose’ (a loaded term, if ever there was one). Might these be elements, however, of a working-class psychoanalytic praxis on the part of the therapist? Or am I simply looking to excuse my ‘bad’ behaviour?
Finally, and thinking of a question raised recently at the Freud Museum event with Joanna in conversation with Site colleague Barry Watt, I am drawn back to the geographical metaphor contained in the book’s title. As we all should know by now: it’s all about ‘location, location, location’. Where are our consulting-rooms? What does the surrounding area look like, socio-economically? What do our rooms look like? What do they communicate to our clients about our class position? How welcome do clients feel in approaching our workplaces and ringing the doorbell? (And what fee do we charge them, and why?).
In conclusion, this book should be compulsory reading for every member of the British psychoanalytic community.
References
Fanon, F. 1967 (1952), Black Skin, White Masks, trans Charles Lam Markmann, New York: Grove, ISBN 978-0-8021-5084-4
Lacan, J. 1988 (1978), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans Sylvana Tomasselli, ed. Miller, Cambridge: CUP, ISBN 0-521-26680-7
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1989 (1960), The Child’s Relations With Others, trans William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. Wild, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 0-8101-0164-5