ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses points in the development of psychoanalytic theory where disarticulation from the social world arises. Anne McClintock (1995), in Imperial Leather, names this an aporia - a radical disjunction. The author of this chapter identifies significant points in the construction of theory by Freud that led to the extrusion of class from psychoanalytic discourse, leaving a theoretical vacuum which has also had effects on clinical work. McClintock uses the notion of disavowal to argue that Freud founded his Oedipal theory on the elision of the working-class female employee, depriving her of any theoretical status and presenting the Oedipal account as free of any economic or class structures, as universal. She argues that the categories of gender, race and class exist and operate in and through each other, often in contradictory and conflictful ways, so that they are not as hermetically distinct and separate as is often assumed.
