ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the dynamics of therapy relationships may be inflected by class, based on the author's research and the contemporary writings of others. Class contempt as an aspect of transference exposes what is often kept politely or defensively hidden: attributions of inferiority and superiority according to class. The potential for contempt in the transference, previously described, finds an echo in a fear of being denigrating that some of the middle-class therapists with working-class patients expressed. Several also described being stuck when they encountered class-related anger, which they felt unable to sufficiently take up or explore. Janine Puget, in her re-theorising of the psychoanalytic representation of social reality, observes that one barrier to recognising how the social field has its effects is that analyst and patient often live in the same social/cultural world. The economic, social and cultural resources that make psychoanalysis accessible and attractive mean that assumptions of shared class status, values or lifestyles may go unquestioned.
