ABSTRACT
This chapter first describes how increasing income inequalities in the U.K. and U.S. brought class, after a multi-decade disappearance, back into research on identity categories. I suggest that Bourdieu’s concept of distinction takes on new resonance in neoliberal times. Focusing on the psychic effects of the neoliberal demand to rise in class and to be an entrepreneurial self, I describe two clinical vignettes that show some ways in which those cultural demands create conflicted class and gender identifications/disidentifications that play out in unconscious enactments of sadistic intrapsychic and relational class struggles.
