ABSTRACT
Class can evoke extremely charged and difficult emotions. It is a determining factor in the life possibilities of many people, a source of huge inequalities or privileges that go back to our earliest experiences. There is an extensive sociological literature on issues of definition and demarcation, and also on class identities. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This book interrogates the psychoanalytic silences around class, its hidden and yet omnipresent nature, the many disavowals involved from the earliest days of psychoanalysis until the present. Contemporary initiatives suggest different ways of thinking psychoanalytically about class within clinical work. These are appraised for what they suggest about the various processes by which class can be installed in and/or structure the psyche, the ways in which class builds 'walls in the head'. The book also addresses what frameworks psychoanalysis might need in order to more fully embrace class clinically and theoretically.
