ABSTRACT
This chapter gathers together scattered clinical writings involving class to identify the approaches taken by different psychoanalytic writers. It focuses on the substantive contents of the clinical material and explains how different authors perceive and theorise class as having its effects. The chapter considers the reflection/projection model put forward by Altman and then addresses Layton's elaboration of this, with her concept of normative unconscious processes and critique of unlinking. Altman's title, The Analyst in the Inner City, underlines the relatively unusual recognition of psychoanalytic work in such contexts, and his book has become a much cited and taught work on class and 'race' in the clinic. Layton's extensive writings on class avoid some of these problems, partly because from the outset she incorporates other aspects of psychosocial, sociological and political thought into her clinical thinking. Hartman's article is important for his introduction of work as a force shaping the transmission of class within families, something relatively unusual in psychoanalysis.
