ABSTRACT
It seems hard to believe that social class can be anything other than a live and burning issue to any helping 'professional' from a workingclass background. Specifically in the field of psychiatry, it is hard to perceive the scene as being anything other than largely middle-class professional elites (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers) ministering to largely working-class populations in working-class ghettoes called psychiatric hospitals (often through a somewhat ignored and difficult to 'classify' corps of nurses). But surely that's an exaggeration, of course it is, or is it? But in any case what's all this got to do with psychotherapy? 'Certainly' (when that word is used to mean its approximate opposite) psychotherapy is used mainly with non-hospitalised non-working-class (or perhaps upper working-class) patients. Most psychotherapy takes place between mutually non-working-class people, most other psychiatric treatment takes place between non-mutual working-class patients and non-workingclass professionals.
