Psychoanalysis and the Secret Life of Class

Sally Sales examines the troubled relationship between psychoanalysis and working-class experience, critiquing its class-blind theories and practices while exploring ways to address these exclusions.

In this book, she traces psychoanalysis from its inception to the present, highlighting how it has marginalized working-class lives by privileging internal psychological states over external realities, universalizing class differences, and reducing classed suffering to individual pathology. It explores key areas such as childhood, mothering, rural living, psychotherapy training, and clinical practice, offering a critical yet constructive analysis of psychoanalytic traditions.

This book is essential for clinicians, psychotherapists, and students of psychoanalysis, offering insights into class dynamics and their impact on therapeutic practices, challenging readers to rethink psychoanalytic theories and practices to better address the lived realities of working-class individuals.