Joanna Ryan

I've been longing to speak with Joanna Ryan since I read 'Landscapes of Inequality' and requested an interview with her for the PCCS book I'm editing. But as one of our pioneers who have become elders Ms Ryan has become less available to strangers.

Listen to her talk at the Freud Museum with Barry Watt:

"What does psychoanalysis have to say about the emotional landscapes of class, the hidden injuries and disavowed privileges? How does class figure in clinical work and what part does it play in psychotherapeutic trainings?

 In these times of increasing inequality, Joanna Ryan will discuss aspects of her timely new book Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, exploring what can be learned about the psychic formations of class, and the class formations of psychoanalysis. Addressing some of the many challenges facing a psychoanalysis that aims to include class in its remit, she holds the tension between the radical and progressive potential of psychoanalysis, in its unique understandings of the unconscious, with its status as a mainly expensive and exclusive practice."

Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, Routledge, 2017

(2009) Elision and Disavowal: The Extrusion of Class from Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice. Sitegeist ,no 3,p27-40

‘“Class is in you”: An exploration of some social class issues in psychotherapeutic work’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2006, 23, 49-63. Reprinted, (2013) with postscript in F. Lowe (ed.), Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking about Race, Culture and Diversity in psychotherapy and Beyond,  London: Karnac