Issues of Social Class

¶ … Social Class

My current social class is dependent upon the fundamental reason why I am writing this paper: my level of education. Even though it is an idealization to consider that education in America is as meritocratic as it pretends to be, and whether its high price-tag is merited. The price tag looks particularly high when viewed in comparison with most European countries, in which the cost of university education is virtually subsidized. Recent riots broke out in London over the raising of the level of school fees required to be paid by students at universities like Oxford and Cambridge. By American standards, even the proposed raised fees make Oxford only as expensive as a community college education would be for an American. Nevertheless, the price tag of an education in America is only part of the complex process whereby it does offer an automatic way of increasing one's own social status.

Nonetheless when I anticipate my own future work as a therapist, it occurs to me that the social class of my patient population is not something that I can necessarily predict, and on some level I can anticipate that the attendant potential increase in social status that I will undergo by receiving the education for which I am currently studying might also potentially alienate me from certain communities which might be mistrustful of the concept of therapy altogether. This was something that I considered when reading the case study of Katie, who was raised Catholic and Italian-American but learns to make interesting compromises when she marries a Jewish husband. Certain remarks made about Italian-American personalities in Anthony's case study reminded me of perhaps the most famous Italian-American named Anthony ever to undergo therapy: American audiences were so fascinated by the spectacle of HBO's Tony Soprano and his regular therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi in part because both patient and therapist knew how culturally unlikely it was that either of them should have sought out therapy. But it becomes clear that for Dr. Melfi, becoming a therapist was a way of increasing her status as an Italian-American woman -- whereas for Tony Soprano to seek the help of a therapist like Dr. Melfi is actually an admission of weakness, and he only attends therapy under medical duress and pressure from his wife, and otherwise keeps his attendance in talk therapy sessions a strict secret -- as he must, because the therapeutic situation presupposes something very different from the mafioso's culture of "omerta," a refusal to speak which would not ever permit the therapeutic situation sufficient room to establish itself.

But at the same time, I think this dynamic is gradually changing in American society. Certainly the willingness of influential media figures like Oprah to endorse the idea of the benefits of therapy has helped to wash away the negative associations American psychiatry had not too long ago in the period of frontal lobotomies and electro-convulsive therapy. Therapy is no longer seen as sinister or alien, but the therapist's job is seen as "white collar" -- and that can matter in certain contexts. The Oscar-winning Hollywood film "The Departed" presented at its heart a love triangle between the female therapist who is charged with overseeing the psychological welfare of policemen, and the two cops who are each leading double lives. Leonardo diCaprio is obliged to go into the therapy sessions with her against his will, but he cannot speak the truth about what he actually does for a living (he is an undercover agent) so instead he expresses his pain in more vulnerable ways -- leading the therapist into an inappropriate erotic relationship with him. But Matt Damon as her fiance has already mocked her job precisely because of the class and ethnic background of the cops -- like himself, they largely derive from South Boston's Irish Catholic working class, away from what Katie's case study terms as "shanty Irish." In this milieu, Matt Damon jokes darkly, "good luck getting a bunch of Mick cops to open up." Culturally speaking, there is a palpable prejudice against speaking openly and publicly about one's feelings in Irish-American culture -- even Matt Damon in the film refers to the apocryphal story that Sigmund Freud himself said the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis. This is not a blue-collar prejudice against the therapist as white-collar. This is one working class culture which defines itself by a code of silence (as witnessed when the police canvass relatives of a recently murdered mobster, and not even the victim's mother will speak to the detectives).