by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

CLASS SIGNIFICATION

I can finally frequent the gym. And get my hair cut. My canceled tattoo appointment has been rescheduled. But I can’t see my shrink. Psychotherapy, always explicitly deemed an essential service, remains largely remote. Why?

Certainly, we have learned the grave severity of COVID-19. We have also learned how to keep ourselves relatively safe as we go on being. Rates remain low in San Francisco. Every interaction contains a risk, but with all the risks we’re now taking, psychotherapists persisting fervently in telehealth presents an intriguing anomaly. The same colleagues who travel by plane and enjoy in-home massages seem aghast at the idea of returning to work.

“It just doesn’t feel safe.”

“When will it? How will you decide when to go back to the office?”

(Long pause.) “I’m not sure I want to.”

Full disclosure: I see everything through the lens of class. I grew up in a poor, rural community—the kind of population coastal elites brand as degenerates. I read Marx obsessively in college. Now, I live in Pacific Heights; I have a doctorate and a private practice. I experience guilt and anxiety about “passing” in my new environment in equal measure.

I don’t think reluctance to return to the office has to do with safety. I think it has to do with class.

This pandemic is intensifying class divisions. Memes quip that when the dust settles, there will be exactly four social classes: Billionaires, Zoomers, Task Rabbits, and the Unemployed. 

Therapists desperately want to be part of the Zoomers. 

And who can blame us? Working remotely signifies privilege: the difference between the fate of a high-end bartender and an entry-level tech worker, earning roughly the same wage pre-COVID, could not be more blatant. Patronizingly describing the working class as “essential” only obviates the prestige of the Zoomers “working” from the luxury of their bedrooms. Or a resort in Mexico.

I don’t mean this especially critically. Or, at least, I understand we all have to survive in ruthless hypercapitalism. If I feel critical, it’s only of the perpetual dissociation of class. 

Everything is at stake in our current moment. It always is.

New class divisions hinge on a digitized surveillance capitalism that increasingly, dramatically, statistically makes us miserable. It breeds depression, anxiety, narcissism, greed, alienation, sociopathy, superficiality, hyperbole, polarization, fake news, environmental catastrophe—you name it. It disconnects us—by design—from our hearts and minds, from esthetic, embodied experience. Like any seductive, abusive relationship, it’s hard to escape.

I have long wanted to believe in a radical psychoanalysis. A psychoanalysis engaged in resisting the status quo, questioning everything, interrogating structural power, reaching towards the marginalized—the patients who don’t have a safe, comfortable, private home and digital device from which to conduct therapy.

Instead, I see the obsequious embrace of privilege cleverly disguised as moral certitude.

It’s enough to make me moan, with Radiohead, “OK Computer.”