Clinical Anecdotes Working from My Home Office: Privilege and the Haunted House Next Door¹

ABSTRACT

This paper begins with fragments which came unbidden as I began working with patients during the covid-propelled move to my home office. While my intent in moving to this office was to hold on to my identity as an analyst with so much slipping away and to help my patients hold on to our work through the trauma of covid – not to mention the ongoing political upheavals as well as the horrors of global warming – little did I anticipate that I was moving to a site with a more visible grounding in a social problematic. I hadn’t foreseen the issues which would arise regarding social privilege – issues with which I would fortunately have to reckon working from home in an affluent neighborhood with a dilapidated house next door. Excerpts from my clinical work with 3 patients are presented which reflect efforts to broaden/contextualize my more traditional way of thinking and working.

This article is referred to by:

Them That’s Got1/Them That’s Not: Commentary on Paper by Julie Gerhardt

Why Smudge Race?

On Saving Mockingbirds: Comments on Gerhardt´s “Clinical Anecdotes Working from My Home Office: Privilege and the Haunted House Next Door”

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Yes, in the words of the should have been first female president Hilary Clinton, “It takes a village,” let me thank some other villagers for their responsiveness to my intrusions into their own projects: Tony Bass, Amy Schwartz-Cooney, Eric Essman, Sam Gerson, Kathy Sinsheimer and the three very thoughtful reviewers for this paper. Molte grazie.

² I acknowledge that I am using the signifier “caste” in a figurative manner to refer to social privileges and hierarchies. While the ur-use of the term is grounded in India’s caste system of social stratification on the basis of ancestry, Wilkerson (2020) argues that the U.S. also has a caste system cloaked in a race-based pyramid, as did Nazi Germany. All three caste systems are said to be based on “the ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits … ” (p. 17). Given that the focus of this paper is on socio-economic and/or class privilege – so-called white privilege – as this issue emerged in working with patients during the Covid-propelled move to my home office in an affluent neighborhood, I have found myself, incorrectly no doubt, using the term “caste” rather than class as I find it difficult (recognizing my own subjectivity) talking about class privilege and my obvious good fortune – even to colleagues. Hence, I have opted for the term “caste” as a smudgier signifier to fudge the issue.

³ I have opted for the pronoun “we” rather than state more explicitly that the group whom I am describing is comprised of mostly white professionals with the economic resources to buffer and/or survive the material deprivations of the quarantine. As such, the focus is on an affluent professional group with many unearned privileges “rendering [their] subjectivities with nuance” (Caflisch, 2020) at the expense of the experience of the less financially/professionally advantaged.

⁴ To confirm the duality, see Stephen DeBerry’s TED talk of April 2018 in which he describes the “east side disparity:” the east side of cities houses the Have-Nots, while the west side houses the Haves. This is due to the fact that the earth rotates counterclockwise so the wind blows to the east. Communities on the economic and social margins tend to be situated on the east side, the dirtier side. The idiom “the wrong side of the tracks” originally derives from observing the direction trains would blow dirty train smoke.

⁵ Research on “fear of envy” suggests that being in the advantaged position presents problems of its own; not only in terms of the rancor the envied person might evoke, but, worse, the feelings of emptiness, deprivation and/or envy in the less fortunate other (on a particular dimension) that they may unwittingly call forth (Alicke & Zell, 2008, p. 8).

⁶ Intuitively sensing Ms. A’s vulnerability, I wish I would have been the one to “take the lead in listening for and speaking directly to” (L. Levine, 2022) the discomfort/threat my seemingly cushy affluent neighborhood posed for Ms. A rather than letting her “silently suffer inside” until she reached an uncontained/non-self-regulated breaking point without empathic support.

⁷ However see Sarat and Umphrey (2013) for articles offering an incisive critique of the moral ambiguities in Harper Lee’s depiction of Atticus’ character; e.g., choosing his legal obligation to represent Tom Robinson which would, and did, jeopardize the safety of his children. Also see Potyk and White (2020) for a different critique based on Atticus’ acceptance of the racist, segregated caste system in Maycomb, Al.

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Julie Gerhardt

Julie Gerhardt, Ph.D. is a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She has published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Narratives from the Crib, Studies in Language, Journal of Child Language and maintains a private practice in Palo Alto, CA.