As strong an influence social class can be, people often grow up unaware of it.

If psychologically unexplored, switching social classes can cause anxiety, shame, low self-esteem.

Understanding the influence of class can alleviate its related anxiety and social strife.

We usually look to our families of origin to understand ourselves and our unconscious motivations, especially if we’ve been in therapy. Having had two psychoanalyses myself, I’ve been exploring that connection my whole adult life.

But as I age and think more retrospectively, I’m aware of how anxiety about social class played a role, too. Maybe that’s true for most people in this socially mobile culture of ours. After all, families are embedded in social class, which influences how parents raise children and model attitudes for them. Yet, social class rarely gets talked about in relation to our psychology and identity. We may more readily acknowledge our backgrounds nowadays, but do we think enough about their emotional impact?

Like most kids, I took my place in society for granted. I grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, an outer borough of New York City, where people worked as shopkeepers, bookkeepers, receptionists, and salesmen. My father sold corrugated boxes to factories throughout New England, and my mother sold clothing in Manhattan’s garment district. The few wealthier kids in our schools were headed for careers instead of jobs, like the rest of us, and kids from poorer neighborhoods were bound for physical labor. My first after-school job was in a jewelry shop in one of those neighborhoods. Its streets, darkened by the trestle overhead that carried trains, weren’t as clean as ours. People’s clothing was worn. That’s just how it was. Everyone seemed to accept it, and so did I.

Until at 16, with a teacher’s encouragement, I found myself unshakably determined to escape (as I thought of it) Queens and defy my mother’s plan that I become a secretary who would marry the boss. I was going to college, as my brother, who'd been in a gang, had managed to do.

From my current perspective, the where-and-when of class-consciousness seems psychologically significant. I see how loaded the social dice were for me. Back then, the obvious college choice for an ambitious girl with my grades was one of the “Seven Sisters,” like Smith. But I believed I’d look like a fool there, not knowing which fork to use for salad or blouse to wear to class. Unlike them, I had to prepare to support myself. Anyway, my mother had taught me contempt for the upper classes. In her rare interactions with any of them, she’d regale us with some story that invariably ended, “Who do they think they are?" Between my inherited fear and contempt was a lot of conflict and anxiety.

To quiet the demons waiting at the staircase to the professional class, I chose a university far from Queens with a reputation for academic meritocracy. I was relieved to be going with another girl from my neighborhood, one whose family lived in rooms in the back of the candy store they ran. We would face the unknown together. As we’d hoped, academic achievement mattered enormously, but most of the other students were children of lawyers and doctors. Their confidence and competence floored us. I was often mortified at something I hadn’t understood—some Latin phrase, like pro bono, or a reference to some revered Russian poet I’d never heard of. I spoke with a strong New York accent. I spoke Queens.

Occasionally, one of my few friends and I talked about it in a whisper. There was such mutual fascination between me and a girl who shared a last name with a museum—my first wealthy acquaintance, her first commoner—that we practically interviewed one another. My friend Michael was from the “lace curtain” Irish district of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. His mother worked in a jewelry factory and sent him to church every Friday to fill a bucket with the free baked beans they distributed. Maybe being male, he never thought he was “less than” the way I did.

By then, our choices in friends and work, our feelings, our unspoken shame, and our guilt at betraying our backgrounds were lodged in our psyches—but floating there freely, without any sense of their cause. Now, I understand how much of an advantage it would have been to know their cause.

Eventually, I became a college professor and married an upper-middle-class man on the editorial board of the New York Times. Without sufficient psyche-social awareness, though, I couldn’t dispel that sense of being “less than” or feeling comparatively crude. Nor could I get rid of the chip on my shoulder, like my mother, who resented the rich. Once, when we took her to a “fancy” restaurant for her birthday, she took one look at the prices and said, “This is disgusting.”

I had wanted a more comfortable life than the one I grew up with, but it had come with anxiety. It caused a lot of friction between my husband and me; he still likes to tease, “You can take the girl out of Queens, but you can’t take Queens out of the girl.”

Eventually, his tease became a point of pride for me. Once I was aware of the part social class played in my psychic life, I was able to track much avoidable stress and insecurity, as well as many arguments and strife, to the challenge of moving around social classes.

If only we understood our relationship to social class, we’d have a chance of choosing what we value from our class backgrounds and what to let go. I think now that understanding might have allowed me to be myself wherever I was. As with any investigation of our psyches, this one might have helped to lighten mine.

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