Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of compensatory mentors in helping lower middle-class, American youth overcome structural barriers to social mobility. The psychic defenses of idealization and identification along with individuation emerging from dependency on the mentor are analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

(co-authored with Naomi Quinn). Drawing on data from a larger project, this paper analyzes ten life stories from young Americans who perceived themselves to be insecurely located in the lowest rungs of the middle class and who aspired to upward mobility. These individuals explicitly discussed the class, ethnic and gender barriers they faced when trying to pursue professional careers and consistently identified mentors, of a type we label compensatory, as crucial to helping them. Part of our larger argument is that this process was difficult for them precisely because they lacked the kind of praise and support that upper middle-class parents routinely provide their children within the dominant-dependent schema of American middle-class child-rearing (Whiting, 1978, Weisner, 2001). Instead, respondents reported being criticized frequently by caregivers for their failure to measure up to middle-class standards. They often experienced crippling anxiety and a sense of “being stuck” and unable to confront and handle the discrimination they faced. In these situations, compensatory mentors provided needed support but also proved crucial to the resolution of the mentee's psychic conflict. Respondents used the psychic processes of idealization and identification to merge with and introject some of the mentor’s desired qualities into their own senses of self thereby changing their ways of being and perceiving the world. We argue that this re-finding of dependency with the mentors led to the emergence of the individuation respondents perceived as necessary for confronting structural barriers. We consider the implications of these psychological processes in situations where individuals confront hierarchy.