Class and Psychoanalysis by Ryan Joanna;

Class and Psychoanalysis by Ryan Joanna;

Author:Ryan, Joanna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


Bourdieu and psychoanalysis

Reay (2015) argues that Bourdieu often fails to engage fully enough with the affective aspects of class, despite in many ways laying the ground for doing so. However he increasingly if ambivalently incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into his writings, recognising them as intrinsic to his theories, as Steinmetz (2006) depicts.

In Distinction Bourdieu invokes the notion of a ‘social psychoanalysis’, arguing that taste, ‘one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production’, is where sociology is especially akin to a social psychoanalysis (Bourdieu, 1984: 11). He argues that: ‘[T]he social relations objectified in familiar objects, their luxury or poverty… impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered garish linoleum’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 77). Bourdieu continues: ‘Experiences of this sort would be the material of a social psychoanalysis which set out to grasp the logic whereby the social relations objectified in things and also, of course, in people are insensibly internalised, taking their place in a lasting relation to the world and to others’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 77, my italics). What is of particular note here is Bourdieu’s positing of the embodied, non-conscious internalisation of social relations (here class relations) as these manifest themselves in cultural practices and in relation to others. These particular passages have been made much use of in Layton’s incorporation of Bourdieu’s work into her clinical understandings of class (see Chapter 8). His notion of internalisation fits well with the schemas of relational and object-relations psychoanalysis.

Bourdieu criticises the more essentialist and ahistorical aspects of psychoanalysis in his critique of ‘substantialism’ but makes extensive use of psychoanalytic terminology at other points. Steinmetz (2006) cites many examples of Bourdieu’s use of concepts such as repression, denegation, identification, libido and defence, and yet also his ambivalence towards them. He argues that psychoanalysis could fill in some of the holes in Bourdieuian theory, especially as regards how disparate life experiences either become integrated or fail to be, in the formation of a biography or habitus; and also in how the ‘dominated’ often need the approval and recognition of the ‘dominant’. These are aspects that I also suggested earlier are of psychoanalytic relevance.

In later writings Bourdieu recommends that sociology and psychoanalysis, rather than being seen as alternatives, should unite their strengths, but he acknowledges that they would have to overcome their mutual suspicion, a highly recognisable description. The psychosocial work cited here does illustrate the creativity unleashed by attempting to do so. Bourdieu summarises the task of this disciplinary collaboration as understanding how:

[T]he social order collects, channels, reinforces or counteracts psychological processes depending on whether there is a homology, redundancy and reinforcement between the two systems, or to the contrary, contradiction and tension. It goes without saying that mental structures do not simply reflect social structures.

(Bourdieu, 1999: 512, my italics)



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