SubStance

SubStance 29.3 (2000) 103-112

Bourdieu's Uneasy Psychoanalysis

Jean-François Fourny

As is known, psychoanalysis, developed in Vienna around the time of the Belle Epoque (1870-1914), would be a form of Eurocentrism universalizing the European psychic structure and its sexual obsessions, further contributing to psychoanalysis's crisis. Nonetheless, it seems to be playing an increasingly important role, no less ambiguous, in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In fact, psychoanalysis has always had a place in his texts, despite an initial degree of hostility or serious reservations on Bourdieu's part. His reservations, however, have evolved over time, become nuanced and modified, to ultimately assign psychoanalysis a tentative but increasingly distinct profile as a problematic discipline. At times psychoanalysis is viewed as a rival to Bourdieu's sociology, from which the latter must absolutely be differentiated. At others it is seen as a kind of domain (or field) susceptible to annexation through the sociological treatment of certain of its concepts--that is, when a possible fusion with sociology, based on an equal footing and a clearly defined division of labor, appears hopeless.

As is also known, since its foundation, sociology has offered its own answers to the questions philosophy has been asking from the very beginning, an observation that Bourdieu would certainly be the last to deny. But in the case of psychoanalysis, as Alain Juranville notes in his remarkable Lacan et la philosophie (1984):

The existence of analytical discourse is, therefore, the social symptom par excellence, "what isn't right" in the historical world (and the presence of this irreducible flaw characterizes the historical world as it is). As a social symptom, it represents the cause of the world's problems and the basis of all discursive self-inquiry.

[L'existence du discours analytique est donc le symptôme social par excellence, "ce qui ne va pas" dans le monde historique (et la présence de cette faille, irréductible, caractérise le monde historique comme tel). En tant que symptôme social, il est dans ce monde ce qui fait problème, et ce à partir de quoi s'interrogent tous les discours.] (471, emphasis in the original). ¹ [End Page 103]

A little further on the author adds: "Psychoanalysis and philosophy are irreducibly linked and separate. They represent the real, or the condition of the real, for one another in this era marking the end of history. They represent the symptom for one another" ["Psychanalyse et philosophie sont irréductiblement liées et séparées. L'une pour l'autre, en cette époque de la fin de l'entrée dans l'histoire, est le réel, la condition du réel. L'une pour l'autre le symptôme."] (481).

I would like, therefore, to raise the question here of whether psychoanalysis is not also the symptom of Bourdieu's sociology and whether these two disciplines are not also closely linked. There is nothing extravagant in this proposal, given that sociology had already had much difficulty in distinguishing itself from the novel a century ago, Bourdieu himself granting literature an exorbitant degree of lucidity. ² This essay is, therefore, dedicated to the relations of conflict, potentially destabilizing, that Bourdieu's sociology has long maintained with psychoanalysis, and I will proceed in chronological order.

Verneinung

Even a quick study of Pierre Bourdieu's use of psychoanalytical concepts shows that his use of denial ["(dé)négation"] is by far the oldest and most lasting. But it would also suffice to look at Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) in order to see that Bourdieu's reservations regarding psychoanalysis on the whole remain numerous. In effect, Bourdieu's works on Kabylia spurn the traditional distinction between ethnology and sociology, which he holds as a product of the history of colonialism (Questions 30). Moreover, his confusion of these two disciplines was undoubtedly never faulted. On the other hand, the status of psychoanalysis in this book appears much more problematic in that Bourdieu does not seem able to refrain from borrowing certain of its concepts while repudiating the discipline...