Bourdieu's Uneasy Psychoanalysis

Abstract

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):