The Bourdieusian Unconscious: The Scientific and Political Significance of the Sociological Treatment of a Psychoanalytic Concept

From the very beginning of Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre, but with increasing intensity, one can find expressions that are either explicitly taken from psychoanalysis, or at least have a psychoanalytic meaning. This paper aims to contribute to the existing discourse on Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis by examining the meaning of Bourdieu's most frequently used term, unconscious, which is also a key one in psychoanalysis, in Bourdieu's writings. In a brief introduction, I outline Bourdieu's relationship to psychoanalysis based on the literature and Bourdieu's texts, and argue that although Bourdieu's relationship with psychoanalysis remained controversial over the years, there is a growing integrative tendency, with psychoanalysis playing an increasingly important—even if sometimes hidden—role in his texts. In the main body of the paper, I argue that this tendency does not fully cover Bourdieu's approach to the unconscious, and that although his approach to the unconscious is not independent of the tendency discussed in the previous section, a dichotomy can be observed from the beginning to the end of the oeuvre, namely the parallel use of the unconscious in the sociological and psychoanalytic sense, and the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the two. Finally, in the last section, I point out that socioanalysis, as an emancipatory project, should have clarified its position on the unconscious, because it marks the limits of the actors' potential for self-reflexivity, which can also shape political strategies.