Bridging Sociology and Psychoanalysis
in Qualitative Analysis:
Mixing Bourdieu and Psychoanalytical
Approaches
Diane Reay, University of Cambridge
Sociology and psychology should combine their efforts
(but this would require them to overcome their mutual
suspicion) to analyse the genesis of investment in a field
of social relations, thus constituted as an object of
investment and preoccupation, in which the child is
increasingly implicated and which constitutes the
paradigm and also the principle of investment in the
social game. How does the transition, described by Freud,
occur, leading from a narcissistic organization of the
libido, in which the child takes himself (or his own body)
as an object of desire, to another state in which he
orients himself towards another person, thus entering the
world of ‘object relations’, in the form of the original
social microcosm and the protagonists of the drama that
is played out there? (Bourdieu 2000: 166)
Sociology does not intend to substitute its
explanatory method for that of psychoanalysis.
It only intends to construct in a different fashion
certain facts that the latter takes up as objects
of inquiry fixing on aspects of reality that
psychoanalysis dismisses as secondary or
insignificant or treats as screens to be traversed
in order to reach the essential
(Bourdieu 2000, p, 717).
Sociology and psychoanalysis should unite
their strengths (but to do so they would
need to overcome their prejudices against
each other) to analyze the genesis of
investment in a field of social relations.
(Bourdieu, 2000:198-199).
We are disposed because we are exposed. It is
because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed
and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of
emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death, and
therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and
nothing is more serious than emotion, which
touches the depth of our organic being) that it is
able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an
openness to the world, that is, to the very
structures of the world of which they are the
incorporated form. (Bourdieu 2000, 140-141)
Through a whole series of imperceptible
transactions, half-conscious compromises
and psychological operations (projection,
identification, transference, sublimation,
etc).
(Bourdieu 2000: 197)
As these familiar psychoanalytic terms
literally unfurl before the reader’s eyes ….
there is the question of whether the
differences between the habitus and the
subject of psycho-analysis are not
becoming blurred to the point of being
interchangeable (Fourny 2000, 110).
• Akim’s story: habitus stretched to the limit
• A: The teachers thought because of where I come from
I was thick and my teachers all said I was only fit for
Foundation and it wasn’t until I was in the thick of it I
realised how it stopped me from realising my dreams,
so I got 7 Cs and only one A star for RE because that
was the only one I wasn’t in Foundation for. So it was
all a mess and there was no way I was going to be a
doctor after that. I felt like I will never realise my
mum’s, like my dreams. So I got to 16 and I had
already failed in life.
• D: So didn’t you get any support from the school?
• A: (Laughs) I did see a career advisor once, she
suggested I do vocational work so that wasn’t very
helpful either.
Akim: I got 2Bs and a C after a year of AS so
started again 3 totally different subjects and
then I got 2As and a B so it was worth it cos now
I am predicted 3As
• A: I am really scared about going to uni, I know I
have to go because there is no other choice but I
don’t know how I’ll cope. I have no idea what I
am letting myself in for.
• D: So why are you going?
• A: I want to do it because I really want to help my
mum and my brothers, there is no one else to
help them.
• D: But what about you, what do you want to do
for you because you are sounding like you don't
actually want to be a lawyer?
• A: (Laughs) Not really but my mum was always
having to see lawyers and they weren’t a lot of
good so I am going to be one of the good guys
Government has increasingly retreated from
providing any functions that might contain anxiety
and trauma; on the contrary, government, in
concert with the media and corporate policies,
has done its best to keep people frightened. Fear
has led to splitting and projective identification,
and large segments of the population,
traumatized in different ways depending on social
location, have taken up polarized positions of "us"
vs "them".
(Layton 2008:71)
I did my own thing but with lots of support and
like yeah, I was never held back and I was always
really pushed by my teachers. In class things I
always felt a bit uncomfortable because I would
always be kind of straining myself from sounding
like a twat (laughs). But in general I was, allowed
to write like a twat in my books and I just got on
with it. I am not saying I found things easy it was
just that I compelled myself to do more than
anyone else did. Like I just worked longer, it’s kind
of like a neurosis. (Ross, white middle class)
Anyway they wanted three kids for this gifted and
talented leadership scheme and he was chosen for
one of them and I remember him coming home
and saying “oh great”. And the next day he was just
crying for no reason at all and so they took him to
the office and it happened again. And so they took
him to the doctor and they arranged a visit, it was
amazing, within a week with the educational
psychologist. And then we got 6 sessions with him
and me almost straightaway and it turns out that I
had been putting too much pressure on him and
that was the last straw. (Peter, Ross’ father)
...the other factor that goes into making the school
actually good is erm (I don’t know if it’s particularly
politically correct) but actually it is very low on the
white trash factor you see. […] You know they
might be poor and they might be refugees but they
have still got a very erm positive towards the
benefit of education as opposed to like the white
trash families basically who are the third generation
of Thatcher’s dross or whatever. Actually if you get
too many of those in the school then that is actually
much worse than people of different colour and
races frankly. (Keith Hurley, a London parent)
They are really an indigenous community and have long
histories of being servants to the military and now that
military has gone, everything has crumbled around them.
They don’t have so many jobs. The army has just kind of left
them and that’s actually an erosion of 100s of years of
history. You may not like the attitudes, you may not like the
lack, you know, the quite aggressive culture, the racism in
that culture, you may not like it, but to pretend that it never
existed and that it is unimportant is only to create problems
for yourself. And the problems that you deal with- schools,
are the only places, I think, the only places, where you
actually confront those issues, because particularly state
schools are pulling in everybody.
(Tricia, London parent)
Class identities are formed via a defensive
splitting off of parts of self too closely
associated with anything felt to characterize
other, especially lower class fractions. One
distances oneself from the lower class’s
closeness to necessity, but that very splitting
creates a haunting anxiety about necessity
that is ever-present and must be vigilantly
guarded against. (Layton 2006:56)
I was quite upset to see it though and I remember
feeling really sorry for them because although I
knew it happened and I knew it was an issue, you
know, until you actually see it for yourself you don't
actually think about it. And then knowing that we
had so much more and knowing that when I came
back after my first day my mum was going to ask me
how it went. And there were so many kids there
whose parents obviously probably didn't have
hardly anything and you know weren't going to ask
or didn't care sort of thing and that was quite sad.
(Camilla, white middle class student)
I think they looked up to me to a certain extent and
I didn't sort of consciously think it but I
subconsciously felt slightly superior to them in that I
had everything that they didn't have. You know
everything that my mum and dad had given me and
I was more intelligent than they were and there was
more going for me than there was for them. And I
think also because my mum and dad had achieved
so much I think I probably felt quite second rate to
them and being friends with these people made me
feel like the one you know who was achieving you
know and was superior to them. (Camilla)
A true sociogenesis of the dispositions that
constitute the habitus should be concerned with
understanding how the 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. (Bourdieu, 1999: 512)