Bourdieu’s Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of “Habitus” and “Symbolic Capital”

Although Bourdieu is often seen as “a theorist who will have no truck with Freudian psychoanalytic theory,” he seemed to recognize in the last decade of his life (1930-2002) that psychoanalysis was intrinsic to his own project.2 The pressure of the Freudian tradition was first revealed in his writing by the recurrence of the words “unconscious” – used both as adjective and as noun – and “misrecognition” (méconaissance), a concept that received its most powerful formulation in the writing of Lacan.3 Bourdieu’s oeuvre accumulated a growing and ever more elaborate psychoanalytic vocabulary. His writing includes the following terms, all of them mainly associated with the Freudian tradition: projection, reality principle, libido, ego-splitting, negation (dénégation), compromise formation, anamnesis, return of the repressed, and collective phantasy; in his “Autoanalyse” (published in German in 2002 and in French in 2004), he uses the phrases “disavowal, in the Freudian sense” and “community of the unconscious.”4 But Bourdieu’s relationship to this tradition was not untroubled. The conditions in which Freudian concepts appear in Bourdieu’s work can be understood partly in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of Verneinung or (de)negation. In his earliest studies of hysterics, Freud already recognized a particular kind of resistance to the deepest layers of repressed material in which the patient disavows memories “even in reproducing them.”5 Freud specified the process of Verneinung in a later paper: “the content of the repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated”; denegation involves “already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed.” The “intellectual function is separated from the affective process.” This allows the ideational aspect of the repression to be undone, accepted intellectually by the subject, and named, while at the same time the condemning affective judgment is retained. The subject still refuses to recognize the denegated object as an intrinsic part of herself.6 In some writings, especially the earlier ones, Bourdieu rejects psychoanalysis outright. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, for example, psychoanalysis is reduced to a