ABSTRACT
I am beginning with a deviation to reflect briefly on the relation between sociology and psychoanalysis, before moving on to outline the more central focus of this chapter. Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein were both major sociologists working from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty firstcentury. Both were interested in the relation between class and knowledge and their work in this area was central to the development of the field that became known as the new sociology of knowledge (Young, 1971). In addition, the work of both men suggests that they were influenced by the psychoanalytic theories that dominated in their respective countries at the time they were writing: for Bourdieu, in France, Lacanian ideas; for Bernstein, in the UK, the ideas of Melanie Klein. And finally, neither appears to have fully acknowledged the relation to psychoanalysis within their work. The similarity in the use and suppression of psychoanalytic ideas in the work of these two sociological theorists provides a basis for speculation on the relation between the two fields, sociology and psychoanalysis. It raises the possibility that the field of sociology did not find it easy to accommodate the insights of psychoanalysis. This constitutes, I think, an important context for a consideration of moments in their individual writings where psychoanalytic sources are either rejected or ignored. George Steinmetz (2006) has argued that Bourdieu’s relation to psychoanalysis can be understood in terms of the Freudian concept of (de)negation, in which a repressed idea is admitted to consciousness, but is not fully recognized or accepted by the subject (p. 445). He explains:
In some writings, especially the earlier ones, Bourdieu rejects psychoanalysis out-right. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, for example, psychoanalysis is reduced to a biological reductionism, completely ignoring Freud’s shift from the theory of childhood abuse in the early Studies in Hysteria to the theory of sexual fantasy that he developed in the course of his self-analysis. But his treatment of Freudian psychoanalysis more often takes the form of admitting Freudian terminology
and even some psychoanalytic arguments into his texts while surrounding these passages with rhetorical devices that seem to condemn psychoanalysis.
