ABSTRACT
After Sigmund Freud and his disciples, symbolism and the processes of individual symbolisation were explored and studied by the post-Freudian, notably in the field of the psychoanalysis of children with Melanie Klein, Hanna Segal and Donald Woods Winnicott, in particular, and in that of psychoses. Structuralism would therefore strive to realise the Maussian project of unifying the human and social sciences through the symbolic produced by the human mind and its unconscious structure, something which would ultimately lead Levi-Strauss to make the unconscious their unifying agent. Confronted with the structuralist omnipotence of the symbolic, Maurice Godelier meant to defend the primacy of the imaginary which necessarily combines with the symbolic and the diverse forms of symbolisation. The symbolic violence it implies would therefore only impose domination by concealing the fact of its domination. Inseparable from symbolic power, Bourdieu therefore strove to think through this symbolic violence.
