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)