The View from Inside, The View from Outside

It might not appear at first glance that the work of the late French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu has much to offer psychoanalysis. In what follows, I would make the case that reading Bourdieu can reorient in significant ways our thinking about sociocultural contextuality and about how language functions. Traditionally, psychoanalytic theory has presented itself as concerned with inner or psychic reality resulting from each individual's path of deviation from norms that hold true for all in our species. Considerations of social or cultural relations have not been central to psychoanalytic theorizing. We are more apt to look for biological ties to related species than to explore social or cultural distinctions within our own. Our search for a universal, species-specific base for human experience would seem to preclude the usefulness of findings from studies of local variations among human groups.

I suggest that the time is ripe to reexamine the role of culture in our theories, not only because of the external realities of the world we live in, but also because a reflective awareness of sociocultural context is noticeably missing in our developmental theories. I believe that Bourdieu can help us to understand how that context is constitutive of inner reality, since this is the question he addresses in his work on practice (1977, 1990)—not how the individual can become embedded in a sociocultural context, but how the sociocultural context is embedded in the individual.

A second focus of Bourdieu's work is based in a broad critique of structural linguistics, which he claims has extracted language from its cultural context and objectified it, thereby obscuring its functioning in social relations of power, dominance, and violence. Language and Symbolic Power (1991) is a collection of Bourdieu's poststructural analyses of the structuralist tradition that begins in Saussure and extends to Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky, Austin, and Habermas (among others). Bourdieu's concept of sy