The cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu developed a conception of culture or habitus that can greatly expand our understanding of how the collective and trans-individual contributes to structuring the mind,
Cultural dislocation – the removal of a person from a location organized by a particular set of cultural practices and placing them in another location organized by a substantially different set of cultural practices – can shock and alter the ego. I utilize the cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu's definition of culture or habitus as “a set of durable transposable dispositions” inculcated from a collective in which an individual is embedded to describe the impact of cultural dislocation. Finally, I suggest that difficulty in mourning the loss of a “country” and “set of ideals” that can no longer adequately mediate the immigrant's new world leads to melancholic symptoms, particularly anhedonia (loss of feeling in the body) and a type of self‐loathing that emanates from deeply unconscious sources.
This article applies a cultural or collective perspective to Winnicott's developmental theories. Expanding on existing psychoanalytic literature and drawing from neighboring fields, specifically the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, the notion of habitus is utilized to account for the constitutive impact of culture or a collective on individual development. Cultural systems play a fundamental role in the structuring of subjectivity and the coordination of inter‐subjective linking. Collective systems of meaning‐making (cultures) replicate themselves in the minds of individuals who are structured by them. Extending this idea to Winnicott's developmental theories will help illuminate the constitutive impact of Winnicott's cultures or collectives on his perception, thinking and theories. A case example illustrating the thesis of cultures’ constitutive impact on an individual's basic experience of self and world is provided.
This is a brief introductory paper about the history and centrality of the social unconscious in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The term―Social Unconscious―was introduced into our literature more than 100 years ago by the first formally trained American psychoanalyst―Trigant Burrow. It opens new pathways for understanding the social and collective dimensions of the unconscious, allowing us to extend our reach with our patients and our relevance with fellow citizens. Despite its potential, the social unconscious and the theories that undergird it were denigrated by Freud. In the early 1930’s, Freud instructed the American Psychoanalytic Association to remove Trigant Burrow from its membership and to excise this scholarship from its curricula. Coordinated attempts to suppress these ideas harmed the field’s development and retarded its relevance. Understanding the social dimensions of the unconscious is necessary because the unconscious is largely structured by social, cultural and collective coordinates. Fortunately, the turn into the 21st century is seeing a proliferation in analytic scholarship regarding the centrality of the socio‐cultural in structuring the unconscious of individuals and groups. New terms are being introduced such as vinculo, normative unconscious, interpellation, semiotic code, and ego‐habitus that aim to elaborate the various ways culture, ideology, large‐groups, and geopolitical processes shape the unconscious. Their potential to deepen our contact with patients across the spectrum of human difference is immense. I suggest using the capacious term―social unconscious―as a core conceptual category that organizes this vein of expanding analytic scholarship.
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