The Ego's Habitus: An Examination of the Role Culture Plays in Structuring the Ego

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, conditioning the body and shaping experience from moment to moment. A synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu's conception of culture or habitus with Freud's conception of the ego clearly demonstrates that culture structures the ego's nucleus. Cultural propositions are inculcated into the ego in the form of dispositions that determine how things are perceived and understood within a large‐group. Mental structures derived from culture are located within the unconscious but not repressed ego in a “third” type of unconscious that Freud discovered but did not elaborate. Deepening our understanding of how culture connects the individual with the collective can help us reach previously overlooked areas of experience in our patients and, perhaps, develop methods for addressing pathogenic cultural attitudes.