‘Structures of feeling’ and psychoanalysis: revisiting Raymond Williams on social forms of consciousness.
As last term, the seminar is online only and will be available to view online from 8.15 pm on Monday November 15th, for 7 days. The link will be sent by email that day. If you were registered last term, you will automatically receive the link this term. To register for the first time, please email paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there will not be an online discussion with viewers, but comments may be posted on http://oxfordpsychoanalysis.blogspot.com . Following Michael Rustin's talk there will be a response from Louise Braddock.
‘Structures of feeling’ and psychoanalysis: revisiting Raymond Williams on social forms of consciousness.

2021 is the centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth, and a suitable moment to revisit his work for ‘unconsidered trifles’; ideas, themes, moves in his thought that may have been overlooked. His pre-eminence as literary and cultural critic of the latter 20th C is widely acknowledged, but his work is characterised by an omission, shared with other anglophone sociologists, of any but passing reference to psychoanalysis. Yet the established nature of Freud’s influence had been apostrophised by Auden (in 1940) as a ‘whole climate of opinion’, while psychoanalysis was, through the work of psychoanalysts such as Donald Winnicott, a contributing part of the social and cultural thought contemporary with Williams himself. The seminar examines the potential of Williams’s well-known term of art, the ‘structure of feeling’, for offering a point of contact with psychoanalysis.
Date: 15 November 2021, 20:15 (Monday, 6th week, Michaelmas 2021)
Venue: Online only.
Speaker: Michael Rustin (UEL)
Organisers: Niall Gildea, Louise Braddock, Paul Tod
Organiser contact email address: paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis
Booking required?: Not required
Booking email: Paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Cost: Free
Audience: Open to university members and mental health professionals.
Editor: Paul Tod