‘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.