About the IPT Network
The Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Thought (IPT) Research Network was set up in 2020 to enable ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and the social sciences and humanities. The project is a collaborative one between all members of the network; in our work we aim to identify and understand disciplines’ often doctrinaire mutual resistances, while remaining attentive to others’ discrete critical metalanguages and methodologies.
Working under the broad rubric, ‘Transmission and Trauma’, we explore conceptions of the nature of social meaning and of its mechanisms of transmission, as these engage with the individual both as agent and as experiencing subject. We bring different disciplines together by applying both analytic and critical methodologies to interdisciplinary understandings of concepts and their connections.
This academic year (2023-24) we enter a new phase in the investigation of mechanisms of transmission. So far, and with the volume on Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’ we have mapped out one theorist’s approach to understanding the relation of individual and social affectivity, seen through the lens of social and cultural analysis in the arts. Our programme continues as an intercalated series of online seminars and research conversations, and in-room workshop and in the next two years we shall develop two projects.
One, closely related to the idea of structure of feeling, is a collaboration with the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF)’s programme on ‘Political Affect’. The other engages with the work of Richard Wollheim, a contemporary but very different thinker to Raymond Williams whose centenary in 2021 was the occasion for undertaking the volume on structures of feeling. Despite their close proximity in time and indeed in place (the one working in Oxford and then at Cambridge, the other in Oxford and then London), the two thinkers’ apparently incompatible routes to much the same end point make for an intriguing comparison of both thought and method. Wollheim, whose centenary falls in 2023, was a philosopher whose philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis and art speak together to the question of transmission’s psychological and cultural mechanisms. The IPT’s 2023-24 Richard Wollheim Centenary Project will take this forward, in partnership with the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and supported by St John’s College via the Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis Seminar, and by the ISRF.
The IPT network’s first three years: 2020-23
After an initial exploratory phase we began an in-depth analytic interrogation of Raymond Williams’s well-known but loosely defined methodological concept of a ‘structure of feeling’, which tries to account for the emergence, reification and dissolution of dominant cultural forms and values over time. Williams’s model, however, lacks any kind of psychological component, and part of our first year’s work was to set his thinking in a dialogue with forms of psychoanalysis which his peremptory rejection of Freud may have led him to overlook. In a second, critical phase, we look at re-framing the idea of a structure of feeling as an ‘unthought known’ of Williams’s work seen as self-exploration, to which he persistently returns, repeating but not working through the conundrum it presents him with.
In these first three years we have held workshops on Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’, on Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Thought, on intersubjectivity (‘The Social Subject: Intersubjectivity, Psychoanalysis, and Hegel’), and two winter seminar/workshops on Richard Wollheim’s philosophical work on psychoanalysis and its relation to art, and on Kleinian moral psychology. We have also continued with discussions and seminar papers on a range of topics related to psychoanalysis: affect, the ego, phantasy, the transitional object.
In this current academic year we have been working towards an edited collection on Williams’s structures of feeling (under contract for publication in 2024), and are continuing to map out the ways that psychoanalytic thought engages and is engaged with cultural and social enquiry across the disciplines, with particular reference to the psychoanalytic school of Object Relations. This has led to work, in collaboration with the ISRF, towards a psychoanalytic exploration of political affect.
Alongside such focused work, the ‘Transmission and Trauma’ theme remains the basis on which the network defines its enquiry into forms of transmission which are not available to consciousness in any straightforward sense, but nevertheless mediate the onward progression of social meaning as well as its distortion and interruption.
The IPT Network’s members come from a range of disciplines including anthropology, classics, economics, history of ideas, history of medicine, literary studies, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychology; several are also psychodynamic or psychoanalytic clinicians. Our meetings mainly take place over Zoom, which enables us to include members from Europe and other continents. In term-time we hold plenary video-discussions, and also small themed ‘research conversations’, in which members of the network share and discuss their ongoing work. Occasional workshops with both in-person and online attendance are held in the UK. The most publicly accessible activity is the series Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis (currently based at St John’s College, Oxford); these are conducted online and may be viewed by clinicians and academic staff and students.