STRUCTURES OF FEELING A Curated Research Conversation Edited by Dr. Niall Gildea
Question I. Does ‘structure of feeling’ have application to psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic practice and theory? Louise Gyler: I am interested in the transmission of trauma, and whether the structure of feeling might be too rigidly centred around meaningful transmission to capture what we might call the transmission of affective nonmeaning—those states that are inchoate, jumbled and muddled, that stir up anxiety and terror and paralysis in people. Do the social sciences have a language to describe that? How do we understand what gets transmitted in such cases? As psychoanalysts we can talk about emotions that get split off and projected and deposited elsewhere, but what is being transmitted is not affective meaning. I think it is something that is too confusing, doesn’t carry any structure of meaning. How do we find a way of understanding those processes? It is partly a question of how to find ways of articulating and conceptualizing something about this transmission of something which is affective—which is basically unintelligible but yet has material impacts on individuals, societies and cultures. Attempts to find ways, to give expression to that, always seem to fall flat or have limits. David Kaposi: I think the first question is ‘What is psychoanalysis?’ Psychoanalysis is concerned with truth and authenticity—but it is not philosophy. It is concerned with healing and alleviating suffering—but it is not medicine. I think psychoanalysis brings something radically novel inasmuch as it is emerging from a clinical encounter, and in that sense we might consider psychoanalysis itself as a structure of feeling—a liminal experience to do with process, to do with becoming, and to 35
