studied at the University of Amsterdam in the 1960s, a time of impressive changes in codes of manners and emotion regulation. In an attempt to describe and understand them, he critically used Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes, and introduced the concept of informalisation.

Subsequent research was directed at connections between social and psychic processes since the mid-nineteenth century, focussing on regimes of manners and emotions in relations between classes, sexes and generations, comparing changes in four western countries (Germany, Netherlands, Britain, and the USA).

From these studies he concluded that a long-term process of formalisation has been dominant until the 1880s, after which a process of informalisation has prevailed: behavioural and emotional alternatives increased, together with demands on emotion regulation. Many emotions that previously had been rigorously controlled, repressed and denied, especially those concerning sex, violence and death, were again ‘discovered’ as part of a collective emotional makeup: there was an ‘emancipation of emotions’, interpreted as a ‘psychic informalisation’. These processes were largely ‘blind’, that is, unplanned, driven by the pressures of a ‘competition and interweaving mechanism’.

Cas Wouters has been teaching at Utrecht University and as a researcher, he was a staff member of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. His research resulted in the publication of numerous articles and books that appeared in Dutch, English, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.

Tel.  0031 (0)629603412    and    0031 (20)6655294     

Email:caswouters@xs4all.nl