Television and Psychoanalysis: Psycho-Cultural Perspectives(The Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture Series)

Despite the prominence of television in our everyday lives, psychoanalytic approaches to its significance and function are notoriously few and far between. This volume takes up perspectives from object relations theory and other psychoanalytic approaches to ask questions about the role of television as an object of the internal worlds of its viewers, and also addresses itself to a range of specific television programmes, ranging from Play School, through the plays of Jack Rosenthal to recent TV blockbuster series such as In Treatment. In addition, it considers the potential of television to open up new public spaces of therapeutic experience.Interviews with a TV producer and with the subject of a documentary expressly suggest that there is scope for television to make a positive therapeutic intervention in people's lives. At the same time, however, the pitfalls of reality programming are explored with reference to the politics of entertainment and the televisual values that heighten the drama of representation rather than emphasising the emotional experience of reality television participants and viewers. A recurring theme throughout is that television becomes a psychological object for its viewers and producers, maintaining the psychological 'status quo' on the one hand and yet simultaneously opening up playful spaces of creative, therapeutic engagement for these groups. This collection of essays makes a timely intervention into the field of television studies by offering a distinctive range of psycho-cultural approaches drawn from both academic criticism and an array of experiences grounded in both the clinical and televisual scenes of practice.

Table of Contents:
Series Preface , Preface , Psychoanalysis and television: notes towards a psycho-cultural approach , The View from the Couch , Television as Rorschach: the unconscious use of the cathode nipple , Psychotherapy on the couch: exploring the fantasies of In Treatment , Television as Transitional Object , BBC Play School: playing with transitional, transitory, and transformational space , Family romances in Jack Rosenthal’s television drama , Spending too much time watching TV? , Television Experiences , Television as “docutherapy”: an interview with Richard McKerrow and Jonathan Phang , TV times at the Freud Museum

About the Author :
Caroline Bainbridge is Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton and a Director of the Media and the Inner World research network, which is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is Editor of the Journal 'Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics'. Ivan Ward is Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum, London, and manager of the Museum's public Programme of talks and conferences. Candida Yates is Reader in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London and is a Director of the Media and the Inner World research network funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the Co-Editor of the 'Journal Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics' and a consulting editor of the 'Journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society' and she has published widely on the themes of masculinity, emotion, politics and popular culture.

Review :
'Given that television has arguably been the most powerful medium in much of the world for up to half a century, a book approaching it through psychoanalysis is considerably overdue. And now digitisation and the internet have made the idea of "television" much more complicated and pervasive, our need to understand its deeper influences on our minds, and how we relate to it, is yet more important. This collection of essays draws on key ideas from modern psychoanalysis while retaining, in its rich psychosocial approach, a strong appreciation of the socio-cultural contexts in which television has taken the shapes it has.'- Barry Richards, Professor of Public Communication, The Media School, Bournemouth University'Combining cultural theory and television studies with clinical encounters and object-relations, Television and Psychoanalysis is as erudite and switched-on as it is eclectic. Ranging from the London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony through to The Sopranos, and even Play School, the essays gathered together here challenge us to re-think the "boob tube" via a welcome array of shows. TV has long deserved serious psycho-cultural understanding, and this book marks a vital transition by creatively bridging the small screen and key psychoanalytic ideas.'- Matt Hills, Professor of Film and TV Studies at Aberystwyth University