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- Herausgeber: Karnac Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Our lives are saturated by media that we use in conscious as well as unconscious ways. Spanning a wide range of examples, from film and TV to social media, from gaming to robots, this critical introduction guides readers through the growing field of psychoanalytic media studies in a clear and accessible manner. It is indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between humans and technology today. Jacob Johanssen and Steffen Krüger show how media function beyond the rational. What does it mean to speak of narcissism in relation to social media? How have the internet and online platforms shaped work? How do apps like Tinder and online pornography shape our experience of love and sexuality? What are the potentials and pitfalls in our relationships with AI and robots? These questions, and many others, are discussed and answered in this book. Aimed at students, academics and clinicians, this book introduces readers to key media and the ways they have been approached psychoanalytically, and presents major concepts and debates led by scholars since the 1970s.
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MEDIA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
A Critical Introduction
Jacob Johanssen Steffen Krüger
Contents
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of an intense work process and countless dialogues and discussions we had on, with, in and via digital media. We are glad it’s done, but we are still glad we’ve done it.
Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, Steffen. The authors.
Introduction
In 1907, Sigmund Freud wrote to his family while he was on holiday in Italy. On the Piazza Colonna in Rome, a screen had been installed on the roof of one of the buildings onto which magic lantern slides and moving images were projected:
They [the magic lantern slides] are actually advertisements, but to beguile the public these are interspersed with pictures of landscapes, Negroes [sic] of the Congo, glacier ascents, and so on. But since these wouldn’t be enough, the boredom is interrupted by short cinematographic performances for the sake of which the old children (your father included) suffer quietly the advertisements and monotonous photographs. They are stingy with these tidbits, however, so I have had to look at the same thing over and over again. When I turn to go I detect a certain tension in the crowd, which makes me look again, and sure enough a new performance has begun, and so I stay on. Until 9 p.m. I usually remain spellbound; then I begin to feel too lonely in the crowd. (Freud, 1992, pp. 261–2)
Written well over a hundred years ago, the scene that Freud describes here may nevertheless sound familiar to us. Big screens in public places on mild summer nights have long since become a cultural mainstay and frequently attract hundreds, even thousands, of people to experience, say, a sporting event together.
As art and media historian Pasi Väliaho (2013) observes of Freud’s report, under ‘the pull of the technological spectacle, the external environment of the Piazza becomes secondary’ (2013, p. 169). His eyes glued to the screen, Freud finds himself suffering through the advertisements, as so many television viewers in the decades that would follow, but he admits to being spellbound by the moving images offered in between the ads and the slideshows. Indeed, the spectacle of movement on the screen fascinates him so much as to render him immobile, if only 2for a short moment. More than that, each time he attempts to turn his back on the screen and leave, he can sense in the physical responses of other spectators that something new is catching their attention, which makes him turn around again only to become spellbound once more.
Although the magic lantern was one of the key inventions predating and anticipating cinema – with the first properly moving images having been made and shown by Louis Le Prince in 1888 – we can link the repetitive, tidbit nature of the screening at the Piazza Colonna to contemporary media technology. Indeed, the historical scene is reminiscent of the photo- and video-sharing app Snapchat, for example, where users can share up to 60-second-long videos with friends. Furthermore, the magic lantern slides can also be seen as early instances of animated gif images that have become commonplace on social media: punchily short film sequences that are a few seconds long and repeat endlessly. The silent films and slideshows of Freud’s era were often accompanied by live music to add an additional stimulus. This comes remarkably close to another current social media platform, TikTok, which draws its highly affective strength from the often funny and joyful visual illustrations of short samples of well-known pop music songs.
Turning to more traditional media, Rome, the ‘eternal city’, has been featured in countless Hollywood films, from La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999), to Zoolander 2 (Stiller, 2016) and many others. It is also possible today to learn about Rome by watching videos of virtual walks on YouTube or to ‘visit’ the city through a virtual-reality headset like Oculus Rift where users can interact with a virtual artificial intelligence (AI) tour guide. Videogames from Street Fighter Alpha (1995) and the Assassin’s Creed series (2007–16), to Gran Turismo 6 (2013) have all featured levels set in the Italian capital. Hence, although technology and media change rapidly, we can always find traces of the old in the new. As we shall see in the coming chapters, the spatio-temporal dynamics of repetition and in/visibility that we have evoked in the above passages are characteristic of both media and psychoanalysis. In this Introduction, we outline basic ideas of psychoanalysis and define key technological terms such as ‘media’. Lastly, we provide a summary of the book’s main arguments. 3
What is psychoanalysis?
This book is a critical introduction to media and psychoanalysis or, more precisely, the study of diverse media through a psychoanalytic lens. The coming chapters feature the technologies, practices, uses and genres already broached above: film and television, the internet and social media, videogames and AI. We present and develop the field of psychoanalytic media studies and show how scholars have drawn on psychoanalysis in their thinking about them.
But, first of all, what is psychoanalysis anyway? Founded by the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), psychoanalysis is, first and foremost, a theory of the human mind, or the human being in general (the ‘subject’, a term many psychoanalysts prefer) and its peculiar ways of functioning. Taking its cues not from the well-functioning and healthy, but from the ailing mind, it consists of a clinical practice of caring for what today is referred to as ‘mental health issues’: for example, an inexplicable and overwhelming sadness (called ‘depression’), states of extreme, mysterious fearfulness (‘anxiety’), obsessive–compulsive behaviours such as ‘hoarding’, and radical mood swings and emotional instabilities (classified today as ‘bipolar’ or ‘borderline’, depending on the strength and character of the phenomena), as well as many others.
We can say that, together with his mostly female patients – or ‘analysands’, as one calls them nowadays, so as to denote a more equal relationship in which both analyst and patient/analysand engage in mental work – Freud ‘discovered’ that people suffering from psychological turbulences could be significantly helped by talking about themselves and what is difficult in their lives during daily sessions. Although much has changed since then,1 the basic principles have remained the same. The analysand lies down on a couch and freely associates – that is, talks about everything and anything that comes to their mind – while the analyst sits at an angle behind them, taking in the analysand’s stream of (un)-consciousness with evenly hovering attention, trying not to focus their attention on any specific aspects of the analysand’s discourse, but bringing out the import of the overall scene thus created.
Psychoanalysts (or psychoanalytic therapists, psychodynamic therapists or depth psychologists, as they are often called) are trained in psychoanalytic institutes, not merely learning key psychoanalytic ideas, but experiencing them by submitting to psychoanalytic treatment 4themselves, long before they start seeing their own patients/analysands. Once accredited, they can set up their own practice.
Depending on where one lives in the world, the availability and affordability of psychoanalytic treatment vary greatly. For instance, psychoanalysis does not have a large presence in the Arab region, whereas the Argentinian city of Buenos Aires is said to have the most psychoanalysts per square mile. This might have to do with the practice being rooted in a western culture that puts emphasis on individuality – the idea that each of us is their own, separate being, living their distinct lives. Paradoxically, clinical psychoanalysis affirms this idea each time an individual lies down on an analyst’s couch; at the same time, however, the aim of the treatment can be described as making individuals aware of their fundamental state of ‘unseparatedness’ from others. In this respect, it is unfortunate that psychoanalysis has become marginalized by many welfare states, as governments – and individuals themselves – often favour other, allegedly ‘quicker’ and more ‘cost-effective’ forms of therapy.
Furthermore, due to its western origins, psychoanalysis has been critiqued as a white, modernist project that cannot simply be ‘exported’ to all corners of the world. Many regional variations and developments of psychoanalysis – for example, in Egypt, China and India – have emerged as a result. We briefly return to this point in Chapter 4, when we consider psychoanalysis and racism. But back to the beginning. At the very core of the so-called ‘talking cure’ (Freud & Breuer, 1895, p. 30) is the process of free association that Freud (1913a, p. 134) emphasized was ‘the fundamental rule of psycho-analytic technique’:
You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them – indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. (Freud, 1913a, p. 134, italics in original)
Even more importantly, Freud emphasized that patients should never follow the urge of not saying something because it is unpleasant to tell (ibid.). In this way, he held that unconscious thoughts and unconscious 5ways of thinking, feeling and experiencing could be brought to the fore and made perceivable, understandable and thus conscious.
Unlike conventional academic psychology, Freud placed a great deal of emphasis on the dynamic interplay of (a) what people are consciously aware of, (b) what they might at any given time become consciously aware of, but simply do not focus on, and (c) what of their thinking and feeling is more or less opaque and inaccessible to them. Whereas Freud straightforwardly called (a) the conscious, he referred to (b) as the preconscious and only defined (c) as unconscious – that is, those thoughts people are totally unaware of themselves. And indeed, we are not always aware of why we do certain things – moreover, we are frequently not even aware that we do them in the first place. We are often unaware of how we relate to people in the ways we do, leave alone why; we seldom remember our dreams, but most of us remember recurring ones. However, this is without being able to say for sure why we keep dreaming them, or why we keep making the same old mistakes, repeating particular patterns or going in circles with our lovers, friends or colleagues with actions and reactions we know we should shake off but are unable to. Irrespective of whether we feel mentally healthy or fragile, our actions, thoughts, utterances, fantasies and desires are constantly being shaped by unconscious processes. The psychoanalyst Phil Mollon (2000) defines the unconscious using digital technology as analogy:
Consciousness could be compared to what is visible on a computer screen. Other information could be accessed readily by scrolling down the document or by switching to a different ‘window’. This would be analogous to the conscious and the preconscious parts of the mind. However, some files on the computer may be less easily explored. They may have been encrypted or ‘zipped’, or they may require a password or are in other ways rendered ‘access denied’. Some may also have been corrupted, so that information is scrambled and thereby rendered incomprehensible. While the Internet potentially makes available (to people collectively) all kinds of information and images […], a programme [sic] may have been installed that restricts access to Internet sites, censoring some that contain material considered unacceptable. Moreover, most of the activity of the computer is not visible on the screen; this is analogous to Freud’s idea of the bodily based instincts, or 6‘id’, in themselves inaccessible to the mind, only to be discerned through their derivatives (desires and phantasies). (Mollon, 2000, p. 8)
With this quotation, we do not want to say that the mind works like a computer, but Mollon’s analogy is productive in our context, not least because it links the unconscious to media technology. The psychosocial thinker Stephen Frosh writes that the psychoanalytic unconscious ‘refers to the existence of ideas which are not just not being thought about (hence not just “not in consciousness”) but which are also radically unavailable to thought’ (Frosh, 2002, p. 12). For clinical psychoanalysis, the reasons for particular neuroses, mental troubles or forms of suffering often have blocked and inaccessible aspects, either because they are attached to our earliest, pre-linguistic experiences, made at a time when our consciousness had not been sufficiently formed, or because they have been repressed and banished from an established consciousness as they are too traumatic, shameful or, as Freud (1913a) put it drily, ‘unpleasant’ to face consciously.
While psychoanalysis holds the unconscious to be universal, it is nevertheless shaped by particular individual and sociocultural dynamics. As mentioned, it takes a culture in which individuality holds some importance, for example, for psychoanalysis to make any sense in the first place. Gillian Rose (2001) puts it thus: ‘the unconscious is formed by the disciplines of a culture, by its particular pattern of interdicts and permissions. Subjectivity is thus culturally as well as psychically constructed, and this process of subjection continues throughout our lives’ (p. 104). The unconscious is never simply a box or kind of hidden place where something can be hidden or buried. In that sense, Mollon’s analogy of the zip file is not fitting. Rather, the unconscious is dynamic and, to stay with computer analogies, a reservoir of algorithms and if-then patterns which continuously announces its presence in our interactions with others. As Frosh (2002) writes, these ‘hidden ideas’, as he calls them, ‘have a profound influence on psychological life’, by remaining ‘active (“dynamic”), pushing for release’ (p. 13). In other words, unconscious fragments continuously intrude on and reintroduce themselves into our interactions and mental activities. 7
Breasts, penises, mothers, fathers – what was Freud(’s) thinking?
Readers unfamiliar with psychoanalysis will nevertheless be familiar with many of its ideas. These ideas have deeply penetrated popular culture. Proverbial sayings that have long since turned into common-sensical wisdom are, for example: that everything in life is about sex; that young children desire the parent of the opposite sex; that men strive to marry someone who is like their mother and women someone like their father; that cigars and other pointy objects represent the phallus; that some people are ‘anal’ (i.e. obsessively controlling) and some others are characterized by ‘oral cravings’, etc. Although such notions are sometimes taken too literally, they often have some truth in them. For example, ‘anal’ and ‘oral’ as character traits denote particular phases in an infant’s psychosexual development and, even though these phases are no longer seen as holding true in the rather rigid sequence in which Freud posited them, they still offer immensely productive models for conceiving human relatedness, a point we unpack in Chapter 5.
A key stage in this model is the Oedipus complex, which refers to a phase in a child’s development, roughly from age four to six, in which the child develops a quasi-sexual – but not in the way we understand adult sexuality – attachment to one of the parents, usually that of the opposite sex, and a degree of animosity toward the other parent. Such tensions in one’s earliest relationships have indeed proven plausible. Across different cultures, for example, toddlers have shown a tendency to make proclamations along the lines of: ‘I am going to live with daddy/mommy one day.’ As Freud stated, those oedipal wishes are given up at some point because, in the male case, the little boy fears that his father may punish him for such adultery through an act of castration (i.e. cutting off the penis, which stands for total destruction and/or subjugation). In turn, the little girl, Freud argued, upon realizing she does not have a penis, comes to feel inferior to her father and angry at her mother for not ‘equipping’ her with one. This part of psychoanalytic theory has been fiercely debated and challenged within and outside psychoanalysis, and we can only scratch the surface of this debate here by emphasizing that the Oedipus complex is not so much about the penis as a bodily organ. Rather, it comes to embody a particular symbolic meaning in society that has to do with power and the ways in which people invest things, other people 8and themselves – including certain body parts – with power or a lack thereof, something the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan elaborated on. Hence, although the idea of the Oedipus complex may sound a little whacky, far-fetched and embarrassing, we invite readers to take its basic premises seriously: specifically, how patterns of deep attachment and love – as well as sexual stirrings – which form first between the baby and mother, and subsequently among baby, mother and father (or other caregiver arrangements), come to shape a person’s upbringing, identity and being in the world.
By crossing through the oedipal phase and giving up on one’s parents as sole love objects, the child becomes able to see themselves as part of a generational line (in familial as well as societal terms) and thereby gains a (rudimentary) understanding of history and temporality. The child learns to see themselves as a subject of the future and begins to speculate and daydream about what that future might look like – and, importantly, they need to face what it will not look like. Although Freud argued that the Oedipus complex is universal, his theory’s focus was clearly on boys. Yet, both boys and girls need to give up on their longings for a blissful return to a union with either mummy or daddy and, in the process, they internalize their parents as inner authorities. Through this process, and with the child becoming more aware of their surroundings, the superego is formed. The quasi-erotic desires of the Oedipus complex become repressed, tabooed and forbidden – a process Freud saw as a hallmark of civilization. The child ‘is forced to swallow her or his desires in the face of the power of the real world’, Frosh (1999, p. 36) notes.
Thus, mediated by the relationship to one’s parents, the super-ego comes to represent the laws, customs and morals of a society, with Freud introducing two further neologisms in his later metapsychological writings with which he sought to delineate the subject’s relationship to these laws: the ego and the id. Whereas the id comes to represent the unconscious and constantly seeks pleasure and enjoyment, in this way going against and coming into conflict with the laws of the super-ego, it is the ego’s job to negotiate between id and super-ego and navigate the arising conflicts so as to keep them in check. Yet, this is no simple task, since the super-ego is seldom benign; rather, being intimately related to the id and its unconscious desires, it must be seen as the latter’s flipside and thus as a hyper-moralistic and exactingly cruel agency which constantly taunts its bearer for their failures and shortcomings, their insufficiencies 9and transgressions, even – or better, especially – if these transgressions are not enacted but merely imagined.
In a long line of cultural-analytic works, Freud showed how unconscious conflicts among ego, id and super-ego seep not only into family relations, but also into wider sociocultural spheres – for example, in works of literature, theatre plays, visual art, jokes, proverbs and parapraxes (the famous Freudian slips!). It is this presence of unconscious processes in cultural and societal realms – or these realms’ suffusion with unconscious processes – that makes psychoanalysis so truly radical and, in our opinion, so useful for analysing how individual subjects on one side and culture and society on the other shape each other in various ways. This question of the respective mutual shaping of the individual psyche and the collective or aggregated social is at the core of psychosocial studies, an approach and emerging academic discipline we are particularly invested in. Psychosocial studies argue that the individual-psychological and the social–structural dimensions of reality and existence are intertwined (Clarke, 2002; Hollway, 2006; Frosh & Young, 2008; Jones, 2008; Clarke & Hoggett, 2009; Day Sclater et al., 2009; Frosh, 2010; Hollway & Jefferson, 2012; Woodward, 2015; Redman, 2016; Krüger, 2017b). ‘We are psychosocial,’ Wendy Hollway (2006) writes, because we ‘are influenced by desire and anxiety provoking situations that are affected by material and social conditions, discourses, as well as by unconscious defence mechanisms and intersubjective relations’ (pp. 467–8). This book, too, is interested in this process of the mutual shaping of individuals, culture and society, and it considers media as entities positioned at the intersections of these three.
Post-Freudians: debates, rifts and developments
When Nazi Germany occupied Austria in 1938, Freud and his family fled Austria, which had embraced its ‘Anschluß’ (annex) to the ‘Third Reich’ rather enthusiastically (Krüger, 2011, pp. 199, 293). The family immigrated to London, where Freud died of painful cancer of the jaw in 1939. Many German and Austrian analysts sought refuge in other countries, first and foremost the USA. Although agreeing in principle on the dynamic unconscious as the foundation of human subjectivity, psychoanalysts had quarrelled over Freud’s ideas already during his lifetime. After his death, however, these 10quarrels developed into distinct psychoanalytic traditions (Makari, 2008). In that sense, it is wrong to speak of ‘a’ or ‘the’ psychoanalysis, as we have done up to now. Perhaps more so than other disciplines, psychoanalysis is at variance with itself and divided into different ‘schools’. In the USA, for example, an ego-psychological school took hold whose focus on the functionings of the ego was presented as honouring the Freudian heritage, with Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein at the helm. In France, Jacques Lacan presented his revisioning of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts as a ‘return to Freud’. However, instead of taking sides in the institutional conflicts which, in the wake of the Second World War, were simmering all over the psychoanalytic community (Lacan, for example, was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963), we agree with those moderating voices today that mediate between, and find productive perspectives in, the various schools, without regressing into an anything-goes attitude. To our minds, the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches within psychoanalysis is testimony to the ‘heterogeneity of the unconscious’ itself (Laplanche, 1996, p. 11). Therefore, what we argue is required, particularly in psychosocial and cultural analysis, is a careful dialogue between, on the one hand, one’s empirical material and the part of reality one seeks to analyse and, on the other, the broadest possible scope of psychoanalytic theory that one can bring to bear on one’s analysis.
Since one of the main tasks of this book is to present already existing psychoanalytic dialogues between psychoanalysis and media culture, and since these dialogues have mainly been conducted from Freudian, object-relational and Lacanian perspectives, it is these central schools that we will focus on in this book, as well as in the remaining parts of this Introduction. However, it is important to note that there are highly influential psychoanalysts who did not form a school of their own, such as Didier Anzieu, Bracha L. Ettinger, André Green, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche, some of whom we will encounter in the course of the following chapters.
As regards to the establishing of psychoanalytic schools, the so-called ‘Freud–Klein controversies’ were pivotal in shaping the intellectual landscape of psychoanalysis in Britain and beyond. In Britain, two main camps emerged, one led by Freud’s daughter Anna (1895–1982), who had become a highly theoretically versed psychoanalyst herself, and one led by Melanie Klein (1903–60) who, born in Budapest and psychoanalytically trained by Karl Abraham in Berlin, moved to London in 1926 where she 11developed her own ideas about psychoanalysis, often radically redefining Freudian concepts, such as the super-ego, in the process. From 1942 to 1945, in the midst of the Nazi German ‘Blitz’ on London, a string of meetings was held there at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, where Freudians and Kleinians, too, fought battles over their diverging ideas. Yet, despite deep-seated feelings of embitterment, which come to the fore in private letters exchanged at the time – for example, between Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, who had migrated to New York (see Krüger, 2011, pp. 395–7) – the London Institute was not torn apart, and the three separate groups that were formed (Kleinians, Freudians and the Independent, or Middle, group) learned to coexist.
Melanie Klein: object relations and early infantile fantasies
Settling in London in the mid-1920s, Melanie Klein quickly became influential in psychoanalytic circles, and she is still particularly well known for her analyses of and writings on children, an interest she shared with Anna Freud. For Klein, a developmental phase key to the understanding of the human experience is what she called ‘the paranoid–schizoid position’ – ‘a constellation of anxieties, defences and […] object relations’ characteristic of the earliest months of an infant’s life whose influence continues into childhood and adulthood2 (more about this in Chapter 4). Klein, among other notable object-relations analysts, such as D. W. Winnicott, Esther Bick, Ronald Fairbairn, Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer and Harry Guntrip, was key in advancing and supplanting Freud’s theories towards a more relational and intersubjective perspective. Whereas Freud had been most interested in people’s inner conflicts – an interest that often centred his ideas on the individual person – object-relations psychoanalysis emphasized the primary importance of people’s relationships with other people, most importantly those with their main caregiver, traditionally the mother.
We are not only born out of a (sexual) relation between two individuals; throughout our lives, we foster connections with others. ‘Objects’ in this tradition do not refer to things, such as smartphones, milk cartons or chairs, but to other human beings and how they are rendered ‘inner objects’, or fantasy representations that shape how people relate to themselves and each other both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’. As Klein 12writes about the process of object formation in the infant’s mind:
The baby, having incorporated his parents, feels them to be live people inside his body in the concrete way in which deep unconscious phantasies are experienced – they are, in his mind, ‘internal’ or ‘inner’ objects. […] Thus an inner world is being built up in the child’s unconscious mind, corresponding to his actual experiences and the impressions he gains from people and the external world, and yet altered by his own phantasies and impulses. (Klein, 1975, p. 345)
Klein placed great emphasis on seemingly ‘negative’ states such as envy, guilt, hatred or fantasies of destruction – which remain integral parts of subjectivity. She often worked with children and focused on their unconscious phantasy life and how dynamic it was. Julia Segal writes about Klein’s observations of her own four-year-old son: ‘When he was feeling angry with her, he saw her as a witch threatening to poison him. When he was feeling happy and loving towards her, he saw her as a princess he wanted to marry’ (Segal, 2004, p. 28).
Fantasy, a key concept for psychoanalysis in general, is even more central in the object-relations paradigm than in the Freudian. In fact, object-relational analysts even spell it more emphatically, as phantasy. Generally, fantasy refers to imaginary scenes and small plots that individuals dream up so as to insert themselves into them as the protagonists. Fantasies have strong unconscious dimensions and motivations; and in the Kleinian version, phantasies usually remain unconscious altogether. Especially in Freud’s early work, fantasizing, and the related daydreaming, represent a desire for wish fulfilment and constitute the creation of a particularly desirable reality (Freud, 1914, 1915). For Klein, in turn, unconscious phantasies are constitutive of all mental processes, and although they are expressive of both libidinal and aggressive impulses (Bott Spillius et al., 2011, p. 3), Klein’s focus was decidedly more on phantasies of attacking and being attacked, destroying and being destroyed, particularly in relation to the mother and close others. However, although the differences between ‘fantasy’ and ‘phantasy’ are often important to note, we merely use ‘fantasy’ in this book to refer to both conscious and unconscious fantasies, so as to not overwhelm readers with the theoretical intricacies of the diverging schools. 13
As regards Klein’s theory, the existence of archaic aggression may be difficult to acknowledge, let alone digest, for many, but Klein was right, we think, to devote important parts of her work to this human proclivity. Certainly, human beings are capable of amazingly nourishing acts of love and care towards others; in equal measure, however, humans are capable of acts of unspeakable aggression and violence – and sometimes both in close proximity to each other. Klein brought this idea of polar opposites in one and the same human being to fruition in her conceptualization of the ‘paranoid–schizoid’ and the ‘depressive position’. Unlike Freud, who posited more of a linear form of psychosexual development, for Klein infants, and human beings in general, shift between two main ‘constellations of attitudes and mechanisms’ (Segal, 2004, p. 33) for dealing with feelings of anxiety and loss. In the paranoid–schizoid position, the child feels existential, deadly threat and anxiety. In a process of what Klein called ‘splitting’ (1946), ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are rigidly kept apart. Parents of small children normally show intuition for what their children need by behaving in ways that emphasize calm, goodness and kindness. However, if parents themselves have been brought up in ways in which elements of cruelty were mixed into those of care (something psychoanalysis understands as ‘perversion’, which we discuss in Chapter 3), they may find themselves reproducing and repeating such patterns in their own parenting (Welldon, 1988).
Inhabiting the paranoid–schizoid position, the subject is thus unable to tolerate ambivalence, that is, to see that human beings usually embody both good and bad elements at the same time, and this is the main insight of – and sets the feeling state for – the depressive position. But to remain with the paranoid–schizoid position for a moment: the kind of thinking informed by it splits the world into stark opposites, and this has concrete implications for social phenomena. Contemporary politics, for example, are discussed through notions such as division, antagonism and polarization, which bear clear traces of the paranoid–schizoid. Likewise, social media are characterized in ways that echo Klein’s thinking: as filter bubbles, echo chambers and networks with their radically individualized nodes. Although Klein has been used relatively little by scholars of culture and society, her ideas are very useful for interrogating contemporary politics and forms of (digital) discrimination – interrogations into which we enter in Chapter 4.
The second main position in Kleinian theory, as broached already, 14is the ‘depressive position’, which is characterized by an awakening of a ‘capacity for concern’, as Winnicott (1963) put it. The onset of the depressive position marks the beginning of empathy with the other in an infant’s development. Although, in the paranoid–schizoid position, ‘the main anxiety concerned survival of the self […, i]n the depressive position anxiety is also felt on behalf of the object’ (Bott Spillius et al., 2011, p. 84). A sense of guilt for one’s aggressively destructive feelings towards the other now also comes into the picture. From this depressive position, the subject then moves towards a reparative one, while still returning, however, to the depressive position frequently. At this stage, the subject is able to recognize the complexity of themselves and others, involving ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ aspects in one and the same object. The baby, and by extension the mature individual, becomes able to tolerate frustration, jealousy, anxiety, loss and disappointment. Conflicts become manageable and the other comes to be seen as able to sustain and survive one’s attacks. The characteristics of this position are again transferable to contemporary politics, which has likewise been described as in need moving towards a state that echoes the depressive position: caring, compassionate, empathic and relational in its forms of communication and practice. We return to this in Chapter 4 and the book’s Conclusion.
Donald Woods Winnicott: children’s play and transitional objects
A friend and ally of Klein’s, but one who also developed markedly different ideas, was the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald W. Winnicott (1896–1971). Without reservations to draw upon other psychoanalytic paradigms, Winnicott came to be associated with the Middle or Independent group during the controversies. His central ideas, however, are rooted in the object-relations tradition. Like Klein, Winnicott’s concepts are grounded in close observation of children. He gave great importance to the way children played with toys and objects which he saw as significant of their inner worlds, with specific object relations becoming expressed through such play. As we discuss in Chapter 6, free-flowing play and its canalization into more structured game-play has been a marker of mental freedom for centuries, and Winnicott is most famous for a theory that outlines a path towards this freedom. At the heart of this theory is what Winnicott calls ‘transitional objects and phenomena’ (2002), such as teddy bears, cuddly 15blankets, a favourite soft toy or a soothing tune that the young child must always have when going to sleep. They calm the child and help manage feelings of loss and anxiety that accompany the transition from total dependence on caregivers towards a more self-reliant and independent state – a process that children both intensely desire and fear. As anyone who has observed young children knows, transitional objects are by no means ‘just things’, but become intensely invested in and animated. At the same time, children harbour a sense of having at least partly created their own illusion, and Winnicott cautions that this ambivalent status of the object is something parents must never question. ‘[D]id you create that or did you find it?’ (Winnicott, 2002, p. 119) is not a helpful question because for the child the illusion that the object is invested with needs to be left inconspicuous and indeterminate. This indeterminacy becomes apparent when the child grows older and more mature and, instead of the transitional object being mourned or ritualistically discarded, it simply loses its importance and frequently ends up in attics or closets, with their owners unable to properly and ultimately let go.
For Winnicott (2002), transitional objects constitute the foundation of cultural phenomena such as art or religion. They are the precursors of the symbolic and cultural creations in people’s mature lives. As we discuss in Chapter 1, scholars, particularly in the UK, have developed Winnicott’s ideas further and included media products, such as TV series and objects of fandom, like people’s favourite bands, into the field of transitional objects. Winnicott is widely regarded as gentler and less archaic in his outlook on children than Klein. As the French psychoanalyst André Green (2005) has pointed out, Winnicott holds a view of fantasy and play that is positive to a degree that risks downplaying or even ignoring the brutal and sadistic forms that children’s and adults’ play can often take. Nevertheless, Winnicott’s ideas have been extremely influential and, in the context of this book, they are definitely fruitful for analysing the deep attachments people have to media objects, such as social media platforms (see Chapter 2) or videogames (see Chapter 6).
Jacques Lacan: language, subject and desire
Next to Freud, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81) is perhaps the most influential thinker in the field, particularly when it 16comes to the application of psychoanalysis outside the clinic. Notorious for his jargon, word creations, as well as his knack for paradoxical concepts – indeed, he even used mathematical formulas to define unconscious dynamics – Lacan extended and opened psychoanalysis toward notions of the social far beyond Freud. This ‘socializing’ of psychoanalysis makes his ideas extremely useful when it comes to questions of culture and society. At the same time, Lacan has been accused of emptying out psychoanalysis’s core focus on people’s inner lives and intrapsychic functioning by locating psychic life more in people’s social structures than within themselves.
Lacan developed what is perhaps the most sophisticated and logically rounded off universe of psychoanalytic thought; this, however, also tends to seal it off hermetically, and at times Lacanian terms and concepts only seem to work within their own discursive universe. This can feel as though one spends large amounts of time growing the most beautiful flowers in a greenhouse, but once one takes them into the wild, they soon wither in the harsher climate, or are eaten by slugs. Yet, despite his idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, engaging with Lacan’s thought can be immensely gratifying and productive.
Language and subject formation
Being heavily influenced by the linguistic, structuralist and post-structuralist currents of his times, Lacan grants language an overarching and powerful role, both in society and in the lives of individuals (Lacan, 2002). Language and other ways of using symbols are what structures the social and determines a subject’s very identity and place in the world. This is not only because we use language to communicate, or to account for who we (think) we are. Rather, and quite literally, the subject is nothing without language, and even worse: language, instead of giving substance to subjectivity, covers over the nothingness, or void, that Lacan sees as at each subject’s core.
This paradoxical state can be further unpacked through what Lacan calls ‘the Symbolic’ (which we capitalize in the book whenever we refer to Lacan’s term specifically), or ‘the Symbolic Order’. Among other things, the latter encompasses the norms, customs, belief systems and laws of a given society. Here we obtain an example of how Lacan translates Freudian thinking into more social concepts, with the Symbolic creating 17a strong parallel to Freud’s super-ego. Hence, when a child is born, it is born into a Symbolic Order that is already established and, consequently, the child’s paramount task is to make themselves at home within this order – by acquiring the mother (and father) tongue, internalizing the relevant social rules (via one’s parents), adapting one’s expectations to the set cultural ways of doing things, and so on. Lacan introduces an important gender dimension to this existential process of adaptation when he refers to it as ‘sexuation’ (1999 [1972]). With this process being closely related to taking up and associating oneself with particular signifiers, that is, with particular symbolic entities – such as one’s name, whether one is a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, whether one is, say, a ‘big sister’, a ‘little brother’ or an ‘only child’ – one learns to see oneself as naturally embodying a certain gender that is different from another.
Whether we are concerned with gender relations in particular or human relations in general, there is always a gap between human subjects and the symbolic means they have at their disposal to define themselves. In other words, there is always something of the subject that is outside language and something of language that is outside the subject. Language is thus a strange and, at the same time, strangely familiar thing that the subject speaks and writes all the time; but even if we often come really close in words to expressing what and how a person is, we never quite manage to capture this completely.
For Lacan, the subject can never truly or fully say what they mean. Language is both strangely intimate and alienating all at once. It is a closed system that endlessly runs on, with every word referring to another word, and then another, and another – without us being able to ever properly reach outside of the Symbolic and directly into our lives. There is always something that evades symbolization, and this ‘out-side’ of the Symbolic Lacan calls ‘the Real’. This Real, in turn, does not refer to any straightforward sense of reality. Rather, it refers to those aspects that pertain to ‘real life’ but cannot be put into words, such as, for example, raw, unmediated and particularly traumatic experiences, the reality of which we can feel but never fully know.
With the Real pushing onto human experience and shaping Symbolic production, Lacan developed a third term to round off his structural vision of human existence: ‘the Imaginary’. This Imaginary is the register of fantasies, imaginations and identifications that flow into the gap between the Real and the Symbolic. Unable to fully account for how 18we live our lives and who we are, fantasies, ideals, fears, anxieties and imagos (i.e. unconscious role models) fill these gaps and blind spots and patch up the loose ends of our existences. Lacan sees the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary as tightly interwoven; indeed, he visualizes this relation through a Borromean knot in which three rings are intertwined, with all three determining the experience of ‘reality’ for the subject.
Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious
Linked to the centrality of language and the Symbolic in Lacan’s theory is his formula that ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (Lacan, 1966, p. 143). The unconscious, according to him, is like a machine that operates outside the individual human being. This is so because, as mentioned earlier, the unconscious is not something within the subject that can straightforwardly be ‘recovered’. Rather, for Lacan, it amounts to a reality that is radically different from that of the subject’s conscious experience, with this subject always forming an unconscious that is in close relation to its Symbolic universe, but that is always and principally remaining outside of it.
This obverse of consciousness articulates itself in dreams, free associations, parapraxes and other attempts at turning something that is impossible to express into symbolic form nevertheless. All psychoanalysts emphasize that the unconscious shows itself in contradictions, distortions and other failures at making ‘common sense’. Yet, language also remains the only way to give structure and meaning to this unconscious. As Laplanche, a student of Lacan’s, put it: ‘The unconscious is a phenomenon of meaning, but without any communicative finality’ (Laplanche, 1999, p. 102). In that sense, the unconscious communicates a great deal and nothing all at once.
Enjoying what we cannot find: jouissance, objet a and desire
A last key moment in Lacan that we want to present here is his focus on jouissance, which translates from French as ‘enjoyment’, but the term points to an element of anguish and pain as well. A better translation would thus be ‘pleasure-pain’. Contemporary Lacanians – and first and foremost the Lacanian–Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who we will meet at several turns in this book – see society to be structured by an almost sadistic 19command to enjoy. This can be gathered, for example, from the deluge of self-help books filling our shelves, whose mantra is that we must enjoy and be happy at all costs. Arguably, it is this imperative of enjoyment, rather than the tabooed and repressed ideas about sexuality that Freud had posited in his time, which is the greatest source of distress for many people today. We can never be fully happy, with each moment of enjoyment already coming with a sigh of melancholia, and a mixture of sadness or a pang of raging dissatisfaction. Alternatively, we are often prone to enjoy something that is damaging per se or that suggests a mode of enjoyment that can quickly turn self-destructive, as the various diagnostic descriptions of drug, sex, social media or videogame overuse/abuse indicate.
Moreover, since humans are characterized by a fundamental distance between their life experience and their conscious understanding of this experience, a direct and uncomplicated form of enjoyment seems just out of reach. Hence, what Lacan calls objet (petit) a refers to an object-cause of desire that is triggered by the lack or emptiness that people feel each time they get caught up between the Symbolic and their own sense of self. This lack opens up a foundational gap or hole in our existence which animates and perpetuates our search for ‘something’ that is missing from our lives. It causes desire to flow endlessly and hop from object to object, with the subject trying to fill this gap in ever new ways (love, success, religion, hobbies, collections, sports, etc.) that are never enough. As Sean Homer explains:
The objet a is not an object we have lost, because then we would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for passion, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals, there is always something more we desire; we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there. (Homer, 2005, p. 87)
As Mari Ruti (2018) puts it, we are always left ‘wanting to keep wanting’ (p. 14), desiring to fill the void we unconsciously feel. Desire is thus a forward-facing motion, perpetuating movement with productive force. It operates unconsciously and although we ‘learn’ to desire through fantasies, these fantasies are never the same as our objects of desire, but its engine. 20
What are media? Why media and psychoanalysis?
Turning to the field of media studies, one can see how the concept of media meets our psychoanalytic orientation between the individual psychic and the collectively social halfway. Referring to ‘media’ in the plural, we understand the term as the particular ways in which meanings are created and communicated. In this broad understanding, a medium is not merely a ‘channel’ or ‘communication system’ through which independently existing pieces of ‘information’ (or ‘messages’ or ‘content’) are ‘transmitted’ from a ‘sender’ to a ‘receiver’. Much rather, media in this respect refers to the very forms that meaning takes on when it is communicated. The double meaning of ‘sense’ as ‘making sense’ and ‘pertaining to the senses’ is paradigmatic for the intertwining of form and content/meaning with which we endow the term. In this sense, then, although we will mostly write about media in the narrow definition of technological facilitators of communication across space and time (film, TV, print media, radio, digital media and the internet), even basic phenomena, such as the human voice, body language, light or water, can count as media, and it will be helpful to keep this broad understanding in mind. As Steffen (Krüger, 2022b) has written in a psychosocial context (and with a bow to Lacan):
Paradoxically put, a medium in its most basic form is the facilitator of a communication that does not communicate by itself. It is the bringing about of a communion that is at the same time impossible to achieve. The sheer fact that humans need to use symbols – gestures, imagery, speech – to enable mutual understanding points to a chasm and principal distance between alter and ego, no matter how close they are to each other. This principal distance, which is at the root of the concept of ‘communication’ (Peters, 1999, p. 29), turns media into go-betweens, whose function is to bridge this divide, but whose mere existence is a constant reminder of the principle of ‘unbridgability’. (Krüger, 2022b, p. 6)
In a similar vein, the psychoanalytic media researcher Elfriede Löchel (2019) has argued that media can be defined according to both their absence and their ubiquity. Media are everywhere and we take them for granted. Media make something appear and make what appears seem concrete and inevitable; yet they often remain invisible in this process themselves. 21Watching a film on television, for example, we usually do not pay attention to the technological set-up, to how image and sound are transported into our living rooms, how scenes are cut, selected and assembled, or how certain camera angles have been chosen instead of others. As the psychoanalytic trauma theorist Amit Pinchevski has argued: ‘The basic function of media, then, is to make something appear while making themselves disappear in the process. Media dissolve through their operation: they can render immediate what they mediate only inasmuch as in so doing they recede to the background’ (2019, p. 142).
It is only when things go wrong and media fail to communicate smoothly that we become aware of the process of mediation itself – the glitches in digital images, for example, at the point when a wi-fi signal is lost, or the TV programme where audio and video are out of synch, an embarrassing typo in a newspaper article or an inconsistency in the mise-en-scène of a film, such as when an actor wears a digital watch in a historical drama. More often than not, those failures confront us with what is characteristic of media and their specific forms of mediation themselves. In this respect, too, media display an exquisitely human quality, since also humans show their particular workings especially in those moments when their sovereign functioning stalls and their façade breaks down.
Now, this parallel between and close proximity of human beings and media offers us a productive cue for why we feel that the combination of media and psychoanalysis is so useful. To quote from Steffen’s work on media and psychosocial studies once more:
The role of media as go-betweens makes them psychosocial objects par excellence. The question of how the ‘in-here’ and the ‘out-there’, the psychic and the social, the ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, are being woven together, or must be seen as one and the same thing, […] is being decided, rehearsed and demonstrated in the idea of the medium. Already those inner dialogues that humans lead with themselves point to the need of symbolic mediation between something individually psychological and something non-subjectively social. However, and this is the point of psychoanalysis, these inner dialogues also point to the limits of such mediation: they go on ad infinitum, because they work at the borders of the symbolizable and thus bring media into human existence. (Krüger, 2022b, p. 6)
22To put it differently: not only is there no communication without mediation, but, rather, the whole phenomenological field of human psychology and relationality would be inconceivable without an understanding of media and the mediatedness of our life experience. In this respect, the entire field of psychoanalytic theory, too, can be conceived as a set of media with which ideas of human existence can be communicated, and this is how we use it. By the same token, media – in the general sense of means of communication – can be seen as in closest proximity to the psychoanalytic project in that what we can learn with media is how something communicates, or fails to communicate – how something comes to make a difference in our experience, or fails to do so. This holds true as well for media in the narrower sense of communication technologies, and particularly for the case of digital media technologies, which become ever more focused on and customized for the individual person and their everyday lives. This is something that we captured as follows in one of our earlier collaborations:
As regards the in-depth study of this co-constitution, or mutual implication, of the psychic and the social, the media, media technologies and the user’s relationship to these play a key role. In Western societies at the onset of the 21st century, questions regarding socialisation, individualisation and subjectivation can only thoroughly and satisfactorily be answered when we take our relations in, through and with media into consideration. In this respect, what is most striking from a psychoanalytic (but also from other, e.g. posthuman and new materialist) perspective(s), is the movement of information and communication technology ever closer to the human body and into each and every aspect of everyday life. With the steady increase in computing power and a significant rise in wireless transmission rates, with devices becoming smaller, lighter, more mobile and ever more able to merge with the human body, a media sphere has developed that is rapidly becoming a major, integral influence on the ways in which we relate to and interact with others – ways that psychoanalysis holds to be vital for subjective development. (Krüger & Johanssen, 2016, p. 8)
23To us and many other scholars who work in the growing field of psychoanalytic media studies, psychoanalysis is uniquely equipped to address, analyse and critically question the ways in which our new digital environments shape the people within them and, vice versa, how these environments are shaped by people. The dynamic unconscious does not merely emerge from within people, but from in-between people and their surroundings, as phenomena that are distributed between various agencies. The novel applications of psychoanalysis and psychosocial perspectives that we present in this book are particularly useful because they foreground messy and contradictory dynamics, relationships, patterns and structures in a sphere in which individuals interact not merely with themselves and other humans, but with social and cultural institutions of which media are a vital, facilitating part. When Candida Yates (2007) argues, with a focus on gender, that ‘the shaping of gendered subjectivities is always de-centred by the psychic forces of the unconscious’ (p. 6), this process of de-centring can be seen to multiply when taking our media situation into consideration, characterized by a myriad of devices and applications in various distances from and proximities to our bodies competing in the structuring of our conscious thoughts and unconscious desires.
Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on such a complex cultural situation, it becomes clear that our access to psychoanalysis in this book is markedly different from the clinical practice that founded the field. By the same token, however, it would be bad cultural–analytic practice to simply lift psychoanalytic concepts out of the clinical realm and impose them on sociocultural contexts. Rather, as mentioned earlier, what characterizes our work in this book and elsewhere is an application of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts that places them in dialogue with media and communication studies as well as other disciplines. Susannah Radstone explains the difference between psychoanalysis inside and outside the clinic as follows:
Whereas clinical perspectives tend to focus on the difficulties encountered by individuals in adapting to the realms of the social and the cultural, academic psychoanalysis emphasises rather the difficulties posed by culture and the social realm – by which I mean the exclusions, differentiations and inequalities of power produced by, and practised through, language and cultural texts and processes. (Radstone, 2007, p. 244, italics in original)
24In this sense, our perspective is clearly that of ‘academic psychoanalysis’. It is one, however, that includes a view towards clinical psychoanalysis and allows us to critically discuss problematic assumptions clinicians tend to hold – for example, about the pathology of videogames (see Chapter 6) or about questions of race (see Chapter 4). Ultimately, we are not clinically trained, but do not see this as a clear disadvantage for our psychoanalytically oriented academic practice. When Pascal Sauvayre (2022) writes with respect to the cultural–analytic works of German psychoanalyst and critical theorist Alfred Lorenzer that ‘the heart of psychoanalysis can be thought of as lying […] equally in the areas of “cultural analysis” [and] “therapeutic psychoanalysis”’ (p. 151), this covers our understanding of our own work well.
About this book and chapter summaries
This book is a critical introduction to media and psychoanalysis and the field of psychoanalytic media studies. We introduce key scholars and critically situate their work in relation to what we see as key themes pertaining to the media cultures of contemporary societies in many parts of the world. These include: modes of representation and misrepresentation in film and TV (Chapter 1), social media and user behaviour (Chapter 2), work and mental health (Chapter 3), politics and forms of discrimination online (Chapter 4), sexuality and the virtual (Chapter 5), videogames, and artificial and human intelligence (Chapter 6).
The field of psychoanalytic media studies has existed since at least the 1970s, if not earlier – depending on whether one should consider Freud as its originator or not – and it has seen substantial growth in the last 10–15 years. This is one of the reasons for writing this book. However, although our aim is to present a comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction, the result is by no means exhaustive, canonical or complete. We have provided particular foci according to how influential a given scholar is or has been, for example, but always according to our own viewpoints and convictions. Due to space limitations, we have had to make cuts to chapters, sometimes significant ones, or were only able to allude to an idea or briefly cite it. It is for that reason that each chapter ends with a ‘further reading’ list which assembles further important works in a particular area. In this Introduction, we have provided a basic 25outline of major psychoanalytic traditions and ideas. We define key concepts in each chapter, highlighting the most important ones in bold, so that readers can quickly return to this Introduction should they wish to refresh their memory. Each chapter discusses and unfolds different positions and ideas from psychoanalysis, as well as from psychoanalytic and psychosocial media studies, media and communication studies, sociology, critical theory, the humanities and the social sciences more generally. The book’s chapters are designed to be read in chronological order, but also work when read in isolation.
The book is both an introduction to the topics mentioned and the development of a critical argument of what we regard as key issues that we as individuals and societies on the whole face with respect to mental health, our common-sensical understanding of work, discrimination and violence, polarization, sexuality and pleasure, as well as the future of humanity in the presence of intelligent machines. In that sense, we map the field of psychoanalytic media studies and its traditions as well as intervene in it and provide further analyses of it. The book is aimed at any interested reader, but we have a hunch that its main audiences will be students and academics, who may or may not have some familiarity with psychoanalysis, as well as clinicians, who may be familiar with the psychoanalytic terminology but less so with the media-specific issues we present.
Chapter 1, ‘Reality and fantasy from film to TV’, opens the book with a discussion of psychoanalytic film studies, presenting key scholars who laid the foundations of our field and their central works. We chart the historical development of this area from the 1960s particularly in France and the UK and trace its extension into other media, first and foremost television, throughout the 1980s and onwards. Devoting a full chapter to film and television might seem odd in a book about digital media; however, we wish to do so because these newer and older traditions belong together. Despite the breaks and discontinuities that exist in psychoanalytic media studies, many of the foundational texts discussing analogue film are still of key relevance for an adequate understanding of digital media. The works of what has been called ‘Screen Theory’, and especially thinkers such as Laura Mulvey, have foregrounded critical questions of the representation of male and female bodies and how they relate to social inequalities and power imbalances. Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’ (1975) and how cinema has been framing women as objects 26to-be-looked-at by men kickstarted a whole range of studies on how gender relations become constructed in and by media. We will introduce some of the central contributions, with studies on the female voice (Silverman, 1988), the ‘woman’s film’ (Doane, 1987b) and soap operas (Modleski, 1982) at the centre. Subsequently, we show how cultural studies scholars from the 1980s onwards – among them Janice Radway (1991), Valerie Walkerdine (1986), Roger Silverstone (1994), Jacky Stacey (1994) and Ien Ang (1985) – drew on psychoanalytic ideas in their work on television and popular culture more generally. Contrasting with much of the Screen Theory work, these present more optimistic views on the capability of media to hold and care for viewers in a comforting and soothing manner, similar to Winnicott’s (2002) notion of the ‘transitional object’. A host of scholars have continued these lines of thinking from the 2000s onwards and also they are present in the chapter.
Chapter 2
