Original Article
Introduction to special issue on media and the inner world: New perspectives on psychoanalysis and popular culture Caroline Bainbridgea and Candida Yatesb a
Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5SL, UK.
b
School of Law and Social Sciences (LSS), University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London E16 2RD, UK.
Abstract This editorial provides a context for this special issue of the journal and outlines its origins in the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Media and the Inner World research network. In the article, the network directors discuss the significance of British object relations psychoanalytic ideas for shaping new approaches to popular culture. Arguing that the articles constituting this edition contribute toward the formation of a distinctive ‘psycho-cultural’ approach to the application of psychoanalytic theory, the editors outline the main ideas underpinning each contributed article. Maintaining dialogue between the spheres of clinical practice and academic application is paramount here, highlighting the importance of process and demonstrating the specific value of this particular field of theory. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2012) 17, 113–119. doi:10.1057/pcs.2012.17 Keywords: British object relations; psycho-cultural studies; process; popular culture
It is to the arts and culture that people look for representations of experience, for ways of understanding that have emotional reality for them, and for transcendence of the mundane. Here, in culture, rather than in religion, in Marx’s famous aphorism, is now felt to lie the heart of a heartless world. Michael Rustin, Culture and the Unconscious What does it mean to use psychoanalysis as a means of understanding popular culture? This question permeates the scene of cultural and social analysis in a number of different disciplines. It informs debates about
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subjectivity and its constitution in and through engagement with the world. The psychoanalytic analysis of the relationship among self, society and culture began, of course, with the work of Freud himself, for whom art, literature, archaeology, drama and poetry were key touchstones for the development of his ideas. In the wake of Freud’s own contributions, many cultural commentators have turned to the core ideas of psychoanalysis in an effort to make sense of the riddles of this relationship. In the present moment, the values of such psychoanalytic enquiry seem ever-more necessary as processes of mediatisation and the emotionalisation of culture impact on everyday lives. It is in this context that this special issue takes as its focus the potential value of a psychoanalytic approach to popular culture. To do this, however, it sets out in a new direction, drawing on the British object relations tradition to ask new questions about what is at stake for subjects of a mediatised environment and what insights a post-Freudian approach can bring to the analysis of the processes and mechanisms at play. Traditionally, psychoanalytic approaches to culture and society have mostly drawn on Freudian and Lacanian theoretical ideas, whether these approaches emanate from the humanities or from the social sciences. In the humanities, psychoanalysis has been used to explore film, literature, drama, advertising and so on, and the focus is on the value of the oedipal structure, the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of textuality, or both. For scholars in this domain, psychoanalytic accounts of neurotic formations such as voyeurism, fetishism, narcissism and masochism are used to explicate the meanings inherent in cultural engagement. In the social sciences, the application of psychoanalysis is also often guided by attention to concepts from the full spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and these are used to explore the impact of socio-political structures. For example, much of the work is concerned with political agendas emerging from feminism, Marxism and studies of ‘race’ and ethnicity as well as sexuality. In the main, studies in the social sciences are driven by an attention to questions of ideology, although for many scholars in the humanities, criticism of culture is also politically motivated.1 As Rustin (2007) argues, however, [p]sychoanalysis positioned itself in a space between the arts and sciences as these became more clearly demarcated, and it sought to retain and combine the attributes of both. y Ambiguity and uncertainty were held to be essential attributes of its scene of investigation. yIt is a hybrid mode of study, a science of particulars. (p. 67) For Rustin, then, psychoanalysis is in a ‘position on the borderlands of humanities and sciences’ (p. 67), and it is the unique perspective that such a position can offer that goes some way toward explaining its epistemological significance. Psychoanalysis thus becomes a prime exemplar of interdisciplinarity and its explanatory potential within the fluid and slippery context of 114
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a contemporary culture, where borders are often shifting and uncertain. In work developed for this special section, this observation is crucial as it holds in place a driving ambition of the project from which it emerges: to preserve the tensions and overlaps between the humanities and the social sciences and to enhance these tensions by reference to what can be learnt from the deployment of psychoanalysis in the consulting room. In other words, it is not enough for a psychoanalytic critique of culture and society to maintain the traditional divisions between the application of psychoanalytic theory as an intellectual pursuit and its use in the context of the therapeutic encounter. Instead, it is interesting to ask how these two modes of practice, which centre on the same theoretical terrain, can inform one another constructively. As Susannah Radstone (2007) has suggested, to date ‘psychoanalytic engagements with culture in the two domains of the clinic and the academy have tended y to develop along parallel rather interwoven tracks’ (p. 242). Yet, as Ben Highmore (2007) argues, there is a value in returning to psychoanalysis because [t]he clinical aspects of psychoanalysis provide an approach to culture that, rather than establishing the basis of a ‘cure’, will offer cultural analysis the benefits of a form of listening and speaking, one that allows the articulation of unconscious culture (or epistemologically hidden culture). (p. 94) As Highmore also intimates, such an approach provides us with ‘an inkling of how psychoanalysis might be directed in the study of culture: as a theoretical procedure; or as a processual awareness’ (p. 90). This special issue emerges from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Media and the Inner World’ project,2 which aimed to draw on object relations psychoanalysis as a framework for critical and theoretical thinking about emotion and popular culture. The project set out to create new perspectives on processes of mediatisation and enculturation in contemporary life and paid attention to the fact that these are so frequently grounded in discourses of emotionality and feeling. A key aim of the project was to raise questions about the implications of such developments for the study of media, culture and politics.3 It thus makes a contribution to the emergence of a ‘psycho-cultural’ model of engaging with media and culture that harnesses ideas about the roles of relatedness, on one hand, and both internal and external psychological objects on the other, in the shaping of ideas about culture, selfhood and the politics of identity. The articles included here take up different perspectives on these themes. Drawing on a range of ideas and approaches originating in the British object relations tradition, they grapple with an array of examples drawn from popular culture and include discussion of comedy, cinema, music, politics, television and r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763
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social networking. As they demonstrate, however, no single fixed position is taken as a starting point for a psycho-cultural analysis, and this tack is fitting, given the emphasis in this tradition on matters of process. What is more, any project in its early stages needs to remain open to methodological possibilities and adopt a flexible approach to the space it seeks to create. Such a space ought to be both facilitating and containing and yet ought also to be a potentially troubling space of creative resistance. Thus, the selection of work included here represents different elements of object relations theory and offers work emanating from both clinical experience and the scholarly application of ideas. This approach properly reflects a key facet of the Media and the Inner World project and is in keeping with its aim of prompting dialogue between the different scenes of psychoanalytic investigation in the interest of creating new spaces of contemplation. For Aaron Balick, such spaces need to be conceived of with due regard to the burgeoning virtual sphere and its seductive spaces. Writing from a clinical angle, Balick takes up ideas from relational psychoanalysis to consider the importance of the experience of impingement, and he asks valuable questions about the impact of social networking and internet searching on our experiences of selfhood. He extrapolates from a clinical vignette to offer an account of the consequences of such technological development for the practice of psychotherapy as seen from the points of view of both the clinician and the patient. Gail Lewis’s is a distinctive psychosocial contribution that in many ways taps into the experiential aspects of a psychotherapeutic way of thinking and its capacity to open up new modes of self-reflection. This autobiographical account draws on memories of popular music as a means of articulating the complexity of identity and family relations and sits well with the work of Christopher Bollas and his conceptualisation of the role of objects in the inner world. It also chimes with an important psychosocial tradition of using autobiographical material as a means of evoking the subtle nuances of the unconscious and its interactions both with and through popular culture. Caroline Bainbridge explores the circulation of fantasy on and off the couch by examining the HBO drama In Treatment. She draws on the work of sociologist Roger Silverstone and his application of Winnicott’s ideas to the social and cultural role of television in everyday life. Whereas Silverstone was concerned with television as a phenomenon, Bainbridge argues for the value of a psycho-cultural approach to both televisual texts and the contexts of their production and reception. Linking this approach to processes of mediatisation and their impact on the experience of identity, she makes a case for the role of media as psychological objects of the inner world and suggests that they serve an important function in helping to allay the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary culture. The relationship between visual culture and the inner world is also addressed by Michael and Margaret Rustin in their exposition of the animated films of 116
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Miyazaki. Suggesting that the magical evocation of childhood contained in such films is an insightful illustration of infantile development, the Rustins draw on the Kleinian spectrum of ideas to highlight the potency of such imagery. Their article provides a hugely useful overview of a large body of work by a single director and thus is an invaluable resource for reflection on the role of the artist in helping to shape and reshape popular ideas about childhood development and experience. The place of development and experience in Kleinian thought is also taken up by Iain MacRury in his discussion of stand-up comedy. Central to his argument are Klein’s concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and also Ogden’s observation on the role of oscillation between these positions in everyday experience. MacRury argues that stand-up comedians, acting out the ambivalence of subjectivity on behalf of the audience, put this oscillation to work in the performative spaces they occupy. The commentary offered here on the significant manipulations of space and experience is especially interesting given its basis in a special comedy performance/interview event organised by the Media and Inner World network. The theme of ambivalence also surfaces in Candida Yates’s discussion of the role of fatherhood in mediatised political culture. In the face of widespread claims that we are living in a post-political age, Yates turns to the work of Winnicott to explore how the trope of fatherhood is deployed in contemporary UK politics, where ideals of hegemonic masculinity are in disarray. Arguing that the celebritised arena of political culture allows politicians to be seen as symptomatic, Yates explores the emotionalisation of the spaces associated with it and interrogates what is at stake in the unconscious mechanisms of culture. Finally, this issue includes Heather Nunn’s review of Sara Wasson’s (2010) book, Urban Gothic of the Second World War, which has been awarded the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for the best book on gothic in 2009/10. This study of the psychic topographies of period literature and art explores ‘narratives of nation’ and ‘mythologies of unity’ with a view to problematising the usefulness of mourning as a collective response to loss and pain, as Nunn makes clear. Together with this review, the articles selected for inclusion in this issue go some way toward marking out a psycho-cultural terrain of enquiry and make an innovative contribution to the development of new perspectives on the usefulness of a psychoanalytic approach to popular culture. As such, they constitute a substantial representation of the dialogical project underlying the Media and the Inner World research network.
About the Authors Dr Caroline Bainbridge is a Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton in London. She is a Director of the Arts and Humanities Research r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763
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Council research network, Media and the Inner World (www.miwnet.org), which focuses on the development of a psycho-cultural approach to media, popular culture and emotion, drawing on object relations psychoanalysis. She is Editor of the journal Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics (www.freeassociations.org.uk) and author of The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and artifice (Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2007) and A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, women and film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She is also an editor of Culture and the Unconscious (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and a series editor of the ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ book list published by Karnac Books. Caroline has written widely on aspects of psychoanalysis and its applications to popular culture and sits on the organising committee of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival. Dr Candida Yates is a Reader in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London and is a Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council research network, Media and the Inner World (www.miwnet.org). She is Co-editor of the journal Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics (www.freeassociations.org.uk); an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society; and an editor of the international Karnac Book Series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture. She also sits on the organising committee of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival hosted by the Institute of Psychoanalysis at BAFTA. She has published widely on the themes of masculinity, emotion, politics and popular culture. Her publications include Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema, (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), Culture and The Unconscious, (Co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Emotion: Psychosocial Perspectives, (Co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Notes 1 For detailed discussion of these different positions, see Rustin (2007) and Yates (2011). 2 For further information about the project, please see www.miwnet.org (2009), Bainbridge and Yates (2011) and Yates (2011). 3 For further psychoanalytically disposed discussion of the idea of ‘therapy culture’, see Richards (2007) and Yates (2011).
References Bainbridge, C. and Yates, C. (2011) Editorial: Therapy culture/culture as therapy: Psychocultural studies of media and the inner world. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics 62: i–v. Highmore, B. (2007) Michel de Certeau and the possibilities of psychoanalytic cultural studies. In: C. Bainbridge, S. Radstone, M. Rustin and C. Yates (eds.) Culture and the Unconscious. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 88–101. 118
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Introduction to special issue on media and the inner world Media and the Inner World. (2009) http://www.miwnet.org, accessed 1 December 2011. Radstone, S. (2007) Clinical and academic psychoanalytic criticism: Differences that matter. In: C. Bainbridge, S. Radstone, M. Rustin and C. Yates (eds.) Culture and the Unconscious. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 242–254. Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rustin, M. (2007) Introduction. In: C. Bainbridge, S. Radstone, M. Rustin and C. Yates (eds.) Culture and the Unconscious. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–4. Yates, C. (2011) Charismatic therapy culture and the seductions of emotional well-being. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics 62: 59–84.
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