Media And The Inner World Psycho Cultural Approaches To Emotion Media And Popular Culture

This book applies insights from the spheres of academic scholarship and clinical experience to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalysis for developing nuanced and innovative approaches to media and cultural analysis.

Wilfred Bion’s theories of dreaming, of the analytic situation, of reality and everyday life, and even of the contact between the body and the mind offer very different, and highly fruitful, perspectives on lived experience. Yet very little of his work has entered the field of visual culture, especially film and media studies. Kelli Fuery offers an engaging overview of Bion’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis- his theory of thinking- and demonstrates its relevance for why we watch moving images. Bion’s theory of thinking is presented as an alternative model for the examination of how we experience moving images and how they work as tools which we use to help us ‘think’ emotional experience. ‘Being Embedded’ is a term used to identify and acknowledge the link between thinking and emotional experience within the lived reception of cinema. It is a concept that everyone can speak to as already knowing, already having felt it - being embedded is at the core of lived and thinking experience. This book offers a return to psychoanalytic theory within moving image studies, contributing to the recent works that have explored object relations psychoanalysis within visual culture (specifically the writings of Klein and Winnicott), but differs in its reference and examination of previously overlooked, but highly pivotal, thinkers such as Bion, Bollas and Ogden. A theorization of thinking as an affective structure within moving image experience provides a fresh avenue for psychoanalytic theory within visual culture. Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of film and media studies, cultural studies and cultural sociology and anthropology, visual culture, media theory, philosophy, and psychosocial studies.

This book explores how traumatic experiences of impingement and neglect – in childhood and adulthood, and at both the family and the state level – may create a desire in us to be parented by certain kinds of screen media that we unconsciously believe are “watching over” us when nothing else seems to be. Andrew Asibong explores how viewers make psychical use of eerily moving images, observed in film and television and later taken into an already traumatised mind, in order to facilitate some form of reparation for a stolen experience of caregiving. It explores the possibility of a media-based “working through” of both the general traumas of early environmental failure and the particular traumas of viewers racialised as Black, eventually asking how politicised film groups in the age of Black Lives Matter might heal from a troubled past and prepare for an uncertain future through the spontaneous discussion – in the here and now – of enlivening images of potentially deadly vulnerability. Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television studies, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, culture, race and ethnicity.

Toy Story and the Inner World of the Child offers the first comprehensive analysis of the role of toys and play within the development of film and animation. The author takes the reader on a journey through the complex interweaving of the animation industry with inner world processes, beginning with the early history of film. Karen Cross explores digital meditations through an in-depth analysis of the Pixar Studios and the making of the Toy Story franchise. The book shows how the Toy Story functions as an outlet for exploring fears and anxieties relating to new technologies and industrial processes and the value of taking a psycho-cultural approach to recent controversies surrounding the film industry, particularly its cultural and sexual politics. The book is key reading for film and animation scholars as well as those who are interested in applications of psychoanalysis to popular culture and children's media.

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.

The field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in recent years and this companion brings together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new research directions. Engaging an impressive array of media texts and formats and incorporating a variety of methodologies, this collection is organized into six main sections: methods and ethics, technologies and practices, identities, race and transcultural fandom, industry, and futures. Each section concludes with a conversation among some of the field’s leading scholars and industry insiders to address a wealth of questions relevant to each section topic.

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of human subjectivity in the technological age and how psychoanalysis can help us better understand human life. Presented in five parts, David M. Goodman and Matthew Clemente collaborate with an international community of scholars and practitioners to consider how psychoanalytic formulations can be brought to bear on the impact technology has had on the facets of human subjectivity. Chapters examine how technology is reshaping our understanding of what it means to be a human subject, through embodiment, intimacy, porn, political motivation, mortality, communication, interpersonal exchange, thought, attention, responsibility, vulnerability, and more. Filled with thought-provoking and nuanced chapters, the contributors approach technology from a diverse range of entry points but all engage through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and thought. This book is essential for academics and students of psychoanalysis, philosophy, ethics, media, liberal arts, social work, and bioethics. With the inclusion of timely chapters on the coronavirus pandemic and teletherapy, psychoanalysts in practice and training as well as other mental health practitioners will also find this book an invaluable resource.