From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 31
Journal Title: Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011 ISSN: 2047-0622 URL: www.freeassociations.org.uk
FROM ‘THE FREUD SQUAD’ TO ‘THE GOOD FREUD GUIDE’: A GENEALOGY OF MEDIA IMAGES OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS ON THEIR ROLE IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION
CAROLINE BAINBRIDGE
Abstract: Since Jeffrey Masson published The Assault on Truth (1984) some twenty-seven years ago, popular media representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have taken on a number of guises. These encompass a full spectrum of perspectives on the values and pitfalls of psychoanalysis as both a mode of therapeutic intervention and a tool for the scrutiny of the self. Such representations include both those premised on profound suspicion (seen, for example, in print media coverage of ‘false or repressed memory’ debates) and others grounded in a mode of reification (for example, the idealised images of therapy seen in TV dramas such as The Sopranos [HBO, 1999-2007]). This article considers the shifting cultural contexts surrounding the emergence of such representations of psychotherapy in order to offer a genealogy of its popular media images. It draws on the work of D.W. Winnicott to explore what such a genealogy suggests about the role of psychoanalysis in shaping the emergence of a culture of feeling in this period. It considers debates about notions of ‘therapy culture’ and discusses the overarching preoccupation with matters of emotion that appears to dominate media images on the contemporary Western cultural scene. How are such cultural developments linked to the rise of ‘mediatisation’ and its impact on notions of selfhood and subjectivity? Arguing that the media have now come to function as objects of our internal worlds, this article explores what can be learnt from object relations psychoanalysis in attempting to grapple with such shifts in experience, and it deploys a psycho-cultural approach to the ideas that emerge when such questions are posed.
Since the publication of Jeffrey Masson’s book, The Assault on Truth (1984), some 27 years ago, and following on from that, Frederick Crews’ The Memory Wars (1995), popular media representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have taken on a number of guises. In part, the shifting fortunes of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the media eye can be understood as pertaining to the dominant cultural disposition. During the period that has elapsed since the ‘Freud Wars’ that ensued on the back of the Masson/Crews debates, the notion that we now reside in a ‘therapy culture’ has come to the fore, marking out the past
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 32 two decades as particularly interesting in terms of understanding what has been at stake in shaping our notions of therapeutic culture and their relationship to popular media perceptions of psychoanalysis as an intellectual force (Furedi, 2004; Giddens, 1992; Lunt and Stenner, 2005; Richards and Brown, 2002).1 This article sets out to chart the ways in which such media representations have shifted in shape during the last two decades. It contextualises this in relation to the now widely accepted commonplace that ours is indeed a culture where notions of emotional correctness and well-being dominate the media landscape of identity. How are media images of psychoanalysis related to the cultural reception of its theoretical ideas and cultural currency? To what extent can it be argued that psychoanalysis has become a central object of struggle in the formation of newly emergent subjectivities that are grounded in emotional concerns and endeavours? The broad-based acceptance that we live in a mediatised age has impacted on ideas about identity so that it is now assumed that these are intimately bound up with our encounters with mediated forms of experience. Given the widespread emotional inflection that dominates many media platforms in contemporary popular culture, the aim of this article is to make sense of the changing media attitudes to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy during the period in which ‘therapy culture’ has become entrenched in the mediatisation of everyday life. In order to explore the questions this poses, I will offer a case study of representations of British psychoanalytic positions in the UK national press and also make references to its representations in TV drama.2 To this end, the article draws on some 400 newspaper articles published between 1989 and 2009.3 In setting out this case study, my focus is on tracing the discourses around ideas related to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the press and on making use of psychoanalytic insights to explore the relationship between the media and the inner world. In particular, the case study will be used to show how press images impact upon media consumers, demonstrating the ever closer imbrication of mediatisation and everyday life and raising a number of important issues about the potential of psychoanalytic theory to illuminate what is at stake in such processes for notions of the self in contemporary popular culture. This article, together with the others in this special issue, emerges from the Media and the Inner World project4, which draws on object relations psychoanalysis as a framework for critical and theoretical thinking about emotion and popular culture. The project sets out to create new perspectives on processes of mediatisation and enculturation in contemporary life and pays attention to the fact that these are so frequently grounded in discourses of
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 33 emotionality and feeling. A key aim of the project is to raise questions about the implications of such developments for the study of media, culture and politics.5 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 the 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. In this respect, it draws upon the work of scholars such as Barry Richards and Roger Silverstone who have each argued for the importance of a psychoanalytic approach to the study of media, culture and politics (Richards 2004, 2007; Silverstone 1994, 1999).6 Richards suggests that
Psychoanalysis is a highly developed form of reflexivity, requiring as it does of both analyst and analysand a relentless self-scrutiny. … This takes us to a crucial point about psychoanalysis as a body of ideas and as a force in understanding society and its future. Its insistence on constantly interrogating the meanings we give to experiences, and on revealing the hiding places for unconscious motivation in rationalised explanations, means that one of its roles in social and cultural analysis is a deeply sceptical one. (2004: 152)
Arguing for the importance of enabling a cultural turn toward the psychoanalytic analysis of popular culture and the mass-mediated public sphere, Richards further suggests that ‘what matters here in determining the outcome are things like media content and media consumption’ (2004: 154). In his own work, Richards turns to the theories of Melanie Klein, demonstrating how psychoanalytic ideas such as those of containment, projection and introjection can provide new strategies for media analysts to grapple with the complexity of emotional experience in contemporary culture. For Richards, then, Kleinian object relations theory provides a means of understanding the interpersonal passions that circulate via media platforms and through mediated politics. It also offers a means of comprehending the relationship of such social and cultural phenomena to forces of unreasonable power and their influence on everyday lives and emotions. The usefulness of a Kleinian perspective on culture stems from its ability to highlight the slipperiness or messiness of emotional investments which seek to present themselves as grounded in reason and yet which are clearly inflected and underpinned by unconscious phantasies such as those associated with
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 34 aggression, paranoia and annihilation. Richards’ work on the cultural politics of the mediatisation of terror provides rich pickings in this regard (Richards 2007). A key facet of Richards’ argument here is that a clinically-rooted form of psychoanalytic engagement with culture and society allows for the useful preservation of a sense of complexity in terms of cultural politics and any subsequent fashioning of policy development that may arise. The significance of being able to hold onto (unconscious) negativity in the shaping of innovative interventions becomes crucial in Richards’ arguments and this has interesting consequences for the analysis of the press coverage I undertake in the case study below. How is such a capacity to tolerate negativity represented in the shifting images of psychoanalysis that emerge from this case study and what does this suggest about the role of the media as objects of our inner worlds? In a similar vein, the work of D. W. Winnicott also becomes important – his notions of the ‘true’ and ‘false selves’, potential space and the shaping of creativity through the processes involved in relationality offer similarly constructive perspectives on what is at stake in the processes of mediatisation for both media producers and consumers. As Roger Silverstone has suggested, ‘the constant media mastication of everyday culture’ (1999: 1) reflects the role of the media in relation to the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of our lives, but it also highlights the need for media scholars to engage with notions of experience (1999: 5), something that was central to Winnicott’s engagement with psychoanalytic ideas (Abram, 2007: 5). Arguing that our capacity for reflexivity is crucial to any attempt to contextualise the roles of the media in shaping human experience, Silverstone suggests that
If we are to study the media, then we have to confront the role of the unconscious in the constitution as well as the challenging of experience, and, likewise, if we are to answer the questions, why study the media, then part of our answer must be because it offers a route, if not a royal route, into hidden territories of mind and meaning. (1999: 11)
For Silverstone, the work of Winnicott is of crucial importance here, and much of his work draws on Winnicottian ideas of play, transitional objects and spaces and notions of experience to foreground the significance of the unconscious in shaping our relationship to a mediatised world. Such a view is also expounded by Richards and Brown who argue in this
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 35 volume that the dominance of a ‘therapeutic imagination’ in contemporary culture indicates that ‘the social scripts, lenses and vocabularies through which people understand themselves and their lives are strongly inflected by the interior-oriented language of the therapeutic (with talk about feelings, attachments, self-esteem, anxiety, stress, well-being, security, trauma, loss, mourning, and so on)’ (Richards and Brown, 2011: 19). These perspectives touch on the very heart of the Media and the Inner World project, demonstrating the extent to which the therapeutic turn in culture coincides with the ever more entrenched relationship of everyday life to processes of mediatisation and emotional experience, as the articles in this special edition demonstrate. A central tenet of the project is to build on these debates to suggest that the media are now so closely imbricated with the everyday experience of identity and subjectivity that they have come to function as key objects in both our external and inner worlds.7 As Silverstone has argued in relation to television in particular, media are now ‘part of the grain of everyday life’ (1994: 22). In order to understand the significance of this observation and its implications for notions of ontology in a mediatised environment, Silverstone also argues that, to understand the place of television and ‘its embeddedness in quotidian patterns and habits as a contributor to our security’ (1994: 19), we need to acknowledge that TV is not simply a medium that ‘extends our reach and security in a world of information’; it also serves as a psychological object, one that provides ‘the focus of our daily rituals and the frame for limited transcendence – the suspension of disbelief – which marks our excursions from the profane routines of the daily grind into the sacred routines of schedules and programmes’ (ibid.). On the contemporary scene, of course, such observations apply very readily to a broad range of media platforms, as detailed in the expansion of interest in the notion of ‘mediatisation’ in the field of media and cultural studies (Livingstone, 2009). As Livingstone suggests, ‘today’s media become meaningful because of coordinated human activity and, at the same time, people understand the world and their position in it through the media’ (2009: 5). In this way, media provide the contemporary subject with channels for both the uptake and output of emotional experience, and thus, one can argue, come to serve an important function in relation to both psychological and lived experiential relations. In other words, the media come to function as key objects in the management of ideas about selfhood and interpersonal relationships, enabling a creative engagement with the world around us. This is crucial to any discussion of the uses we make of media objects as a means of working out the complexity of our lived relationship to the social, cultural, political and economic pressures we experience in contemporary culture. In
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 36 addition, media objects often enable new modes of relationality in contemporary culture where notions of community in its traditional definition are often assumed to have fallen into disarray. Many facets of media consumption enable a new sense of relatedness to emerge as is, perhaps, most apparent in relation to ‘new’ media such as ‘smart’ mobile telephones, social networks and so on (Elliott and Urry, 2010). The role of media objects as aspects of psychical experience that play a role in regulating our emotional lives needs further explication. In the British object relations tradition, the notion of the object refers not to any inanimate object, but rather to our profound need for a sense of relatedness and how the mind works to internalise the objects of our emotional experiences so that this relatedness can be sustained even when we are separated from others in the external world. The presence of such objects in our inner worlds is central to our capacity to work through emotion as a process and to negotiate the often treacherous terrain of subjectivity and identity. For Winnicott, the psychical relation to the object is central to the human capacity for play and creativity. However, he also underscores the important difference between the use of psychological objects and the notion of object relating. He suggests that, in object-relating, ‘the subject allows certain alterations in the self to take place … The object has become meaningful’ (1969: 712). In this context, the object serves as a means of enriching the self by providing aspects of it that appear (in the self) to be depleted because of the use of psychological mechanisms such as projection and identification. In accounting for object-usage, however, Winnicott argues that it is necessary to take account of ‘the nature and the behaviour of the object’ as well as that of the subject (ibid.). In addition, in order to be able ‘to use an object the subject must have developed a capacity to use objects’ (1969: 713) and this cannot be taken for granted as it depends on the maturational processes. In object-usage, the object is placed ‘outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control’ (ibid.) and is thus recognised as an external phenomenon, an entity in its own right. This is crucial in understanding the use of objects because, Winnicott suggests, this status as an entity external to the subject allows the object to be destroyed by the subject and yet paradoxically to survive its destruction. The subject’s capacity to use the object follows on from this interlinked destruction/survival. As Winnicott states, ‘because of the survival of the object, the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject stands to gain immeasurably’ (ibid.). Because the object is capable of always being destroyed, it is felt by the subject to be more real (1969: 715). This is of particular significance in Winnicott’s clinical account of patients who might be described as
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‘borderline’ – those for whom the central psychological disturbance is ‘psychotic’ in character but who nevertheless exhibit enough capacity for neurotic organisation to cover over the psychotic anxiety in everyday life (1969: 712). What is the implication of this distinction between relating to objects and using them for any attempt to conceptualise the psychological dimensions of mediatisation in relation to contemporary forms of identity? How does such a distinction enable us to demonstrate the significance of reading media as objects of the inner world? In order to grapple with these questions, it is interesting to engage in case study research to explore the issues that arise with reference to clear-cut empirical examples. In this regard, the case study that follows is intended as a means of making links between the ideas discussed above and the shifting representations of ‘therapy’ that have circulated in the cultural imagination during the past two decades or so. The examples it comprises act as key signifiers of the therapeutic turn that is widely accepted as having taken place during this period and, thus, the case study functions as a barometer of cultural conditions. By analysing media representations of ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘therapy’, my case study sets out to chart the cultural significance of these ideas as therapy culture emerges and becomes entrenched in popular culture.8 During this time, psychoanalysis firstly falls out of fashion, becoming a target for overt disparagement and criticism. Subsequently, however, it is rehabilitated as attention to emotional experience becomes more and more fashionable, coinciding with the emergent fascination with celebrity culture and the trend for mediated public confessionals. This shift, I will argue, can be read as symptomatic not only of the increasingly emotionalised public sphere but also of the growing importance of mediatisation in shaping ideas about the ‘self’ in a cultural climate where the disintegration and fragmentation of social structures such as the family and community are increasingly manifest. What does such a study reveal to us about the popular images of ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘therapy’? How can the study of such images illuminate the central role of the psychological object in shaping our experiences of mediatisation and its implications for contemporary notions of subjectivity?
Media Images of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Towards a Genealogy This article is concerned with the popular demise of the reputation of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the cultural imagination following on from the so-called ‘Freud Wars’ that took place during the 1980s (Forrester, 1997). Prior to this, one can argue that psychoanalysis
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 38 enjoyed a similar position to other ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism in relation to popular culture, knowledge, politics and social significance. Indeed, psychoanalysis enjoyed a central role in the development of a number of academic disciplines, featuring strongly in work done in the field of literary theory, feminism, film studies, social theory, history and philosophy. As John Forrester has noted, citing the work of Jacques Derrida, ‘we think of the twentieth century as having been, without knowing it … entirely under the hypnotic sway of Freud’ (Forrester, 1997: 227). The extent of influence of psychoanalysis in both the academy and popular culture is striking here, for whilst the debates that were taking place within the intellectual sphere can be seen as rather rarefied, the popular reception and coverage of the contributions of Jeffrey Masson, in particular, in the press acts to provide a bridge between these different arenas. In this way, the concerns being voiced in the intellectual domain can be seen to have reverberated in the popular press. For the purposes of this article, it is worth noting that the 1980s saw the beginning of a distinctive shift in the cultural position of psychoanalysis with the publication of works by Masson and Crews in particular, where the focus was on dismantling the sub-structures of psychoanalytic thought in order to undermine its influence and question its authority.9 In this period, both Freud and psychoanalysis became objects of both scrutiny and scepticism. How did this turn affect the cultural perception of psychoanalysis in the UK and what does this suggest about the role of psychoanalysis as an object of the cultural imagination?
Fraudulent Freud In the immediate aftermath of the scathing critiques of Freud and his theoretical inventions made by Masson and Crews, the UK national press turned against psychoanalysis in increasingly vehement terms. In the late 1980s, Masson’s work prompted newspaper coverage of the need for scepticism with regard to Freud’s writings and method but there was nevertheless an on-going perception that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy were enjoying levels of popularity hitherto unseen in a UK middle class setting, and, up until 1993, the UK broadsheets still gave regular column inches to psychoanalysts and therapists so that the widespread notion that psychoanalysis was ‘terribly fashionable’ gained credence. As Joanna Lyall commented in The Times, ‘The shrinks may be at war with one another, but psychotherapy has never been more fashionable’ (Lyall, 1992: 31).10 This perspective was bolstered by news coverage of the popularity of new forms of family therapy in the US (Muir, 1992) and its effectiveness in helping to re-negotiate ‘family values’ in an age where
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 39 the spectres of AIDS, sexual promiscuity and drug addiction were still looming large on the horizon and John Major’s government was turning to its ‘back to basics’ campaign. The contradictions at play here between the apparent turn to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a means of coping with such cultural change and its demise in terms of its status as an epistemologically valid form of knowledge demonstrate a clear capacity for splitting. One can argue that this is linked to the ever faster pace of cultural change in this period which witnessed the fracturing of familiar social and cultural structures such as the nuclear family as well as the rapid development of technologies in everyday life. The effects of these social developments on notions of the ‘self’ were reflected in the shifting epistemological, cultural and political morays of the time. In the sphere of knowledge, theories of post-modernism were in the ascendant, whilst in culture and politics, the idea of ‘getting back to basics’ reflected a particularly conservative drive toward old-fashioned values and social structures at the very moment in which these were disintegrating.11 Here, we can draw on the psychoanalytic notion of negativity explicated in the work of Jacqueline Rose (1993) to suggest that the press coverage of psychoanalysis during this time acted as an outlet for the negativity and distrust that characterised the cultural moment. This goes some way toward helping us to understand the specifically schizoid tendency involved here. The demonisation of psychoanalysis that tended to dominate is a defensive manoeuvre that allows us to hold onto the ‘bad’ object and to project our worst assumptions about culture and society into it. As Rose notes, ‘Distrust of the object is better than despair’ (1993: 137). It was in this context that Thames Television and Euston Films produced the TV drama, Shrinks (Tx. ITV, 1991). Described by Patrick Stoddart in The Sunday Times as ‘Harley Street Blues’, this show dealt with ‘a psychiatric practice where people who can’t cope with what the Eighties dealt them pay £60 an hour to tell somebody’ (Stoddart, 1991). The patients were criticised as overarchingly stereotypical, consisting as they did of a wife- beater, an abandoned mother and a couple set on rekindling their desire by dressing up as ice skaters. Shrinks was roundly criticised by therapy professionals for its trivialisation of its patients’ problems and for creating unrealistic expectations around the timescale involved in facilitating a cure of any kind. In response to this, the Independent Television Commission carried out a survey of viewers and established that while only 38% of those questioned were of the opinion that real psychiatrists resembled the ones depicted in the TV drama, more than half of respondents felt that the drama was important because it helped to enhance public understanding of the nature of mental health problems (Persaud, 1999: 1360). What is
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 40 interesting here is how the popular media provide a space in which long-standing cultural taboos around mental health problems could begin to be explored. This shift was not confined to the content of the drama format, however. The centrality of concerns about mental health and well-being also found an outlet in other media formats, particularly in those emerging in the new context of daytime television programming, where the influence of magazine cultures helped to ensure that TV media paid due attention to concerns about identity and selfhood. The rise of daytime television during this period moved the agony aunt off the page and onto the studio couch and relied on the talk show format with its heightened attention to emotional expression and experience. Much has been made of this harnessing of emotionality to the public sphere elsewhere, and this article will not explore this further other than to signal its role in the generalised psychological turn that is widely held to underpin the emergence of ‘therapy culture’ (Furedi, 2004; Giddens, 1992; Lunt and Stenner, 2005; Richards and Brown, 2002).12 By 1993, however, in the midst of the first UK parliamentary sleaze allegations, this preponderance of therapists on screen began to feed into debates about bogus practitioners and fears about the lack of regulation in the sphere of alternative health care. For example, there were many articles with titles such as ‘Can talking help?’ (Wessely, 1994) and ‘Who will mind the healers?’ (Laurance, 1993). While therapists such as Susie Orbach continued to publish regular columns and a number of UK Universities established Centres of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Studies, journalists increasingly turned their attention toward stories of malpractice. Such stories would often make the claim that, where court cases were being carried out, it was not just the hapless practitioners who were under scrutiny. Rather Freud himself was seen to be on trial – psychoanalysis was increasingly prone to sensationalist outcry and this was shored up by the publication of Memory Wars in 1995. By this time, journalists such as Suzanne Moore in The Guardian were decrying the cultural imperative to talk openly about one’s problems, largely because Freud was seen to have ‘made it all up as he went along’ (Moore, 1994). The key debate in the press at this time was whether or not psychoanalysis could ever be seen as properly scientific and its intellectual credentials were shot down in flames when the overwhelming verdict appeared to be that it could not.13 False or Repressed Memory Syndrome was seemingly irrecuperably linked to psychoanalysis and therapy of all forms – at least were Freud could be discerned – the press frequently caricatured him as ‘Sigmund Fraud’ (Phillips, 1995).14 At one level, this debate persisted into the latter years of the period under scrutiny in this case study as debates
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 41 about the trustworthiness of psychoanalysis continued to surface in debates about the proper regulation of ‘alternative’ medicine and therapies. Here, questions about the relative advantages and disadvantages of talking therapies were interrogated in relation to the rise of short-term, ‘quick-fix’ alternatives such as CBT (Billen, 2008; Gillan, 2004; Miles, 2004; Narayan, 2002; Yates, 2011). What is clear here is the extent to which the representation of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the press has mirrored developments in the critical and theoretical work on ideas of selfhood and how this close imbrication of ideas contributes to the mediatisation of identity by forging ever closer links between lived cultural experience and mediated commentary on emotional and psychological experience and expectations. For example, the on-going regimes of scepticism about ideas of truth, selfhood and subjectivity formed the basis for many shifts in social theory premised on the emergence of post- modernism (see, for example, Giddens, 1991; Jameson, 1991; Lyotard, 1984) and this undoubtedly had an effect on popular culture and its manifestations of the cultural zeitgeist.15 Once again, these epistemological developments influenced the press representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. During the early/mid-1990s, commentators such as Nigella Lawson, frequently came to the rescue of psychoanalysis with claims that it was being targeted by an intellectual elite bent on dismantling the grand narratives of high theory (Lawson, 1995). Reviewing Richard Webster’s book, Why Freud Was Wrong, she writes,
Popular anti-Freudianism resides in a strange perturbation of what is essentially a far from Freudian belief. Blaming Freud for his buck-passing, self-exonerating superliberalism is a strange misreading. No authentic Freudian would claim that we were helpless victims of our pasts. Rather Freud teaches one to recognise the past for what it is, so that one may understand, and therefore if necessary modify, one’s actions in the present. Freudian psychoanalysis is not about casting blame, it is about taking responsibility. (Lawson, 1995)
Emphasising the Relational This period, of course, also saw a sharp increase in media coverage of celebrity dysfunctionality - the eventual collapse of the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer further fed the new regime of emotion that had come to dominate the mediated environment. Barry Richards (2007) and others have explicitly made links to Diana as a key figure around
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 42 whom therapy culture can be read, with Martin Bashir’s interview of her in 1995 and her death in 1997 providing key cultural moments of crystallisation. It is also worth noting that Dylan Evans, who was at the time a practising Lacanian psychoanalyst16 (www.dylan.org.uk/biography.html), made a TV programme for Channel 4 called Psychoanalysing Diana, in which he took excerpts of Diana’s broadcast conversation with Bashir and used a Diana ‘lookalike’ to stage a dramatised version of an encounter with a psychoanalyst. While this programme was released to the press for review, a copy was never made available to Diana’s palace and Channel 4 controller, Michael Grade, pulled it from the schedules the day before it went to broadcast because it was deemed not to have worked (Evans, 1996; Dutter, 1996; Jeffries, 1996). This, of course, provided the press with easy ammunition against psychoanalysis broadly defined and against Evans in particular and most papers carried incredulous comments on the whole affair. The extent of influence of revelations about Diana’s relation to therapy is rather paradoxical in some regards. On the one hand, it can be argued that they highlighted the failures of therapeutic engagement for members of the public interested in her mediatised persona. The complexities of Diana’s life involving extra-marital affairs, divorce and eating disorders were well documented by press coverage of her and, seemingly, her therapy did not lead to the abatement of her complex emotionalised state of being. On the other hand, however, one could argue that Diana’s engagement with psychotherapy (which was also widely documented in the press) contributed to the apparent democratisation of therapy as a practical solution to the increasingly complex lives of many of her fans and acolytes. In this interpretation, the ‘people’s princess’ can be seen to have helped to bring therapy to light within the domain of popular culture, albeit at a moment when therapy was also under rather negative scrutiny. In the press around this time, however, it is worth noting that it is only Freudian psychoanalysis that comes under fire. In 1996, psychoanalysts of other persuasions began to assert some of the crucial distinctions between different schools of practice. Margot Waddell wrote in The Times calling psychoanalysis ‘a living field’ in which contemporary practice was largely informed by the work of analysts such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud (Waddell, 1996). In The Guardian, Sally Weintrobe (1996) wrote an explication of the different schools of analysis and therapy, giving details of recognised training bodies and drawing attention to the notion of the inner world that is central to the British object relations tradition. Indeed, The Guardian gave space in 1996 to six serious feature-length articles written by psychoanalysts which are now collected on the website of the British Psycho-
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Analytical Society (www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/guardian2.htm). A number of other analysts and literary critics made use of the review columns to re-work the scandalised perception of psychoanalysis, with many of these similarly drawing attention to the eclectic roots of the contemporary scene of practice, as in the examples referenced above (Phillips, 1995; Waddell, 1996; Weintrobe, 1996). Freud had seemingly been abandoned and the so-called ‘Freud squad’ (made up of analysts writing in the press) (Clare 1997) appeared more interested in establishing the value of contemporary practice as stemming from the later developments of his work. As Weintrobe argues,
I think the biggest change that has taken place within psychoanalysis is one that was largely pioneered by British psychoanalysts. In earlier days the psychoanalyst tended to see her own inner responses to the patient primarily as a source of bias. She now recognises her inner responses as an important source of data, potentially very helpful to her in her attempts to understand the patient’s underlying thoughts and feelings. … I think this shift in perspective has influenced the way psychoanalysts write about their work. … There is less abstract theory and more description of a relationship. This is reassuring because the reader is in a better position to have a view of how the psychoanalyst thinks about the patient, is more able to agree, disagree and to consult his or her own intuitive knowledge of people and common sense about what the psychoanalyst is saying. (Weintrobe, 1996: 7)
For Waddell, such changes were anchored in the British turn toward a distinctly Kleinian position which led to ‘what amounted to a fundamental reframing of psychoanalytic thought’ in which ‘many of what to this day remain die-hard psychoanalytic shibboleths - most notoriously the male oriented concepts of penis envy and castration anxiety - lost their centrality’ so that ‘analysts have become not so much detached experts as involved participants, reflecting on their own conscious and unconscious responses which then constitute less an interference (as Freud believed) than an indispensable part of the working method’ (Waddell, 1996: T6). For the analysts seeking to engage with public attitudes, it was important at this stage to promote the distinctions between the different schools of psychoanalytic theory in the interest of countering the prevailing impression of the analyst as charlatan or rogue. It is worth noting the emphasis on relationality that emerges from these arguments, foregrounding the object relations school of psychoanalytic thinking as a modern
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 44 and contemporary version of psychoanalytic exploration that somehow avoids the pitfalls associated with the Freudian approach. To an extent, such interventions seem to have been effective and it is important to note that these debates and discussions pre-dated 1997, a year in which the cultural and political contexts of the UK shifted significantly. This year saw a change of government following eighteen years of Conservative party dominance and also the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – an event which gave rise to an unprecedented outpouring of public emotion – and one which is frequently harnessed to the emergence of a new, feeling-centred phase in the cultural life of the UK, namely ‘therapy culture’ (Richards, 2007).
Mediatising Emotion: The Rise of Therapy Culture By 1997, then, cultural and political changes can be seen as underlying the apparent rehabilitation of psychotherapy in its mediated forms and the press coverage of this period indicates that this was then in its nascent stages. Culturally, this coincides with the rapid emergence and entrenchment of cultures of consumption within UK society (see Featherstone, 1991; Lury, 1996). In this context, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy became literal objects of consumption as the idea that happiness was something that might be bought began to take root. It is also worth noting here that the advent of cultures of consumption led to a renewed interest in psychoanalytic theory and its usefulness in explaining the mechanisms and structures at work in such contexts (Bennett, 2005; Bowlby, 1993). In the context of consumption, broadsheets also increasingly gave extended review space to plays, art and cinema where psychoanalysis featured either as a theme or a key element informing their cultural significance. The tenth anniversary of the Freud Museum provided grounds to re-present Freud, not as a mistaken pseudo-scientific fraud, but as the father of a theory rich in its cultural origins and overtones. The turn of the millennium, with its myriad retrospectives of the 20th century also gave rise to new opportunities for re-visioning the material. The rise of prescription medication for the treatment of depression often sets the backdrop for an on-going dismissal of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a qualitative tool of mental health intervention, but in the contexts of management culture, sport, and the arts broadly defined, the relevance of psychotherapeutic practices is increasingly emphasised, as the following examples illustrate. From 1999 onwards, psychoanalysis is frequently mentioned in the business sections of broadsheet newspapers as a tool for improving
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 45 management skills and techniques (Times, 2006). Rather surprisingly, it is also mentioned in many sports reports on cricket and football where sporting conflicts on and off the field are described as not exactly requiring a psychoanalyst to be understood in terms of emotional tension (Brearley, 1995; Dunn, 2001). A new tendency emerges in these contexts however, and psychoanalysis becomes shorthand for any mode of psychological or psychiatric endeavour, such that German postmen are reported to be receiving training in how to ‘psychoanalyse dogs’ when actually it was a group of animal psychologists who were working with the postal companies concerned, showing the way in which any kind of behavioural psychological intervention can become confused with the general notion of ‘therapy’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ (Leidig, 2001). This conflation of scientific approaches to the mind becomes ever more widespread after 2000, and it is notable that serious features on psychoanalysis that were visible in the 1990s almost disappear in their entirety at this point. The rise of celebrity culture, however, contributed to keeping psychotherapy in the popular print media eye, with features on Faye Dunaway, Jerry Hall and numerous references to John Cleese being especially notable (Farmer, 2008; Middlehurst, 1995; Narayan, 2002). What the examples I have discussed here demonstrate is the extent to which ‘therapy culture’ had begun to take hold in the UK since the 1980s, suggesting that there had been an extensive emotionalisation of all aspects of popular culture by this time.
The On-Screen Rehabilitation of Psychotherapy Perhaps the most significant point of reference after 1999 in media coverage of psychotherapy, however, is The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007). Widely reviewed and critically acclaimed, this US TV drama is even a point of reference for Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst who had been interviewed in the press because of his links to and interest in the Young British Artists. Leader comments on the fact that his patients discuss The Sopranos with him, echoing many of the popular journalistic links made between this series and popular notions of psychotherapy (O’Connell, 2002). In fact, The Sopranos appears to have escalated the rehabilitation of analysis in the cultural imagination. Tony Soprano’s encounters with Dr Melfi in the consulting room cue all kinds of articles including those which scrutinise themes such as contemporary tropes of masculinity, the fascination with the criminal mind, how to recognise panic attacks, and the increased take-up of psychotherapy by men in the US as a result of watching the show (Gabbard, 2002). As Toby Young’s interview with US critic, Hilton Kramer, suggested, The Sopranos was crucial in contributing to the idea that ‘The id is
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 46 on television around the clock’ (Kramer cited in Young, 1999: 58). Kramer was not alone in making this observation and the media coverage of ideas associated with the id became widespread when The Sopranos was first running (see Darling, 2006; Linklater, 2006; Pemberton, 2006; Watson, 2003). Identification with Tony Soprano and the rest of his family as sympathetic characters regularly features in reviews of the programme, and the fact that the American Psychoanalytic Association made an award to Lorraine Bracco (who plays Jennifer Melfi) (The Observer, 2010: 6) is seen as a way of authenticating the representation of therapy on the small screen. Interestingly, it is Tony Soprano who is singled out for alignment with Princess Diana in an article in The Observer in 2000 as proof that therapy is good for you and has now been proven to work whereas pills such as Prozac are not and do not, although here therapy is also conflated with counselling. As Summerskill has suggested,
After it was satirised for years as the touchy-feely sharing of pain, a major medical investigation has confirmed that therapy works. In a £500,000 project, patients receiving treatment for depression and anxiety were closely monitored. After four months, therapy had reduced their depressive symptoms ‘to a significantly greater extent’ than GP care, which usually involves anti-depressant drugs. (Summerskill, 2000: 5)
Whereas consumer culture had prompted claims that Prozac was a catch-all solution to emotional problems such as depression whilst criticising psychotherapy for failing to be instant and/or easy to swallow, research had now shown that this was no longer the case. This prompted a yearning of sorts for solutions which had seemingly fallen out of fashion, and this nostalgic inclination prompted a return to talking therapies. As David Thomson declared in his preview of The Sopranos in the same year, ‘psychotherapy is a new way of feeling good’ (Thomson, 2000). This new turn toward a nostalgic vision of psychotherapy as positive intervention in the press coverage is bolstered in the early 2000s by increasing commentary on the significance of Freudian ideas for art, literature and cinema. Here, the press echoes a broader cultural shift in which psychoanalysis and the idea of the therapeutic encounter become significant themes in the cultural life of the UK, with a number of plays, films and novels appearing in which psychoanalysis plays a significant part. Plays such as Christopher Hampton’s The Talking Cure (Hampton, 2002) and retrospectives of the films of Bernardo
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Bertolucci are given extensive review space in tones which revere the historical importance of psychoanalysis for example, and the establishment of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in 2001 sponsored by The Observer led to supportive reviews and feature-length articles as well as creating space for a new attentiveness to psychoanalysis as a means of understanding the appeal of cinema in other papers. There are a number of articles between 2000 and 2007 that persistently link psychoanalysis and Freud to the history of Hollywood cinema and the tone in these pieces is increasingly nostalgic. As Sean Macaulay notes, ‘the inverted Freudian pyramid of motivation has been a Hollywood staple since the 1920s when psychoanalysis became popular’ (Macaulay, 2005: 11). In The Daily Telegraph, Philip Horne showed how closely the cinematic treatment of psychoanalytic themes mirrors nostalgia for the early days of Hollywood in his review of Fred Astaire’s Carefree (1938) and its release on DVD (Horne, 2003). As Farrah Anwar commented,
Happily for Hollywood, no matter how discredited Freud and psychoanalysis becomes [sic], it will sustain very little lasting damage. As a rule, American cinema has had no qualms in lumping psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts as one discipline, and Freud's elaborate theories of development, which provided rich pickings for directors such as Nicholas Ray (East Of Eden, Johnny Guitar) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Marnie) in the fifties, have now been reduced to providing explanations for killing sprees in slasher movies (Jason in the Friday The 13th series, Michael Myers in Halloween). (Anwar, 1994: T6)17
Tabloidisation and the Search for the Good Therapist The enthusiasm for psychoanalytic themes was not, however, confined to reviews of cultural exemplars of its themes. Instead, aspects of psychoanalysis, its practice and morays were now so familiar that they began to influence everyday structures of the media. Influenced, perhaps, by the trend for media cultures to embrace magazine-style journalism, many broadsheets began to produce daily supplements to their main news-laden editions, and much of the content of these supplements consisted of playful and ironic regular features in which the popular themes of celebrity, emotion and daily life were discussed in highly cynical and knowing ways. The bracketing off of such concerns from the immediacy of the news sections of the broadsheet papers demonstrated the ‘tabloidisation’ of popular culture in
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 48 the UK, and the supplements began to embrace a number of (frequently voyeuristic) entertainment-led values alongside the tabloid tendency toward exploitative and humorous disparagement and denigration (Biressi and Nunn, 2007). By 2005, for example, The Guardian’s G2 supplement was carrying a regular column entitled ‘Character on the Couch’, a humorous fictional analysis of characters ranging from Madame Butterfly to Fagin and Santa Claus, the choice of character always linked to a cultural production of the moment. 2003 onwards saw the return of features and reviews that gave serious scrutiny to new psychoanalytic publications such as the work of Jacqueline Rose (Hanks, 2003) and that of Adam Phillips (Vickers, 2006), who was something of a media darling throughout the period under scrutiny here. It is interesting to observe how psychoanalysts writing in the press now became cultural intermediaries, providing a bridge between intellectual ideas and popular culture as well as promoting the values of psychotherapy as a practice. This arguably had the effect of providing a platform for the on-going democratisation of psychoanalysis in relation to the public sphere and this is significant for our understandings of what ‘therapy culture’ might mean. Such shifts enabled a much wider spectrum of psychoanalytic referencing in the assessment of popular cultural artefacts. For example, the publication of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, in 2004 was hailed as ‘DIY psychoanalysis’ in The Daily Telegraph (Rennie, 2004) and the scrutiny of the lives of both politicians such as Tony Blair and celebrities fresh from the jungle, such as Rhona Cameron, continually made connections to their emotional experiences and effects (I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, ITV, 2002 - ). 2004 saw a new turn in reality TV programming in which matters psychological came to the fore. The success of shows such as Supernanny (Channel 4, 2004 - ) and Little Angels (BBC3, 2004-6) led BBC3 controller, Stuart Murphy, to predict that 2005 would see the industry turning increasingly to psychological and psychotherapeutic themes in the development of new programming initiatives (Murphy, 2004). At the same time, Scotland Yard established a new Homicide Prevention Unit with the express aim of marrying traditional detective work with what were described as ‘psychoanalytic insights’ to prevent future murders, though the unit was actually to be headed up by behavioural psychologists (Cowan, 2004). This link between psychoanalysis and the criminal mind was not limited to the domain of public life, however, as 2005-7 saw a phenomenal growth in popular literature whose key protagonists were psychoanalysts or therapists. Jed Rubenfeld’s The
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Interpretation of Murder (Rubenfeld, 2006) was selected for inclusion in the list of recommended reading promoted by the book club affiliated with the popular daytime television shows, This Morning (ITV, 1988-2001) and Richard and Judy (Channel 4, 2001- 08), while other books on this theme, including Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (Carr, 1995), Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You (Kureishi, 2008), Ronan Bennett’s ZugZwang (Bennett, 2007) and Sally Vickers’ The Other Side of You (Vickers, 2007) all received sympathetic reviews, with Lisa Appignanesi acclaiming the work of Kureishi and Vickers in particular as ‘rescuing psychoanalysis from the waste bin’ (Appignanesi, 2008). By the time of the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth in 2006, the British papers had been won over again. Positive coverage of psychoanalysis saw an interview with the musician, Ryan Adams, on the importance of psychoanalysis for his recovery from depression (Paphides, 2006). Elsewhere, the social commentator, Will Hutton, declared that, in changing us, Freud had changed the world and that there was a need to rescue him from his detractors so that he could be properly installed in the hall of fame alongside the likes of Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Kant (Hutton, 2006). The last surviving patient of Freud, Margarethe Walter, was interviewed in The Daily Telegraph and widely reported as proclaiming that ‘the world needs a Freud’ (Cleaver, 2006; Daily Telegraph, 2006). The Sunday Telegraph published a feature on the fact that the wrong image of Freud had entered the popular subconscious (sic) and that he needed to be understood as an imaginative (if flawed) genius who liberated us from our sexual hang-ups and discovered the unconscious (LeFanu, 2006). Links between art exhibitions, the usefulness of psychoanalysis in branding, and comparisons of Freud to the likes of Rilke, Wordsworth and Coleridge continued to appear, underscoring the new emphasis on the rich seam of relevance of psychoanalysis to the arts broadly defined. With David Aaronovitch drawing on psychoanalysis in 2006 to frame readings of both the Conservative Party conference and the significance of ‘The Stern Report’ on the environment (Aaronovitch, 2006), it became clear that psychoanalysis was now out of the woods and once more in vogue. This is, perhaps, most clearly epitomised in the almost universal media acclaim for Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud (Edmundson, 2007), which places a great deal of emphasis on Freud’s final years in London, and in the fact that, in 2008, a journalist, Lorna Martin, published a memoir of her own year on the couch entitled Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Martin, 2008). As I have already signalled, the shifting fortunes of psychoanalysis in the UK press are linked to the rise of therapy culture. What my analysis has shown is that the engagement
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 50 with psychoanalytic ideas in the UK press provides potential space to engage with ideas about selfhood, emotion and does so in a way that invites critical understandings of the relationship between subjectivity and culture. As my discussion has shown, it is clear that Freud’s ideas are influential in popular culture, especially for the middle class consumers of culture to whom much of the broadsheet press is addressed. Furthermore, the extent of the influence enjoyed by Freudian ideas can also be seen in the fact that they are taken up and deployed in the context of media production so that TV shows, print media and films often foreground their significance. The genealogy I have been outlining here indicates that psychoanalysis fell out of fashion during the latter years of the Conservative government when the policy focus on getting back to basics increasingly contradicted the growth of sleaze culture and heightened notions of individualism. The advent of the new, emotionally driven therapy culture coincided with the election to office of the New Labour government in 1997, the year that also saw the death of Diana and a distinctive harnessing of emotion to political life, which was echoed in media responses. The rising trajectory of diagnoses of depression and the use of prescription medication to control its effects gained currency and visibility through press coverage of celebrity cases and the emergence of what is now referred to as ‘rehab’ also runs in parallel to this. Increasingly, as we have seen, the press tended toward a conflation of all modes of psychological, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic interventions and models, as the new emphasis was on emotionality rather than theory or clinical perspectives. Furedi documents this in rather negative and comparatively ill-defined terms in his book, Therapy Culture (Furedi, 2004). However, more recently, as we have seen, Richards has indicated the extent to which ‘therapy culture’ has gained ground and the significance of the role of the media in fashioning this new feeling-focused cultural economy (Richards, 2007). 18 It is clear from my exposition of the changing fortunes of psychoanalysis in its media coverage that the rise of postmodern discourses of fragmentation and disintegration go hand-in-hand with the emergence of a more emotionalised cultural climate.19 As the reliability of social and cultural structures began to shift shape and alter their textures, notions of the individual began to come to the fore. As Silverstone, Richards and others have suggested, this is a key aspect of the increasingly emotionalised relationship to culture and society. As Yates discusses elsewhere in this volume, the fragmentation of the old certainties of society, culture and politics leads to a heightened (and overtly narcissistic) attention to notions of the self in the postmodern age
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 51 and this is central to understanding the consequences of the turn inward to scrutinise the role of feeling and emotion in shaping ideas about identity (Yates 2011). Following on from this, and returning to my starting point at the outset of this article, it is worth noting that the emotionalisation of culture has also gone hand-in-hand with processes of mediatisation and that, as a result, it is important to consider the ways in which media come to function as psychological objects that operate in tandem with therapy culture, impacting on the notion of ‘self’ that emerges as a result. With this is mind, the next section will explore the ways in which the observations I have been making about the close imbrication of cultural trends associated with the emotionalisation of popular culture, the mediatisation of the individual and the emergence of therapy culture demonstrate how the media have come to function as objects of our inner world. How do the media work to shore up notions of identity and selfhood in this context?
Understanding Media as Internal Objects What is clear from the debates I have been exploring is that the media have come to play a very important role in shaping the emotional disposition of our times. In 1994, Silverstone argued that television worked as a kind of transitional object, drawing on the work of Winnicott. For Winnicott, transitional objects, phenomena and space are fundamental to the subject’s negotiation of individual identity and separation from the mother (Winnicott, 1953). They also constitute the first experience of symbol-making and are therefore linked to our capacity for playfulness, thought and creativity. In this formulation, it is in the spheres of art, culture and religion that our childhood capacity for play and creativity finds an outlet in adult life. In Winnicott’s view, such spaces provide for experience that unites the inner and outer worlds, allowing us to live out a profound sense of enrichment that is uniquely personal and unable to be challenged by others (Winnicott 1953, 1974). For Winnicott, therapy is just such a transitional space and requires a capacity for play and creativity in order to be effective (Winnicott, 1953). In Silverstone’s account, television works in this way, helping us to negotiate the threat of anxiety present in everyday life and allowing us space to meditate on creativity and responses to what we see and feel (Silverstone, 1994). Other media also work like this as I have been arguing, and the examples I have explored show that the media participate in shaping the emotionalisation of everyday discourses of being. What seems to be at stake in all of this at a psychological level, however, is a fashioning of the media as an object of our inner world and my case study of the
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 52 representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the press during the period in which ‘therapy culture’ emerges and becomes entrenched in everyday culture demonstrates this very clearly. In other words, in an increasingly mediatised environment, we internalise the media as an object and use their representations as a way of traversing the complexities and contradictions of contemporary emotional life. What is more, one can argue that, against the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented postmodern context of identity (Elliott, 1992; Jameson, 1991; Lyotard, 1984), our capacity for establishing sustainable experiences of relatedness breaks down and we become more and more dependent on the mediated environment for a sense of ‘self’. To some extent, this can be understood as positioning the mediatised subject as one who is inscribed in the very kind of borderline state evoked by Winnicott in his discussion of the usage of objects (Winnicott, 1969: 712). As Elliott and Urry argue, the speed of technological, social and cultural change prompted by the evolution of media can be seen as contributing to this experience and the texture of relatedness as something which is experienced ‘in the ether’ or ‘remotely’, ‘at a distance’ as a result of these technological developments reinforces the concomitant sense of isolation and disconnectedness that characterises our ‘networked’ society (Elliott and Urry, 2010). In this context, then, the internal object described by Winnicott becomes something that must be seen as external, an entity in its own right, one that eludes our illusory desire for control. The object, in this formulation, becomes something that we seek to destroy in order better to be able to tolerate it so as to be able to use it constructively as a means of shoring up our fractured senses of identity. Such a reading provides an interesting backdrop for the geneaology of media attitudes to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy I have elucidated here. The attacks on psychoanalysis in the press serve a purpose in this regard, channelling negativity away from the self which feels itself to be mired in the conflicting demands of contemporary culture and its highly mediatised environment. Despite the source of the negativity felt around what it means to be a subject in this hyper-mediated age, this negativity is nevertheless directed toward the apparently containing structures of the media landscape which are framed as outlets for the expression of personal feeling – the media structures of social networking are indicative in this regard. On a separate level, however, this re-direction of feeling amounts to the projection of our deepest fears about the apparent disintegration of the world and our possible annihilation, the threat of which is seen only too clearly in the very media being used defensively.
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In addition, during the period covered by my case study, there was a gradual loosening of confidence in political structures and systems associated with capitalism and the old western tradition of clearly demarcated left- and right-wing political positions, as evidenced in the growth of social protest movements and the increase in voter apathy in the context of Western democracies (see Dalton, 2008 and Giddens, 1994). Against this backdrop, perhaps psychoanalysis represented a menacing tool, one that threatened to reveal the dark secrets underpinning a Weltanschauung that preferred not to reflect on its origins and mechanisms as it fell into disarray. Psychoanalysis represented a requirement to scrutinise the history of such structures and their origins, and, in this way, may have required too much in the way of the admission of failure, which may have plunged society into an abyss. Without the certainties of national boundaries and identities, the rapidly globalising worldview could conceivably have constituted an overwhelming sense of engulfment and this is reflected in the now widespread view that we live in a culture defined by risk (see Beck, 1992, 1998, 1999, 2005). In this context, psychoanalysis becomes a threatening object in itself, in that its promise to expose the internal workings of such processes becomes too much to bear. The negative dismissal of psychoanalysis in the press, then, can be seen to represent a symbolic destruction of this threat, killing off the object that threatens to engulf us in this way. As a new, highly mediated sensibility has emerged, however, the attendant emphasis on narcissistic structures of being reflected in the enthusiasm for new media technologies such as those linked to social networking ironically permits a turn inward and the domains of psychological and emotional experience come to the fore, as my case study analysis has indicated. This enables us to re-visit the values of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and to see these as objects in their own right, which can survive attempts at their destruction. In this context, we find ourselves able to make use of the tools on offer in order better to survive the assault on identity that often seems all too real in the contemporary mediascape. In this reading, it ought therefore to come as no surprise that there is an increasing tendency over the past ten years toward a return to a therapeutic climate – the representations disseminated through the media reflect but also help to form discursive and ontological structures of being. The process of shifting from a denigratory perspective on psychoanalysis and therapy to one that is more open and integrative, albeit in more superficial ways, opens up cultural spaces for deeper explorations of emotional experiences. Psychoanalysis has much to offer in understanding the workings of such a shift, and the object relations tradition with its rich vocabulary of internal and external objects, transitional spaces, ‘true’ and ‘false’
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 54 selves, splitting, incorporation, envy, denial, idealisation, projection and projective identification offers plenty of scope for doing so. By thinking through the relationship between the media and the inner world, it may be possible to forge new perspectives on the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for media and cultural studies, as there is potential here to revisit issues around uses and gratifications in the media as well as thinking anew about mediatisation as a process and its inflection of ontological structures of being in everyday life.
Caroline Bainbridge is Reader in Visual Culture at Roehampton University. She is a Director of the Media and the Inner World research network and Editor of Free Associations.
Notes
1 Of course, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have a pattern of ebbing and waning fortunes and each has enjoyed quite a strong presence in popular culture almost continuously through its history. This article focuses on the past two decades or so in an effort to foreground the relationship between processes of mediatisation and the rise of therapeutic culture at the popular level. It would be interesting to undertake research on other periods to augment this understanding, but this is outside the remit of this piece of work. 2 There are, of course, other media forms, such as cinema and radio, that also merit scrutiny, but that is part of a larger project and one which I do not have space to explore in more depth here. 3 I made use of the Nexis database of news articles, using keywords such as ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘psychotherapy’, ‘Freud’, ‘object relations’, ‘Melanie Klein’ and ‘Winnicott’ as a means of filtering the results. From over 400 articles in the UK press, I have selected the most relevant for discussion in this article. It is worth noting here that, in an effort to make the case study manageable, this article does not take into account the place of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the UK. This is partly a result of the emphasis placed within the Media and the Inner World project on the potential usefulness of object relations psychoanalysis for shaping new understandings of the role of emotion in relation to popular culture. The emphasis here is on matters of ‘relatedness’ and also on the role of the object at the levels of experience of both the inner and external worlds. By contrast, a Lacanian approach would foreground questions of language and the relation of the symbolic to the imaginary and so on. The scope of this article seeks to move beyond the constraints of this kind of approach, which is well established as an academic method of enquiry in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that any form of psychoanalysis (including the Lacanian one) offers a crucial critical capacity to address unconscious structures and the ‘messiness’ of the human condition, and offers useful insights on our dominant culture of consumption and ‘happiness’. 4 For further information about the project, please see www.miwnet.org, Bainbridge and Yates, forthcoming and Yates, forthcoming. 5 For further psychoanalytically-disposed discussion of the notion of ‘therapy culture’, see Richards, 2007, Richards and Brown, 2011 (this volume) and Yates, 2011 (this volume). 6 See also the important contribution to this debate made by Richards and Brown in this volume. 7 See Young in this volume for a thoughtful exposition of this (Young, 2011). 8 As articles elsewhere in this special edition indicate, there is some debate about when precisely ‘therapy culture’ began to emerge. Richards (2007) suggests that one can chart its entrenchment within popular culture from 1997, the year in which Diana, Princess of Wales died, with the funeral providing a key point of crystallisation. Elsewhere in this volume, Yates (2011) traces the emergence of this cultural trend back to the counter-culture of the 1960s, drawing on the work of Rieff (1966) and also on that of Lasch (1979) in order to foreground the relevance of debates about the culture of narcissism. 9 Paradoxically, the visibility of the work of writers such as Masson and Crews may also have inadvertently contributed to the popularisation and/or vulgarisation of psychoanalysis during this period. 10 See also James, 2005; Moir, 1992; Moore, 1994; and Plant, 1999. 11 It is worth noting here that the mid-1990s also saw the development of ‘sleaze culture’ in UK politics, contributing to the atmosphere of distrust and moral judgement that predominated and arguably contributed to
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the increasing level of scepticism with regard to the old ‘grand narratives’ of theory that had hitherto seemed to provide reliable accounts of selfhood and politics but which were also increasingly coming under fire during this period. 12 See also Yates in this volume. 13 Of course, this is a perennial debate in relation to psychoanalysis and one that is not distinctly specific to this period. For example, Adam Phillips has charted the history of psychoanalysis and fears about its relationship to magic and spiritualism (Phillips, 1997) and, more recently, debates about the role of neuroscience in either undermining the status of psychoanalysis or enhancing its techniques are on-going (Mancia, 2006). 14 It is important to note, here, that memory studies emerged in this period too, indicating the cultural importance at this time of debates about memory and its cultural significance. The broader cultural preoccupation with memory was reflected in cultural events surrounding the dismantling of apartheid systems in South Africa, for example and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It was also closely imbricated with emergent debates about digital technologies and the transmission of history. See Radstone (ed.), 2000, Hodgkin and Radstone (eds.), 2003 and Radstone and Hodgkin, 2003. 15 Interestingly, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is due to stage an exhibition entitled ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ in which a key aim is to explore the propensity of post- modernism ‘to influence all areas of popular culture including art, film, music, graphics and fashion’ (www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/postmodernism-style-and-subversion-1970-1990/). 16 Subsequently, Evans has given up psychoanalytic practice and is now better known for his work in evolutionary psychology. 17 See also James, 2005; Macauley, 2005; and Sigal, 1995. 18 See also Richards and Brown (2011) and Yates (2011) in this volume. 19 See Ortega Breton (2011) in this volume for a complementary analysis of televisual material being linked to the loss of political certainties.
Television Programmes and Films Discussed Carefree (US, dir. Mark Sandrich, 1938). I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (UK, ITV, 2002 - ). Little Angels (UK, BBC3, 2004-6). Psychoanalysing Diana (UK, Channel 4, 1995, not broadcast). Richard and Judy (UK, Channel 4, 2001-08). Shrinks (UK, ITV, 1991). The Sopranos (US, Matthew Weiner, HBO, 1997-2007). Super Nanny (UK, Channel 4, 2004 - ). This Morning (UK, ITV, 1988-2001).
References
Aaronovitch, D. (2006) After this Stern admonition, our world will never be the same again.... The Times, 31 October: 19. Abram, J. (2007) The Language of Winnicott: A dictionary of Winnicott’s use of words. London: Karnac Books. Anwar, F. (1994) You must be out of your mind. The Guardian, 1 September: T6. Appignanesi, L. (2008) All in the mind. The Guardian, Review Section, 16 February: 4. Bainbridge, C. and C. Yates (Forthcoming) Psychoanalysis and popular culture: reflections on the development of a psycho-cultural approach. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 17 (2). In press. Beaumont, P. (1996) Sceptics corner. The Observer Life, 3 November: 68. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a new modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. (1998) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1999) What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press.
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From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 56
Beck, U. (2005) Power in the Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, D. (2005) Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, advertising, Barbie dolls, and the invention of the consumer unconscious. Public Culture, 17 (1) (February): 1- 25 (2005) Bennett, R. (2007) ZugZwang. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Billen, A. (2008) Regulate this!. The Times 2, 15 July: 4. Biressi, A. and H. Nunn (2007) The Tabloid Culture Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bowlby, R. (1993) Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge. Brearley, M. (1995) The plot backfires. The Observer, Sports section, 14 May: 16. Carr, C. (1995) The Alienist. London: Sphere. Clare, A. (1997) Call in the Freud squad. The Observer, 8 June: 16. Cleaver, H. (2006) Freud’s last patient recalls meeting that ‘saved my life’. The Daily Telegraph, 2 May: 14. Cowan, R. (2004) New crime unit crawls inside killers’ minds. The Guardian, 5 July: 10. Crews, F. (1995) The Memory Wars: Freud’s legacy in dispute. London: Granta Books. Daily Telegraph (2006) The world needs a Freud. 2 May: 17. Dalton, R. J. (2008) Citizen Politics: Public opinion and political parties in advanced industrial democracies (5th edition). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Darling, A. (2006) Wellbeing: Seven ways to get inside your head. The Guardian, 25 February: 62. Dunn, A. (2001) Psycho analysis: Title’s just a Pearce of cake for United. The People, 21 January: 8-9. Dutter, B. (1996) Channel 4 calls off show featuring Diana lookalike. The Guardian, 3 May: 3. Edmundson, M. (2007) The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism. London: Harper Perennial. Elliott, A. (1992) Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and society from Freud to Kristeva, Oxford: Blackwell. Elliott, A. and J. Urry (2010) Mobile Lives. London: Routledge. Evans, D. (1996) Pulling power. The Guardian, 7 May: T10. Farmer, B. (2008) ‘No one else involved’ in Cleese separation. The Daily Telegraph, 10 January: 11. Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage. Forrester, J. (1997) Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and its passions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frean, A. (1996) Grade orders Princess off Channel 4 couch. The Times, 3 May: no page number given. Furedi, F. (2004) Therapy Culture: Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age. London: Routledge. Gabbard, G. O. (2002) The Psychology of The Sopranos: Love, death, desire and betrayal in America’s favorite gangster family. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy. Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The future of radical politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gillan, A. (2004) Battle of the couches. The Guardian, 9 June: 13. Hampton, C. (2002) The Talking Cure. London: Faber and Faber.
Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011
From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 57
Hanks, R. (2003) Only the heart its own bereavement knows. The Daily Telegraph, 4 January: 3. Hodgkin, K. and S. Radstone (eds.) (2003) Contested Pasts: The politics of memory, London: Routledge. Horne, P. (2003) DVDs. The Daily Telegraph, 15 November: 15. Hutton, W. (2006) Comment: In changing us, Freud changed the world. The Observer, 7 May: 29. James, O. (2005) Be a Freud … be very much a Freud. The Times, 8 July, Section 2: 5. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durhma, NC: Duke University Press. Jeffries, S. (1996) Mixed up mind games. The Guardian, 4 May: 25. Kureishi, H. (2008) Something To Tell You. London: Faber and Faber. Lasch, C. (1979) The Culture of Narcissism: Amercian life in an age of diminishing expectations, New York: W. W. Norton. Laurance, J. (1993) Who will mind the healers?. The Times, 12 January: no page number given. Lawson, N. (1995) Why old Sigmund was right after all. The Times, 5 October: no page number given. Lawson, N. (1998) A childhood trauma we dare not face. The Times, 11 March: no page number given. LeFanu, J. (2006) Wrong image of Freud has entered the subconscious. The Sunday Telegraph, 14 May: 14. Leidig, M. (2001) Postmen learn to ‘read’ the minds of German dogs. The Sunday Telegraph, 3 June: 35. Linklater, M. (2006) Freud-lite: The ideal modern cure. The Times, 3 May: 18. Livingstone, S. (2009) On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address 2008. Journal of Communication, 59: 1-18. Lunt, P. and P. Stenner (2005) The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere. Media, Culture and Society, 27 (1): 59-81. Lury, C. (1996) Consumer Cultures, Oxford: Polity Press. Lyall, J. (1992) Out of the Shadows. The Guardian, 13 April: 31. Lyotard, J. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McGilvary, M. (1997) Does she take therapy…?. Mail on Sunday, 30 November: 47. Macaulay, S. (2005) The kid stays in the picture. The Times, 3 February, Section 2: 11. Mancia, M. (ed.) (2006) Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience, Berlin: Springer. Martin, L. (2008) Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Life, love and talking it through. London: John Murray. Masson, J. (1984) The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. London: Faber and Faber. Middlehurst, L. (1995) Faye Dunaway on her runaway father, suicidal thoughts and the child who changed her life. Daily Mail, 14 November: 9. Miles, A. (2004) Alternative medicine is too silly to regulate. The Times, 3 March: 22. Moir, J. (1992) Public Lives: A piece of her mind. The Guardian, 23 September: 35. Moore, S. (1994) Inside story: What’s up doc?. The Guardian Weekend, 11 February: 16. Muir, K. (1992) Putting the family on the couch. The Times, 6 October: no page number given. Murphy, S. (2004) You’re a celebrity? Get out of here. The Observer, Business and Media Section, 26 December: 21.
Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011
From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 58
Narayan, N. (2002) The therapy revolution. Daily Mail, 4 March: 44. O’Connell, A. (2002) A brain full of emptiness. The Times, 11 March: no page number given. Observer (2010) Review. The Observer, 13 June: 6. Ortega Breton, H. (2011) Coping with a crisis of meaning: Televised paranoia. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Analysis, 62: 85-111. Paphides, P. (2006) Dead man waking. The Times, Times 2, 17 February: 13. Pemberton, M. (2006) Trust me, I’m a junior doctor. The Daily Telegraph, 8 May: 22. Persaud, R. (1999) Doctors taking over the asylum. British Medical Journal, vol. 318, no. 7194, 15 May: 1360. Phillips, A. (1995) Sigmund Fraud. The Observer, 17 September: 14. Phillips, A. (1997) Terrors and Experts, London: Faber and Faber. Plant, S. (1999) The coke connection. The Mail on Sunday, 12 September: 42-3. Poole, S. (2008) Review: Et Cetera: Steven Poole’s non-fiction choice: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown by Lorna Martin. The Guardian, Review Section, 31 May: 7. Radstone, S. (ed.) (2000) Memory and Methodology, Oxford: Berg. Radstone, S. and K. Hodkin (ed.) (2003) Regimes of Memory, London: Routledge. Rennie, D. (2004) Secretive, lying, angry, abused: Clinton’s DIY psychoanalysis for the baby boomers. The Daily Telegraph, 21 June: 4. Richards, B. (2004) What is psychoanalysis for?. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 9 (1): 149-58. Richards, B. (2007) Emotional Governance: Politics, media and terror. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, B. and J. Brown (2002) The therapeutic culture hypothesis. In: T. Johansson and O. Sernhede (eds.) Lifestyle, desire and politics, Goteborg: Daidalos: 97-114. Richards, B. and J. Brown (2011) Media as drivers of a therapeutic trend?. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 62: 18-30. Rieff, P. (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of faith after Freud, London: Chatto and Windus. Rose, J. (1993) Negativity in the work of Melanie Klein. In: J. Phillips and L. Stonebridge (eds.) (1997) Reading Melanie Klein. London: Routledge: 126-59. Rose, N. (1999) Governing the Soul, The shaping of the private self, London: Routledge. Rubenfeld, J. (2006) The Interpretation of Murder. London: Headline Press. Sigal, C. (1995) Home front: Anyone for a game of psycho-cowboys?. The Guardian, 28 January: T8. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (1999) Why Study the Media? London: Sage. Stoddart, P. (1991) Not yet out of the woods. The Sunday Times, 17 February: No page number given. Summerskill, B. (2000) Therapy outdoes pills for beating the blues. The Observer, 3 December: 5. Thomson, D. (2000) Wise guys and even wiser gals. The Independent, 8 October: 12. Times (2006) Thinkers 50: Manfred Kets de Vries. 30 March: no page number given. Vickers, S. (2006) We are more like clouds than stars. The Daily Telegraph, 29 July: 6. Vickers, S. (2007) The Other Side of You. London: Harper Perennial. Waddell, M. (1996) When great minds don’t think alike. The Guardian, 17 April: T6. Watson, P. (2003) Why psychology has got it wrong. The Times 2, 14 May: 6. Weintrobe, S. (1996) That old shrinking feeling. The Guardian, Society, 1 May: 7. Wessely, S. (1994) Can talking help?. The Times, 17 September: no page number given.
Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011
From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 59
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Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011