Candida Yates

Introduction to special issue on media and the inner world: New perspectives on psychoanalysis and popular culture

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.

Introducing Psychosocial Studies of Emotion

This chapter provides an introduction to the papers that make up this book. The psychosocial contributors represented here all share an interest in affect, the emotions and emotional life. Some recent writers (e.g. Blackman and Cromby, 2007) make clear distinctions between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’, with, for example, ‘emotion’ being used to refer to conscious experience, and ‘affect’ to a more basic drive — or bodily based phenomenon. We agree with Greco and Stenner’s (2008) suggestion that such distinctions are not always fruitful, partly because the terms are used highly inconsistently. Emotions exist partly in the body, but they are also in our minds, in our language and in the cultures that surround us. They can be understood as a crucial bridge between the individual and the social, and are quintessentially psychosocial phenomena. They have a mercurial status, not existing without an individual to experience the emotion, but often having little significance without a socio-cultural framework that imbues feelings with meaning.

Fatherhood, UK political culture and the new politics

This article discusses the trope of fatherhood and its deployment within the UK political scene to ask how and why this has become a strategy in the post-ideological context of contemporary party politics. It uses psychoanalytic ideas to explore the fantasies of what is at stake in such a move and explores how politicians can be read as symptomatic of broader struggles around hegemonic masculinity as represented within the celebritized arena of political culture.

Conclusions: Psychosocial Studies – A Therapeutic Project?

The essays in this book show in different ways and in a wide range of contexts how emotion is implicated in every area of our personal and public lives, relationships and institutions. Various psychosocial theories and per spectives have been deployed by the contributors to examine the different ways in which emotion provides a psychosocial bridge between the inner and outer worlds, binding them together, through the shifting processes of history, discourse and unconscious phantasy.1 Clearly there are many ‘psy- chosocial’ approaches. They vary in the kind of psychology being deployed, as illustrated by the various forms of psychoanalytic psychology, identity theory and biographic narrative approaches to be found here, and the wider range to be found elsewhere. Along with this diversity in their models of the ‘psycho’, psychosocial approaches also vary in the ways that the ‘social’ can be theoretically and/or empirically present, with sociological theory (Rustin, Chapter 2), politics (Evans, Chapter 6; Yates, Chapter 7) and history (Jones, Chapter 16), cultural forms and artefacts (Powell, Chapter 8), policy studies (Cooper, Chapter 13), criminology (Gelsthorpe, Chapter 14) and education policy (Price, Chapter 15) being among the ways in which the ‘social’ has been presented to readers of this book.

Reflecting on the study of psychoanalysis, culture and society: The development of a psycho-cultural approach

This article discusses the development of a psycho-cultural approach that brings together object relations psychoanalysis and cultural studies to explore the psycho-dynamics of culture, politics and society. While foregrounding the work of Donald Winnicott and other psychoanalysts influenced by his ideas, I contextualise that approach by tracing my own relationship to the study of psychoanalysis and culture since I was a Cultural Studies student in the 1980s and 1990s and also my engagement with the psychoanalytic scene that existed in London at that time. I have since applied a psycho-cultural lens to the study of masculinity and emotion in cinema and more recently to the study of emotion and political culture in Europe and the US. The article provides an example of that work by discussing the populist appeal of Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK, where the contradictory dynamics of attachment, risk and illusion are present when communicating with their supporters and the general public.

Moving Forward to the Past: Fantasies of Nation within UK Political Culture

Throughout 2014 and in the lead up to the 2015 UK General election, much press coverage was given to the success of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and its charismatic leader, Nigel Farage. Often pictured outside a traditional English pub, with a cigarette in one hand and a pint of beer in the other, Farage’s ‘blokey’ image is awash with signifiers of a particular unreconstructed English masculinity, which, according to researchers, appeals to a constituency defined as ‘left-behind voters’ who feel alienated by mainstream politics (Ford and Goodwin, 2014, loc. 3001). Those sentiments are also fuelled by what UKIP voters see as high levels of immigration to Britain, which they say is caused by the imposition of laws by Brussels (Ford and Godwin, 2014). These fears, which signal a defensive, reactionary turn in political culture, also seem linked to wider anxieties about the pace of social and cultural change and the ‘risks’ (Beck, 1992) associated with the forces of globalisation and late modernity.

The Dilemmas of Postfeminism and the Fantasies of Political Culture

This chapter explores the intersections between political culture, the shaping of femininity in a postfeminist era and the fantasies that have underpinned that interrelationship since the New Labour government first came to power in 1997. The meaning of the term ‘postfeminism’ is contested and has been widely discussed by feminist researchers in the field of media and cultural studies (see, for example, Bainbridge, 2010; Gill, 2008; McRobbie, 2010, 2013; Tasker and Negra, 2007, 2014; Yates, 2007b). The emergence of postfeminism is often referred to as a ‘stage’ after second-wave feminism, in which a liberal, feminist language is used, yet is emptied of its progressive political feminist content (Bainbridge, 2010; McRobbie, 2010). Rosalind Gill (2008) argues that it is a ‘sensibility’ that influences all areas of life and is linked in particular to the growth of consumer culture and to the values and practices associated with reflexivity, neoliberalism and the promotional self. Thus, the meanings of postfeminism, with its links to neoliberalism and promotional culture, resonate strongly with the themes of political culture discussed in this book.

Spinning the Unconscious and the Play of Flirtation in Political Culture

This chapter deploys a psycho-cultural analysis of ‘play’ to examine the flirtatious cultures of spin and political communication by focusing on UK political culture since 1997.1 The study of flirtation as a mode of communication, which operates as a cycle of seduction and desire, is highly suggestive in the contemporary context of late modern democratic party politics where, as in what was known as the UK ‘New Labour Project’, and then subsequently in the UK Conservative-led coalition government, political communication played a key role in ‘wooing’ voters at every turn (Chadwick and Heffernan, 2003). Given the current preoccupation with political ‘spin’ and public relations in the UK and elsewhere, images of flirtatious politicians alongside flirtatious mechanisms of communication have become commonplace as a means to communicate with the public in different mediatised contexts, including print and digital media.

Introducing Emotion, Identity and the Play of Political Culture

This book explores the relationships between emotion, identity and fantasy within the mediatised landscape of contemporary political culture. Focusing mainly on the UK context, the study of these relationships takes the form of an interdisciplinary ‘psycho-cultural’ approach that uses theories and methods taken from the fields of psychosocial studies, cultural and media studies. A starting place for this book is that politics — and our engagement with it — has become increasingly emotional (Lilleker, 2012; Richards, 2007). The emotionalisation of politics can be found in different aspects of political culture, which include the field of political representation, the content of political policy and the engagement with those representations and policies within and via different aspects of the media and popular culture.

The Absent Parent in Political Culture

The English riots of 2011 generated a wealth of political commentary that focused on the ‘moral collapse of society’, and the problem of ‘absent parents’ was cited by the UK Prime Minster, David Cameron as being the main cause (Sky News, 2011). As Cameron argued in a speech shortly afterwards: ‘I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home’ (Cameron, 2011a).1 Today, parenting has become a key terrain of political culture both in terms of the politics of austerity and social policy and also in the presentation of politicians themselves, who try to appeal to the electorate by promoting themselves as parents. For example, concerns about absent fathers and the importance of paternal authority within family life have contributed to Cameron’s political imago as a father himself, who is equipped to pick up the pieces of what he likes to call ‘broken Britain’ (Cameron, 2011b).