David W. Park

The couch and the clinic The cultural authority of popular psychiatry and psychoanalysis

This paper examines the discourse produced by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who wrote for non-professional audiences. As professionals who reached out beyond their professions, their writing raises questions about the authority they invoked. The two factions in this popular psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, staked out cultural authority using systematically different types of appeals. The psychiatric approach involved a ‘pure’ professionalism, invoking psychiatry’s similarities to medicine. The psychoanalytic approach involved an explicit dissociation from medical authority, and claimed a difference from medical expertise as a mark of intellectual transcendence. What becomes clear is that these standpoints were constructed through discourse as types of strategic positionings. Concluding notes address the idea that Antonio Gramsci’s labels of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ are not only types of intellectuals; they are also stakes in the game amongst competitors for cultural authority. This insight is then applied to broader considerations regarding public intellectuals.

THE KEFAUVER COMIC BOOK HEARINGS AS SHOW TRIAL: DECENCY, AUTHORITY AND THE DOMINATED EXPERT

The advent of comic books in the late 1930s almost immediately prompted an outcry over what many critics found to be their vulgar content. In the 1940s, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham entered this enduring debate with his many articles in popular periodicals and his popular book Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham added professional warrant to long-standing decency concerns; he translated the issue into a psychiatric problem and found comic books to be a cause of juvenile delinquency. With juvenile delinquency thusly introduced, comic books garnered substantial critical attention. A Senate subcommittee, spearheaded by Senator Estes Kefauver,was charged with the task of investigating the effects of comic books. This subcommittees hearings were shaped profoundly by the interests of the comic book industry and the subcommittee itself. Expert testimony, especially that of Wertham himself, was used as a way of granting legitimacy to the conclusions of the subcommittee, even though those conclusions proposed an industry self-censorship code – the Comic Book Code – that Wertham believed to be counterproductive. This study examines the authoritative voice of Fredric Wertham and the symbolic politics of the Kefauver comic book hearings, with a particular emphasis on how the interests of the comic book publishers made a self-censorship code an almost predetermined outcome. Media decency crusades follow a script that has certain circumscribed roles for each part in the drama. While experts are important and perhaps even necessary for the creation, legitimation and resolution of such crusades, they occupy a dominated place in the debate - able to reach, but not grasp, the process that shapes the policies that are devised.

Picturing the war: Visual genres in civil war news

This study examines the genres of visual communication utilized by the daily and illustrated weekly papers during the Civil War, when photography existed, but photographs could not yet be printed using the halftone process. I propose a typology of visual genres in use at that time, wherein each genre is differentiated by conventions that governed inclusion and interpretation. Though photography could not be reproduced in the news, an ideal of photorealism can be detected in many of these genres, as illustrations were made to approximate the mode of the photograph. This blending of photography and illustration, it is argued, contradicts the assumption of a metaphysical divide between photographic and illustrated representations, and elucidates the role of convention in visual communication.

New Media & Society 20(1):

This issue of New Media & Society finds us commencing our 20th volume. It seems a fitting occasion for a retrospective and prospective consideration of the ideals that have gone into making New Media & Society a reality. Now that the journal is 20 volumes old, one might imagine that it may have begun showing signs of maturity. One can indeed find some basic signs of stability around certain themes. For a long time, we have described New Media & Society as follows:

2016 Year in Review

2016 was an unusual and challenging year on several fronts for investors. The health of China’s economy and its share market stability were significant concerns at the beginning of the year, though these concerns dissipated as the year progressed. Central banks’ attempts to stimulate growth continued to be a key influence on markets, distorting the prices of many assets. Politics delivered some big surprises.