Media and Psychoanalysis

Media and Psychoanalysis is the first critical introduction to the psychoanalytic study of media – from film and TV, to social media, games and artificial intelligence and is an indispensable read for everyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between humans and technology today.

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Have we all become narcissists of the social media age? How have the internet and online platforms shaped the way we work? Is all of this technology positive or negative for our mental health? Or is it both at once? Spanning a wide range of examples, Psychoanalysis and the Media, guides readers through the growing field of psychoanalytic media studies in a clear and accessible manner. Steffen Kruger and Jacob Johnassen show how media function beyond the rational. This book is the first critical introduction to the psychoanalytic study of media – from film and TV, to social media, games and artificial intelligence and is an indispensable read for everyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between humans and technology today. Our lives are saturated by media that we use in conscious as well as unconscious ways. Spanning a wide range of examples, from film and TV to social media, from gaming to robots, this critical introduction guides readers through the growing field of psychoanalytic media studies in a clear and accessible manner. It is indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between humans and technology today. Jacob Johanssen and Steffen Kruger show how media function beyond the rational. What does it mean to speak of narcissism in relation to social media? How have the internet and online platforms shaped work? How do apps like Tinder and online pornography shape our experience of love and sexuality? What are the potentials and pitfalls in our relationships with AI and robots? These questions, and many others, are discussed and answered in this book. Aimed at students, academics and clinicians, this book introduces readers to key media and the ways they have been approached psychoanalytically, and presents major concepts and debates led by scholars since the 1970s.

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Reality and Fantasy from Film to TV
2. Social Media and Psycho-Social Relations
3. Work, Neoliberalism, and the Perverse Pact
4. Digital Politics and the Other
5. Virtual Sexuality: From the Pre-oedipal to the Post-oedipal
6. Videogames, AI, and the Vicissitudes of Symbiosis

Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

• By (author) Jacob Johanssen
• By (author) Steffen Kruger

'At last, the book we have been waiting for – that comprehensive text that bites off as much as it can chew from our ragingly complex contemporary media and technology landscape, and then subjects what it finds to the psychoanalytic gaze. From AI to Žižek, the authors have tamed a dizzyingly diverse body of theory into a brilliant, comprehensive, and significant text. Johanssen and Krüger have crushed it.'

— Dr Aaron Balick, psychotherapist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking

'This book is a tour de force. It takes us from early feminist psychoanalytic work on the media through the decades of TV and video games to the utter ubiquitous character of social media in the present of a neoliberalism that invades every corner of life. Its analysis is utterly compelling: at the same time erudite and accessible. I cannot recommend it highly enough to both scholars in the field and to students alike.'

— Valerie Walkerdine, Distinguished Research Professor, Cardiff University

'Media and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Introduction is a major contribution to the field of media studies. It presents a very well-researched and accessible study of human engagement with contemporary media through the lens of psychoanalysis. … the authors explore how different media incite and organise our desire for recognition and forms of relating that involve a complex balance between activity and passivity, fantasy play and reality testing. They offer radically new ways to understand the social and political implications – positive and negative – arising from our interactions with these diverse forms.'

— Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Cowie, Film Studies, University of Kent