What is it about?
The article discusses Mad Men (2007–2015) and its images of women's experience in the 1960s. It argues that the show makes a useful contribution to understanding how feminism arose in this decade and the one that followed, and it uses this example to discuss the changing attitudes toward feminism during the period in which the show first aired on TV between 2007-15. I argue that the show works as a kind of psychological object, allowing people to re-work their own relationship to feminism, and I draw on psychoanalytic theory to show how this work. Finally, I suggest that this case study gives us a way of understanding how television plays a role in shaping our emotional and psychological experience, suggesting that television scholars need to understand the value of psychoanalytic studies in explaining these processes.
Featured Image
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This article makes the case for a return to psychoanalytic scholarship so that we can understand the unconscious relationships viewers form when they watch TV. It also shows how changing attitudes to feminism are potentially influenced by stories that show where it came from and what women's lives were like before feminism changed western society.
Perspectives
I am passionate about explaining how the things we do in our everyday lives impact on the way we think and feel about the world. By using the everyday example of feeling attached to television, I try to show how there is scope for us to think about the everyday role of gender politics in culture and society and the way that the pleasures of watching television can also help to change the world for the better, helping to build a more tolerant society.
Caroline Bainbridge
University of Roehampton
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Television as psychical object: Mad Men and the value of psychoanalysis for television scholarship, Critical Studies in Television The International Journal of Television Studies, August 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1749602019851714.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
