The Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture Series

This series provides a space for dialogue and new perspectives on psychoanalytic approaches to popular cultural formations, representations and responses to subjecthood, politics and society. It considers the relationship between psychoanalysis and popular culture as lived and mediated by popular cultural forms. Such forms include media texts (films; novels; streamed, interactive and digital media; video games), as well as broader popular cultural practices (play, public life and citizenship, online sociality). In contrast to other scholarly applications of psychoanalysis, this series explores the creative tensions of thinking through cultural experiences via theoretical psychoanalysis and also clinical work. We ask: what can academic applications of psychoanalysis learn from the clinic, and, inversely, what can clinicians gain from engagement with psychoanalytic theory?
We foreground approaches drawing on Freudian, post-Freudian/object relations and Lacanian theory. We welcome proposals from all fields of psychoanalytic enquiry at the intersections of popular culture.
The series is edited by Jacob Johanssen, Steffen Krüger and Rosemary Overell. It is published in partnership with the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) Scholars’ Network. It was founded by Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates, who continue to serve as advising editors.