ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a clinician’s perspective on the ways in which television seeps into the unconscious mind, in order to satisfy a series of very basic, very primitive, wishes and desires. Since its inception, practitioners of psychoanalysis have participated in many filmic and dramatic and television productions, even musical ones. In view of the horror that Mohammad Sidique Khan, Germaine Maurice Lindsay, and their accomplices would perpetrate on London and the world, one might have imagined that they would have had other preoccupations than spouting dialogue from a 1980s television programme. The Austrian cinema director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a representative of the 1920s movement in German art known as “Die neue Sachlichkeit”, made a movie entitled Geheimnisse einer Seele which debuted at the Gloria Palast, the lavish cinema-house in Berlin. Apart from a very small number of communications, few psychoanalytical writings have yet explored how the patient’s television viewing enters the consulting room.
