ABSTRACT
Based on a presentation delivered at the Freud Museum in London, and commissioned by the research network Media and the Inner World, this chapter examines the ways in which patients refer to specific television programmes during the course of psychoanalytical sessions. The author has described many clinical examples from his daily psychotherapeutic practice, which illuminate the ways in which television references have become the new form of free association in contemporary mental health work, and he considers how patients have forged their identities through self-object identifications with the television itself. This chapter encapsulates the ways in which the media has now become deeply internalised into the very structure of the unconscious mind, and how references to television and other forms of public engagement can provide, nevertheless, a very detailed and very intimate portrait of the specific psychological conflicts and challenges of every patient or couple.
