This article argues that while psychoanalytic theory has been valuably employed by television, film and cultural studies, there has been no comparable 'psychoanalytic turn' in radio studies. It suggests that the concept of 'containment', as developed variously by Wilfred Bion and Esther Bick, might go some way to explain the powerful role that the voice of the radio presenter can play in the regular listener's internal world, with the capacity both to 'hold' the listener together, and to transform overwhelming fears into more manageable feelings. It argues that the disembodied radio voice does this partly because it recalls the prenatal power of the maternal voice, and partly through the temporal order that regular radio voices impose on the internal and external world. Both Second World War British radio catchphrases and Roosevelt's Fireside Chats are discussed in relation to their containment function. The article also explores the radio as a transitional space, as defined by Donald Winnicott, through which it can constitute listeners into an 'imagined community'. It ends by reflecting on the impact of the angry voice of 2 the 'shock-jock' which, it suggests, amplifies rather than contains overwhelming feelings.
Abstract:Donald Winnicott's 50 BBC radio talks, broadcast between 1943-62, constitute the heart of his oeuvre and were later published in the bestselling book, 'The Child, the Family and the Outside World'. This article argues that, although commentators have routinely alluded to the broadcast origins of these talks, the importance of their institutional context is commonly effaced, as a result dehistoricising them. The article seeks to recover the conditions of production of the talks as 'spoken word', emphasising Winnicott's formidable linguistic skills, his understanding of register and his sensitivity to listeners, qualities developed under the formative influence of Winnicott's two producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie.Contemporary attempts by the BBC to popularise psychoanalysis met with significant resistance and criticism within the Corporation but Winnicott avoided such controversy, it is argued here, because of the way he was positioned within the BBC, and the role he played in wartime British society. The article places Winnicott among other popularisers of psychoanalytic ideas at the time, such as Susan Isaacs, John Bowlby and Ruth Thomas, and contends that, while Winnicott's idealisation of motherhood has been rightly criticised, his broadcasts also conveyed a powerful sense of motherhood as a lived experience.
Affect and ResearchOn first learning that the Scrolls of Auschwitz, the testimony of the Sonderkommando found buried near the crematoria at Birkenau in the extermination camp itself, were to be analysed as literary documents, my reaction was an involuntary but resounding 'no'. Here, in its own way, was surely 'the surfeit of memory' that Charles Maier (1993) had talked about. Not only did it seem almost impossible to view the Scrolls as texts when their very materiality was so charged, but I also could not help but wonder how Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams could mobilise their cognitive skills without also letting loose a school of other, less welcome, sensibilities. The Scrolls, I found myself initially thinking, belonged more in a reliquary than academic seminar. In the event (2010), Chare and Williams's meticulous scholarship and deep sensitivity rendered such misgivings redundant, and I dismissed my own first instincts as those of someone, a child of survivors, with a heightened engagement with testimony. Yet as I began to reflect more on the question, it seemed to me that such instinctual responses should not immediately be evicted but were themselves material that merited analysis because they touch on powerful ideas about how Holocaust research can and should be conducted, and speak of the existence of an underworld of unruly feelings that, by being exposed to the light of scrutiny and discussion, can help deepen and enrich Holocaust scholarship.Debates about the role of affect in researching and writing about the Holocaust are not new: it is almost 15 years since Dominick LaCapra talked of the need 'to examine one's implication in the problems one studiesissues that are pronounced with respect to extremely traumatic phenomena in which one's investment is
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