The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius

doi:10.1162/grey_a_00212

Cited by 23 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…COVID‐19 lockdown brought therapists into family homes in a way that many find unfamiliar. While Bateson and colleagues took film equipment into the suburbs to investigate family life (Geoghegan, 2017), contemporary therapists have on the whole preferred institutional settings. Attempts to rethink family therapy as a practice in the home have been few and far between (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Living in a Zoom world’: Survey mapping how COVID‐19 is changing family therapy practice in the UK

Kenny¹,

Galloghly²,

Porter³

et al. 2021

Journal of Family Therapy

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Following the COVID‐19 pandemic, psychological therapies rapidly moved online in mid‐2020. The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice in the UK (AFT) surveyed the attitudes and practices of systemic therapists in the UK in early October 2020, exploring members’ views and gathered information about ongoing needs. A sample of 312 people were included in a mixed methods analysis. In total, 65% of respondents felt their overall experience of using online video technology professionally was positive, further reflected in responses to two open‐ended questions. Detailed thematic analysis revealed that many positive comments were related to the practical advantages of online working, whilst many negative comments were related to technique and the therapeutic relationship. Possible respondent biases are discussed, and the implications of this change in practice are explored. It remains to be seen if this marks the beginning of a more permanent shift in our field as we explore the potential of new technologies. Practitioner Points The vast majority of UK systemic therapists felt that their experience of online video technology was positive. They noted many practical advantages but also identified many challenges regarding therapeutic techniques and the therapeutic relationship. Therapists developed a range of creative solutions to maximise the therapeutic opportunities of online video.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Living in a Zoom world’: Survey mapping how COVID‐19 is changing family therapy practice in the UK

Kenny¹,

Galloghly²,

Porter³

et al. 2021

Journal of Family Therapy

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“…Particular design decisions enable the transformation of the individual's subjective felt experience into emotion-as-number, making feelings legible to digital systems and those who design and oversee them. Like their non-digital media analogs-psychometric scales or popular mood-tracking questionnaires-moodtracking apps seek to crystallize psychological facts as "stable" data created through a cybernetic circuit of designers, users, and researchers interfacing with media devices (Geoghegan, 2017;Martin, 2007). The ways in which the discourses and practices of emotion as number are understood, represented, and interpreted by the designers and users of mood-tracking applications point to how a particular kind of "structure of feeling" grounded in externalized numerical data has become socialized through digital practice (Williams, 1977).…”

Section: A Primer On Affect Emotion and Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emotive politics of digital mood tracking

Stark

2020

New Media & Society

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Through a values in design (VID) analysis, this article assesses two mood-tracking apps (Moodscope and MoodPanda) to argue the particular interface design choices of these applications serve to influence their users’ sense of sociality and self-fashioning. The design features of these artifacts signal a broader shift in the sociotechnical definitions and discourses of the feeling of an individual, enabling an emergent emotive politics at work across contemporary digital media technologies.

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“…Bernard Geoghegan’s notions of the ‘cybernetic family’, and ‘psy-bernetics’, in which mental illness is described as ambulatory, travelling between family members, offer new and important formulations of the influence of cybernetic theory on psychiatry, particularly in its use of cinematic microanalysis to trace communicative structures. Geoghegan claims that ‘psyberneticians’ used film to chart iterative actions or ‘depthless codes’, thereby placing themselves in opposition to psychoanalysis and its emphasis on singular, traumatic events (Geoghegan, 2017: 79). However, this argument obscures the fact that psychoanalytic theory was itself reshaped in this period by microanalysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

Joice

2020

History of the Human Sciences

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This article examines the use of cinematic microanalysis to capture, decompose, and interpret mother–infant interaction in the decades following the Second World War. Focusing on the films and writings of Margaret Mead, Ray Birdwhistell, René Spitz, and Sylvia Brody, it examines the intellectual culture, and visual methodologies, that transformed ‘pathogenic’ mothering into an observable process. In turn, it argues that the significance assigned to the ‘small behaviours’ of mothers provided an epistemological foundation for the nascent discipline of infant psychiatry. This research draws attention to two new areas of enquiry within the history of emotions and the history of psychiatry in the post-war period: preoccupation with emotional absence and affectlessness, and their personal and cultural meanings; and the empirical search for the origin point, and early chronology, of mental illness.

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The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America

Cited by 23 publications

References 20 publications

‘Living in a Zoom world’: Survey mapping how COVID‐19 is changing family therapy practice in the UK

‘Living in a Zoom world’: Survey mapping how COVID‐19 is changing family therapy practice in the UK

The emotive politics of digital mood tracking

Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

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