Therapeutic reflections: In treatment and the politics of psychoanalytic cultural criticism

In recent years, critics working with psychoanalysis have increasingly turned their attention to the relationship between therapy and culture. Following Lacan and Foucault, many critics are wary of the way in which the idea of therapy has become a tool of surveillance and control, whilst those influenced by the object relations tradition concern themselves with the therapeutic effect that might be gleaned from cultural experience. Through a close reading of the HBO series In Treatment, this article explores the contours of this debate in order to theorise what psychoanalysis might offer to contemporary cultural studies. The article argues, ultimately, for a perspective informed by both Lacanian and object relations psychoanalysis that can account for the therapeutic value of cultural experience whilst concurrently offering a critical analysis of the ways in which representation is implicated in relations of power. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.