Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013

This introduction contextualizes the work included in this special edition in terms of the activities of the Media and the Inner World research network. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, it signals the importance of the reparative, emotional work of radio past and present. As we discuss, the emotional resonance of the medium holds a special significance for individuals, for whom radio listening often goes hand in hand with reflective experiences of selfhood and identity. The role of radio is also discussed in relation to our emotionalized experience of popular culture and the world at large and the shaping of shared identities and ‘imagined communities’. We argue that the social and political function of radio arguably hinges on the psychological power it has because of its status as an important internal object of the mind.

Contemporary young people inhabit an environment that is saturated with a variety of new media platforms competing for their attention. While as a demographic they tend to listen to traditional radio broadcasting less and less, under certain conditions the traditional radio transmission can provide an oasis of consistent positive influence on the emotional well-being of its listeners. Drawing on personal experience as the mental health contributor to BBC Radio 1’s public service phone-in advice show The Surgery with Aled, the author reflects on the ways in which this programming may shed light on the curative and protective factors implicit in its broadcast. Using both personal reflective experiences alongside the application of object relations theory, the nature of this public service advice broadcast is critically examined for the unconscious psychodynamic components that underlie the more obvious conscious role the advice itself provides. It is proposed that traditional radio programmes that meet some basic criteria including regularity, authenticity and a ‘listener-centric’ approach can enable an ‘object constancy’, which ultimately creates the overall curative effect for its listeners.

This article explores the intertwining of ideas about radio and popular psychology in broadcasting’s formative years by focusing on the case study of one pioneering BBC producer, Lance Sieveking. Using Sieveking’s private papers and other archival sources, the article attempts to reconstruct his private and emotional life in order to help us understand more fully the unusual and experimental programmes he made in the late 1920s. A focus on Sieveking shows an early example of radio being used as a medium capable of representing – and exploring – one’s ‘inner life’. More specifically, in the 1920s, Sieveking’s work is an example of radio being used as a means of working through anxieties and neuroses that are a recognized feature of life in Britain in the aftermath of World War I. It argues that when analysing the creative process in radio – which is, after all, what Paddy Scannell has called a ‘human-made’ thing – we might want to attend more closely to the personal psychology of its producers.

The article concerns a part of a wider project, ‘A Remembered Soundscape’, in which I am attempting to recapture the sounds of my childhood and to write about them as, what Murray Shafer has called, an ‘earwitness’. The focus here is on the remembered experience of radio listening over two decades between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, a time when ‘the wireless’ was the most significant source of mediated sound. Memories of listening in the setting of the home are compared with the contemporary experience of encountering archival recordings. An added motivation for the project is the challenge of trying to develop the limited vocabulary that relates to sound.

Since ‘memory is partial’ (Kuhn) and ‘what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important as what it remembers’ (Samuel), recall is checked against family and public documentation – family diaries and letters, and records in Mass Observation Archive. Examples are given of remembered radio programmes and the everyday domestic context within which they were first heard and embedded. The pace, accent and intonation of these examples, heard in the present day, are what are found most alien in this exercise in self-ethnography.

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 World War II 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 the ‘shock jock’, which, it suggests, amplifies rather than contains overwhelming feelings.

This discussant piece introduces and explains a psycho-cultural approach to understanding the emotional dimensions of radio listening and creative production. It then explores the ways in which radio is unconsciously used by listeners as a tool for maintaining psychic coherency. A psycho-cultural approach is a valuable tool for research because it is specifically attuned to the emotional dimensions of radio use and programme-making in a therapeutically infused culture. It also provides a means of explaining why radio is used in particular ways, in terms of the everyday maintenance of the self. The article closes with a consideration of the meta-psychological consequences of convergence and recent developments in listening technologies. The aim of the article is to initiate a discussion with radio scholars on the utility of this approach.

Freudian Slippage (BBC Radio 4 Tx: 13 & 20 December 2010, 8 p.m., 30 min.) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wld52