A pragmatic cognitive model for the interpretation of verbal–visual communication in television news programmes

The combination of the verbal and the visual track in television news discourse poses a considerable analytical challenge. In the viewers’ minds the co-habitation of these two semiotic channels triggers a complex network of inferential processes, based on expectations of coherence and relevance, with which they make sense of the representation of the world offered in the news. Through the analysis of a number of news items, this article considers the cognitive processes which viewers may activate when extracting meaning from the multimedial messages contained in television news. The analysis of news items from two British television networks offered by the authors traces the possible meanings that, it is assumed, become available to a potential, ‘idealised’ or ‘implied’ viewer, who accesses the information with some social and cultural knowledge of contemporary Britain. Building on existing studies, the article proposes a model for the classification of verbal–visual relations

Psychoanalytic sociology and the traumas of history: Alexander Mitscherlich between the disciplines

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-twentieth century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt school, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich?s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ?missing? historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication doesn?t hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines

On what citizens mean by feeling 'European' : perceptions of news, symbols and borderless-ness

What is ‘Europe’ for citizens? What do people mean when they say that they feel, or not, European? A growing amount of literature has been produced by political scientists and journalists alike to try and assess the absence or existence of a European identity, but it is very unclear what people tell us when answering our questions on their political identities. Multiple theories of political identities exist, imposing fairly rigid and untested (and, essentially, quantitatively untestable) assumptions on what they mean. No deductive technique, however, would allow us to let citizens explain to us the deeper signification of citizens’ answers to our questions on who they are and how they perceive their attachment to varying political communities. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of a series of focus group discussions run in France, the UK, and the Netherlands with over ninety participants on what citizens believe to be ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’. They tell us how they believe the media inform them on Europe, and how they perceive the main symbols of the European Union. They explain what matters to them in terms of their direct experience of European integration, and finally, what a ‘European identity’ means to them and whether they think of themselves and of their peoples as European or not. We discover that citizens are relatively cynical with regards to the perceived bias of the media on the European question, derive impressionistic but somewhat surprising findings on the meaning they attribute to Europe through its symbols, with references to peace, cosmopolitanism and other ‘anti-identity’ values, and that ultimately, their predominant perception of European-ness relies, precisely, on the disappearance of internal EU borders. Finally, we can identify two main ‘ways’ for citizens to define a European identity, a predominantly ‘civic’ one, and the other, a predominantly ‘cultural’ one