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This book is in turn engaging, reassuring and provocative. Richards uses psychoanalysis - primarily Kleinian in orientation - to analyse the pleasures and constraints of engagement with various aspects of popular leisure pursuits. These include watching football, visiting the country, driving, cigarette smoking and listening to pop music. He bases his critique on a particular ‘psychoanalytic sensibility’, based on interpretations of associations and awareness of his own position within popular culture.
Richards argues that popular culture offers the opportunity for the expression and gratification of primitive libidinal satisfactions within secure and authoritative, collectively sanctioned boundaries. In Winnicottian terms, popular culture provides a series of contained spaces for play. Richards argues that this facilitates both the working through of personal developmental difficulties and offers a means of expression within the wider social community.
Richards illustrates his thesis with a number of closely argued concrete accounts. He shows, for example, in a detailed analysis of song lyrics and personal biographies of pop stars, how pop music may offer the adolescent (or adult, for that matter) the opportunity to work through issues of separation and loss, to manage hostile and ambivalent feelings and to come to terms with his or her developing sexuality. Another rich chapter examines the way in which football provides a vehicle for libidinal pleasures and the opportunity to re-enact adjustment to difficult social constraints. The glory of winning and the idealization of the team enable the supporter to express aggression and partisanship, whilst the prohibition on handling the ball (a form of sublimation) and the need to re-master loss (when your team loses) form constraints