Popular Culture: The Culture of Public Confession: Talk Shows, Perversion, and Neurosis

Recently, we have witnessed an emergence on television of a form of discourse that appears to approach many of the desired aims of both psychoanalysis and liberalism. Of course, I am talking about talk shows and their dedication to the establishment of public spaces for the airing of private issues in a democratic setting of free speech. What one finds on talk shows is an open discussion of some of the most repressed and essential subjects of modern American culture: drug abuse, domestic violence, changing gender roles, the breakup of the nuclear family, and so on. This open form of discourse counters the Left's criticism that television only presents upper- and middle-class heterosexual men and women who suffer from none of the major problems that plague our society.1 Talk shows often concentrate on the lower strata of the socio-economic ladder, and they rarely shy away from any type of controversial social problem. In thus rendering visible neglected aspects of American culture, these programs could be said to perform a valuable social function.

But are these programs liberating, or do they participate in what Foucault has called a “disciplining of the soul?”2 In other words, when citizens are encouraged to talk in a public forum about what appear to be their most intimate desires and experiences, are they not being pushed toward an alienating discourse that simply extends the reach of dominant ideologies further into their private lives? More specifically, does not this form of social discourse contribute to the production of a perverse culture where subjects are forced to submit all of their sexual desires to a rigid set of rules and scenarios?

Lacan's theory of perversion can help explain both why people go on these shows and why people watch them. For Lacan, the central feature of all perversions is the attempt to force sexual enjoyment into the intersubjective field of the symbolic Other.3 While perverse activities appear to be based on a desire to transgress t