Most people have, at some point, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this book argues that the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of film and television viewing in the home is in fact extraordinary.

Jo Whitehouse-Hart is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. She has published in the areas of television and psychoanalysis, audience research, and the creative industries using psychoanalytic and psychosocial perspectives and methods.

Introduction: Puzzling Viewing 1. Favourites, TV and Home: Psychosocial Perspectives 2. Psychosocial Methods and Audience Research 3. Spending Too Much Time Watching TV? 4. Favourite Things: Evocative Objects in the Life of a Castaway 5. Mothers, Sons, Siblings and The Imaginative World of Working Class Women's Viewing 6. Risky Viewing and Risky Method? 7. Conclusion: Viewing is Psychosocial