I'm sorry this is rather a long post; those not interested in TV, psychoanalysis, and daytime talkshows can skip over it. A while ago some folks were discussing the merits of psychoanalysis as a framework for studying television, and whether psychoanalysis would prove as useful to TV as it has for film. As several people pointed out, most efforts to do this have compared film "spectatorship" to television "viewing" (as in the Flitterman-Lewis essay in _Channels of Discourse_). Film spectatorship is said to be more amenable to a psychoanalytic reading because it more closely approximates the conditions of dreaming (dark theater, immobile subject, "projection" of an image, suturing of spectator into the film text, identification of spectator with characters or the narrative itself, etc.). I have been thinking about all this lately because I am currently doing research on daytime television talkshows. It seems to me that psychoanalysis might be important here, not with regard to the conditions of viewing but with regard to the topics discussed. Even a cursory glance at the daytime talkshow listings in TV Guide for any given week will reveal a disproportionate number of shows focused on sex and romantic and familial relationships, especially rape, incest, marital infidelity, homosexuality, and a range of so-called "perverse" sexual behaviors. There are a number of explanations for this, perhaps the most obvious of which centers on ratings. As Gaye Tuchman ("assembling a network talk-show," 1974) and others have pointed out, the same rule governs show business governs all business: make money. Consequently, Tuchman argues, talkshows strive for predictability by employing formulas and "typifications" that have generated high ratings in the past. This insight helps explain the appearance of the same guests on different shows and the repetition in discussion topics. But this doesn't explain why audiences find shows focused on sex and sexuality compelling in the first place. Interestingly, the repeated discussion of these subjects on national television year after year and show after show links talkshows to traditional Freudian psychoanalysis beyond a shared commitment to the "talking cure." Talkshows seem to address with astonishing frequency the three fundamental questions raised by the analysand's primal fantasies about castration, origin, and seduction outlined in Freud's various essays on sexuality: what sex am I, where do I come from, and with whom is it possible to have sexual relations? With talkshows as with psychoanalysis, there is never a definitive answer, only the infinite staging and restaging of the question through narratives of sexual trauma and sexual "deviance." This is not to suggest that daytime talk itself is a psychoanalytic discourse or even that it champions the methods of psychoanalysis (indeed, talkshows seem to draw almost exclusively from American ego psychology and the tenets of the current the self-help movement, especially the various "twelve-step" programs). Rather, it is to suggest that both talkshows and psychoanalysis may be tapping into a similar source, and performing similar kinds of cultural work: that is, both seem to participate in the exteriorization of our individual psychic landscapes, albeit in different ways. I would be very interested in hearing what people have to say about this, or about daytime talkshows more generally. They're certainly all over the dial these days. One last thing: there was a recent posting by someone whose name I somehow lost (I think the last name was O'Neil) who wrote re: the OJ Simpson coverage and television self-reflexivity: "As for good and bad reflexivity, conservative and progressive re- flexivity, I have argued (in a paper on police 'reality programming') that the idea that reflexivity produces political consciousness should be rejected in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary." I would love to read the paper on police and reality programming if the author is willing. Please respond privately to [log in to unmask] Laura Grindstaff Film Studies Program University of California Santa Barbara, CA. 93106