This is a timely book looking at the enormous impact that social networking has had on our society and how it is profoundly influencing our lives. While there is currently a great deal of thinking about the psychological ramifications of these sorts of changes, there has been little work looking at the psychodynamics of individuals who use and depend upon these social networks, and the consequences for themselves and their important relationships. Popular hubs of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter feature centrally in this text, as well as the impact of the ubiquity of access...

Stop Making Sense offers an original and compelling theory of music -from the perspective of the real- as this term is understood according to the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis. Located in a mediating position between the subject and the real, music is here regarded as a form of social bond analogous to but quite distinct from the language of speech, operating -outside sense-. Music, like mathematics, is often regarded as a -language- of the real in two senses: as a particulate system of essentially meaningless notes and tones that nevertheless provide regularities offering...

Faced by the increasing divisiveness and volatility of electoral politics, and the rise of illiberal fundamentalisms, the social sciences may seem to lack the imagination necessary to make sense of the world. In this unusual book of political psychology, based on the idea that we hold ourselves together through a combination of restraint and release, Barry Richards draws on psychoanalysis and its creative interpretations of everyday experience to consider the current malaise of politics in relation to the huge vitality of popular culture. In a wide-ranging analysis, that links topics as...