Cycle: XXXVIII

PhD student: Mario Garzia

Ruolo: R1 - First Stage Researcher

Supervisors: Prof. Elisabetta Gola, Prof. Emiliano Ilardi

"I graduated in Communication Sciences and got my MA in Philosophy and Theories of Communication at the University of Cagliari. My research interests cover mediology, storytelling, imagery, and new technologies in the fields of video games and publishing. The focus of my research is the analysis of the outbreak phenomenon of the representation of psychotherapy in the imagery of new tv seriality. My aim is providing a metaphorical interpretation of the social changes in the digital media sphere, with particular reference to the collective anguish of present times."

Mario Garzia is a PhD student in Philosophy, Epistemology, Human Sciences at the University of Cagliari. He graduated in Communication Sciences and obtained a master's degree in Philosophy and Communication Theories at the same university. His research interests include mediology, storytelling, imaginary and new technologies in the field of video games and publishing. In 2020 for Meltemi he published the essay Back to the 80s. The imaginary of the Eighties in the digital era. He was a contract professor of Sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the University of Cagliari.

THESIS' ABSTRACT

"The crisis of the American Self and the explosion of the representation of psychotherapy in the imaginary of American television series"

According to sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, puritanism, liberalism and romanticism represent the triple foundation of the American Self that determine its individualistic character. The individualistic configuration of Americans is distinguished by the alliance at the same level of private and public: personal success and community building are inseparable.

Ehrenberg identifies two occasions in which American individualism – and therefore the Self – enters into crisis: the first occurs between the Civil War and the First World War, a period in which American society rapidly evolves from small towns to industrial metropolises. During this change, the alliance between personal success and community building is shattered. One of the figures that emerges from this crisis is that of the psychotherapist, a figure destined to occupy a central place in the story that America builds about itself starting from the end of the Second World War. The second instead occurs during the Sixties and Seventies, when consumerist culture definitively asserts itself in society. It has produced abundant literature and wide media coverage through two themes: psychotherapy appears as a conception of the world and a new character, the narcissistic individual, enters the social scene.

In this work we want to identify the third crisis of American individualism that begins with the collapse of the communist bloc and develops up to the present day culminating in the fracture and polarization between the Trumpian and sovereign right of white supremacism, armed militias, conspiracy theories, rural territories and forgotten suburbs, and the radical and progressive left of the open society, of me too, of political correctness, of woke and cancel culture. The new character that seems to emerge on the social scene would seem to be the borderline.

At the same time as this phase, the number of American TV series in which psychotherapy is staged has grown and continues to grow exponentially, so much so that we can speak of the emergence of a phenomenon. This work intends to investigate the relationship between the explosion of this phenomenon and the third crisis of the American Self and what this imagery implies from a symbolic point of view.