Andrew Asibong, PhD, is a psychotherapist and film theorist. He is a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and a registrant of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
1. It's a hard world for little things: Post-traumatic attachments to the eerily moving image: a theoretical framework 2. I just wanted to tell you that everything's going to be all right: My life in the bush of film-ghosts: an autoethnographic analysis 3. May I be alive when I die!: Psycho-televisual regeneration six feet under: an audience study 4. In this here place, we flesh: Racialised vulnerability and collective dreaming: film groups in the time of #BlackLivesMatter
This book explores how traumatic experiences of impingement and neglect - in childhood and adulthood, and at both the family and the state level - may create a desire in us to be parented by certain kinds of screen media that we unconsciously believe are "watching over" us when nothing else seems to be.
Andrew Asibong explores how viewers make psychical use of eerily moving images, observed in film and television and later taken into an already traumatised mind, in order to facilitate some form of reparation for a stolen experience of caregiving. It explores the possibility of a media-based "working through" of both the general traumas of early environmental failure and the particular traumas of viewers racialised as Black, eventually asking how politicised film groups in the age of Black Lives Matter might heal from a troubled past and prepare for an uncertain future through the spontaneous discussion - in the here and now - of enlivening images of potentially deadly vulnerability.
Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television studies, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, culture, race and ethnicity.