(Re-)mediating the Unconscious

This special issue reconsiders the role of the unconscious in media experience through a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The volume departs from the classical psychoanalytic tradition that dominated film theory in the 1970s and instead situates unconscious and prereflective processes within a broader interdisciplinary constellation, drawing on cognitive psychology, affective neuroscience, phenomenology, and 4E cognition.

The issue demonstrates that the unconscious is not a hidden repository of repressed content but a dynamic field of prereflective, embodied, and relational processes that underpin media engagement. By revisiting concepts from Freud, Lacan, and Gestalt psychology in dialogue with contemporary theories of embodied simulation, narrative transportation, and sensorimotor coupling, the contributions articulate new ways of conceiving how media address, express, and exploit unconscious processes. Mediation is thus theorized not only as a relay between consciousness and its outside, but also as the technological and cultural infrastructure through which unconscious operations manifest, from habitual practices and affective dispositions to perceptual thresholds and immersive states.

Foregrounding cinema, virtual reality, social platforms, and experimental media art, the volume reveals how unconscious and prereflective dimensions of experience are mobilized, intensified, and transformed by contemporary media ecologies. It highlights the relevance of interdisciplinary exchanges with psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy in reframing the unconscious as a fluid continuum with conscious life, emphasizing its spatial, dynamic, and embodied qualities. Ultimately, the issue positions mediation as both a conceptual lens and a material practice through which the unconscious becomes thinkable, perceptible, and affectively operative in today’s media culture.