Has the unifying power of mass forms of popular culture been undermined by the cultural pluralism of a globalized world? This book suggests not, because at the heart of some key areas of popular culture is a simple celebration of our condition as members of human society. This offers opportunities for a widely shared experience of containment, of having the anxieties of existence tempered by the fact of belonging. And globalization brings greater reach for the containing forms of contemporary popular culture, which appeal across the deep divides of faith, ethnicity, class and gender.

In a series of case studies, the book explores the emotional underpinnings of three major pillars of popular culture--in consumption, sport, and music. Its core idea is that the pleasures of popular culture are at their strongest and best when they confirm our sense of belonging in the containing matrix of the social. Despite the constraint and disappointment inevitably involved in subjection to a social order, the reconciliation with authority which it brings is vital for the containment of the anxieties with which we all struggle. Popular culture is both libidinal and rule-bound; in psychoanalytic language, it brings pleasure in the context of an encounter with the "loving and beloved superego" (Schafer).