Feeling Remediated: The Emotional Afterlife of Psychic Trauma TV

Abstract

Sydney’s Entertainment Centre holds almost 13,000 people. Add to those people their dead relatives. Add again a few coincidental connections to the dead friends of those dead relatives, and combining the dead and the alive, psychic medium John Edward has an enormous crowd to please. In my youth, I spent some years watching Edward’s television programme Crossing Over with John Edward on cable TV. But now Edward is here in person. His website claims that this Sydney tour sold out in 15 minutes, placing him amongst the vendor’s bestselling acts of all time. A murmur erupts as the stage compère arrives to ‘rev us up’. We have come to see John Edward in action. Clap. We have come to witness the real thing. Clap.We have come to be in the presence of dead people. Clap.We have even come to talk to a few of our own. Clap… clap… clap… and with that, John Edward — the world’s first self-proclaimed ‘media medium’ — enters the arena.¹