Hays 1 The Non-Relation in ASMR and “Satisfying” Videos I aim to produce a close reading of two Youtube phenomena with evident psychoanalytic underpinnings —ASMR and Satisfying videos. These types of videos can be seen to aestheticize or attach a positive valence to what could otherwise be considered a pathological symptom. Videos in the ASMR and Satisfying genres (with 72,700,000 and 136,000,000 Google Video results, respectively, at the time of writing) stage an interpassive obsessive-compulsion. They clean floors pristinely, take tiny bites of food or obsessively drum on objects so we don’t have to. And they can do so breathlessly, in an hour-long barrage, devoid of narrative context. To differentiate quickly between the two genres: ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos feature a human actor whispering, carefully eating or producing faint scrunching, crunching or crackling sounds using objects or surfaces. Satisfying videos are (most often) widely sourced compilations of five-to-twenty second clips of some climactic physical or chemical process, in which something undergoes a phase change, is cut apart, peeled off or wiped clean, in such a way that parts move from the obfuscated to the discrete, or from discrete to the obfuscated. (The ASMR/Satisfying coupling also maps onto the service economy/manufacturing economy divide—the former assumes the anonymous gentility of an employee towards a customer, and the latter revels in the dazzling efficiency of a manufacturing process.) So while the genres are starkly differentiated, with different Freudian trappings, they are alike in their supposed therapeutic value. In their titles the videos are billed as soporifics and stress-alleviators. From a psychoanalytic angle, one wonders whether such a self-help system would create a negative-feedback loop—deferring onto the Other the obsessive rituals which were already a distraction from one’s fear of the lack in the Other. Should we consider these