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Reading, let alone reviewing, this book was initially off-putting for me because of its ‘culture-breast’ title. It seemed too overly intimate or Klein-bound to me. Nevertheless, after working through this book's long and overly detailed first chapter, I found the issues it raises in its remaining chapters both innovative and relevant to psychotherapy.
Nor is its first chapter without interest. In it, as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Giffney highlights the tendency of psychosocial studies to focus, as Freud did in his book Totem and Taboo, on ways psychoanalytic findings can illuminate cultural issues. By contrast, she focuses on ways in which cultural objects, particularly from the creative arts, can be used to illuminate what occurs within the psychoanalytic consulting room so as to enable psychotherapists to work in increased psychoanalytic depth with their patients.
This brings Giffney to her book's second chapter. In it she draws attention to the value of infant observation in psychoanalytic training since, she says, it provides trainees with an ‘immersive and authentic experience to navigate and reflect upon’ (p. 69). This, she says, is due not least to the fact that it requires the trainee to recall and formulate their infant observation experience in writing process notes about it, in discussing it in small group seminars, and in structuring a final study or report. No surprise, therefore, that Giffney particularly applauds the ersatz infant observation experience of visitors to an art exhibition invited to cradle a hand-blown glass sculpture of a newborn baby.
She uses this example in introducing the value she attaches to seminars geared to raising the sensitivity of psychoanalytic trainees and practitioners to the immediate experience of the transference and countertransference in psychotherapy by getting them to attend to, and discuss in facilitator-led seminars, their immediate experience of particular cultural objects or works of art. She illustrates th