Culture and the Unconscious: Noreen Giffney, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (New York:  Routledge, 2021;  190 pp.)

Noreen Giffney's recently published The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis poses the following provocative question: ‘How might culture be understood as a breast?’ (2021, p. 103). As will be clear to most readers, ‘the breast’ in psychoanalysis foregrounds ‘the mother in the developing infant's life’, but also ‘the caregiver more generally’ (p. xx). Here, Giffney cites D.W. Winnicott's well-known formulation: ‘There is no such thing as a baby’, there is always also a carer attending it, an ‘environment-individual setup’ (Winnicott cited in Giffney, p. xx). At the heart of The Culture-Breast is the suggestion that cultural objects ‘form part of that environment’ (p. xxi). While I question here how cultural objects are integral to that relational situation, The Culture-Breast is a notable contribution to psychoanalytic scholarship.

The book is comprised of three core chapters. The first considers the relevance of psychosocial studies for psychoanalytic training and practice, the second offers several ‘non-clinical case studies’, and the third outlines the ‘culture-breast […] a new clinical concept’ (pp. 90, 102). It is the third chapter on which I focus here.

I am not a clinician, and it is here that I found The Culture-Breast, to put it plainly, most interesting.1

It is in her third chapter that Giffney, often employing self-analysis, taking herself as a case, most directly poses the question of why some people come to rely on cultural objects. ‘We all make use of cultural objects of one form or another unconsciously’, Giffney writes, but there are ‘particular individuals’ who ‘depend on cultural objects for psychical survival’ (p. 103). Why this ‘intensity of feeling’ in c