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Published online: 15 July 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture, and can we speak of one without the other? In this book review, I juxtapose two books that address this question and speak to the overlaps of psychoanalysis, the clinic, and culture, emphasising the deep and complex interplay of the influences of culture on the clinic. I highlight where these books are conversant and the relevant distinctions/contrasts with which we can encounter the potential for intriguing dialogues. From the beginning, it should be said that the authors in question, Noreen Giffney and Berjanet Jazani, occupy different psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical orientations, that of Kleinian object relations and Lacanian psychoanalysis, respectively. The question of orientation is an important one, to begin with, not least regarding the clinical implications of this in practice and theory but also regarding the thematic and reflexive subjective positioning that the authors occupy within the books’ narratives. Indeed, Jazani (a medical doctor) comments on how becoming a Lacanian was fundamental to her engagement with psychoanalysis and the movement away from the medical orientation in diagnosis. This first-person narrative and ownership of psychoanalytic orientation is something I found particularly compelling and inspirational in each account and will elaborate more on presently. Why do we choose the psychoanalytic orientation we may find ourselves in? There are certainly times when providing an answer to that question for myself would seem legitimate reasoning for the work of foraging in difficult Lacanian seminars, for example. Before expanding further on some of these interesting dialectics opened by Giffney and Jazani, it strikes me as important to define culture before we continue, as this is something I considered as I progressed through the discussions of the overlaps of psychoanalysi