Psychoanalysis and the Culture-Breast (2): Literature, Sue Rainsford

We are fed at the breast of culture, not wholly but to differing degrees. A series of public conversations around our experiences with cultural objects, with a focus on our emotional and unconscious attachments to art, literature, music, and film.

What happens to us emotionally and unconsciously when we listen to a song, watch a film, encounter an art object, or read a novel? How might the way we engage with cultural experiences relate back to our earliest encounters with the breast or bottle as infants? How might our encounters with cultural objects be understood as a feeding experience that provides us with sustenance? What might our making of, encounters with, and uses of cultural objects tell us about ourselves?

Each session will focus on a discussion of a particular cultural object made by an invited guest, which attendees are requested to access and engage with either during or in advance of each session. Each session will begin with an informal conversation between psychoanalytic psychotherapist and psychosocial theorist Noreen Giffney and an invited guest from one of the applied fields of art, literature, music or film, before opening up the discussion to everyone in attendance. The invited guests are Jennifer Rubell (conceptual artist, New York), Sue Rainsford (fiction and arts writer, Dublin) and Amanda Coogan (performance artist and sign language interpreter, Belfast).

These sessions will invite attendees to enter into a shared experience with particular cultural objects, to facilitate individuals in the group thinking about their unique encounter with each object, but also to reflect on our experience with cultural objects in our lives more generally.

During this session, we will discuss Sue Rainsford’s novel, Redder Days, as a group, so please read the novel in advance of the event.

This series is open to anyone interested in why we react or attach to cultural objects in particular ways. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, psychiatrists, group analysts, mental health workers and peer support workers, as well as artists and curators, and academic researchers and students in the fields of psychoanalytic studies, psychosocial studies, cultural studies, visual culture, and the arts and humanities more broadly.

Places are limited so early registration is advised. This event is organised around the idea of a shared experience and conversation, so attendance is necessary. A recording of the event will not be available to registrants. 

This series is organised on the occasion of the publication of Noreen Giffney’s book, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (Routledge 2021), which introduces a new psychoanalytic concept, ‘the culture-breast’, to explore the formative and enduring influence of cultural objects in our lives.

Series Schedule

• Saturday 28 January 2023 at 12 pm-2 pm UK time Jennifer Rubell (conceptual artist, New York). We will discuss a series of Jennifer Rubell’s artworks during the event.
• Saturday 25 February 2023 at 12 pm-2 pm UK time Sue Rainsford (fiction and arts writer, Dublin). We will discuss Sue Rainsford’s novel, Redder Days, as a group, so please read the novel in advance of the event.
• Saturday 25 March 2023 at 12 pm-2 pm UK time Amanda Coogan (performance artist and sign language interpreter). We will discuss a series of images of Amanda Coogan’s performances during the event.

Convener

Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a psychosocial theorist. She is the author of the book, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (Routledge 2021), and the author and/or editor of a number of additional articles, books and book chapters on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director of ‘Psychoanalysis +’, an international, interdisciplinary initiative that brings together clinical, academic and artistic approaches to, and applications of, psychoanalysis. She lives in County Donegal on the north west coast of Ireland and lectures on psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies at Ulster University, Belfast. She has been taking singing lessons for almost two years and is enjoying the experience of learning how to make sounds.

Invited Guest

Sue Rainsford is a fiction and arts writer based in Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel, Follow Me To Ground began as a response to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun. In particular, the dense and poetic language applied to female experience in these critical and clinical contexts. By working with the images and metaphors inside these works, she wanted to complicate the templates of virgin, mother and crone, and to ask what precisely proves so enduringly unnerving where female agency is concerned.  

In addition to the recurrent themes of power and desire, a central concern of her second novel, Redder Days, is transgression and taboo. Through surreal imagery she attempted to challenge expectations about the kinds of bodies that are likely to leak and stain — to leave a trace of themselves behind. These images fed into broader questions about why certain bodily processes qualify as abject, and why certain bodies are routinely othered and ostracised.

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology Dublin, she completed her MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont. She has been awarded residencies by such institutions as IMMA – The Irish Museum of Modern Art and Maynooth University. She is currently the Writer in Residence at University College Dublin. Recent commissions include RTÉ Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4.