Psychoanalysis and the Culture-Breast: Noreen Giffney in conversation with Amanda Coogan

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? How might psychoanalysis help us to reflect on these experiences?

This online event hosted by the Freud Museum, London will feature a conversation between Dr Noreen Giffney (psychoanalytic psychotherapist, author of ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’ and lecturer at Ulster University, Belfast) and Dr Amanda Coogan (performance artist, Belfast).

Attendees will be invited to enter into a shared experience with Amanda’s art performances and to reflect on our experience with cultural objects (art, film, literature, music) in our lives more generally.

Registration
Places are limited so early registration is advised: https://www.freud.org.uk/event/psychoanalysis-and-the-culture-breast-3-performance-art-amanda-coogan/

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.

Speakers
Amanda Coogan is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across the medias of live art, performance, photography and video. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. Using gesture and context she makes allegorical and poetic works that challenge expected contexts. Her works encompass a multitude of media: Objects, text, moving and still image but all circulate around her live performances. The long durational aspect of her presentations invites elements of chaos with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of the contexts. Her work moves freely between solo presented live performances, group performances and living installation.

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 and lectures on psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies at Ulster University, Belfast.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freud Museum in London, ‘Psychoanalysis +’, the Student Counselling Service at Atlantic Technological University Donegal, and the Centre for Communication, Media and Cultural Studies at Ulster University.