Michael Eigen – författare

Many people seek help because they feel dragged down by a sense of inner deadness that persists in an otherwise full and meaningful life. These individuals somehow remain untouched by their own inner experiences; a deadness persists that can cripple their entire life or part of it. This book shows what is involved in enduring and working with psychic deadness in a day-to-day, session-by-session basis.

Wilfred Bion once said, "I use the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis." Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith, infinity and intensity of experience, shatter and growth of being that supports dimensions which sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life. This work is a psychospiritual adventure touching the places Kabbalah and psychoanalysis give something to each other. Michael Eigen uses aspects of Bion, Winnicott, Akivah, Luria and Nachman (and many more) as colours on a palette to open realities for growth of experience. Bion called faith "the psychoanalytic attitude" and Eigen here explores creative, paradoxical, multidimensional aspects of faith. Eigen previously wrote of psychoanalysis as a form of prayer in The Psychoanalytic Mystic. In Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis he writes of creative faith. Sessions as crucibles in which diverse currents of personality mix in new ways, alchemy or soul chemistry perhaps, or simply homage to our embryonic nature which responds to the breath of feeling moment to moment.

The author relates the stories of two patients reshaping their lives into something they could believe in, and examines the complex roles of the therapist and therapy, self/other and mind/body relations, and the dramatic interplay of faith and catastrophe.

Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image. In this compelling book, the author leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of "no", shame, his session with Andre Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner.

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere.

These lively conversations provide a unique insight into the mind of one of the most original psychoanalysts of our century. The various subjects covered here spread over a wide range of interest, which Michael Eigen talks about with a rich and almost ecstatic flow. He analyzes the madness and psychopathy of our society, and tells us of work with clients and himself. Topics expand to include spirituality, meetings with British and French analysts, psychoanalytic writing, work with trauma and many other areas that go with being alive today and and with the difficulties we share in constituting ourselves as fully human beings. This book provides a wonderful introduction to his writings and for Eigen readers it is a delightfulnand challenging filling out og nuances of his life and work.

To feel like an impostor is a recurrent theme among artists and to feel false as a person is a crucial theme in psychoanalysis. The sense that one is living a lie is important to many and often goes with a sense that an important flame is waning. Fused with this is fear that self-discovery is sinful. Guilt, fear and shame attaches to development and to failure to develop. Fusion of opposites is the rule in psychic life. Creative theft melds with destructive dreads. Unbearable agonies prompt easeful lies and falsity to escape pain and helplessness ... Real touches real, sometimes for evil, sometimes for good, often the two indiscernible, indistinguishable. This book affirms that there is something in us that works with all its might to tip the balance towards the good.- Michael Eigen, from the Foreword

This book explores ways we make contact with the depths in ourselves and each other. We are deeply moved by contact we make with life, yet also puzzled by a need to break or lose contact, and often suffer wounds by failure of contact to be born. Our sense of contact is tenacious and fragile, subject to deformations, plagued with a sense of jeopardy. Chapters focus on ways we make-and-break contact in the wounded aloneness of addiction, the wounded beauty of psychosis, the importance of not knowing and wordlessness, ways we transmit emotions, the need to start over, and harm we cause by trying to get rid of and misuse tendencies that are part of our makeup. Our contact with life, ourselves, each other is challenged. And through it all, we have need for deep contact, contact with the depths, fulfilling and suspenseful. Contact we never stop growing into, part of the mystery, care and love of everyday life.

Dialogues with Michael Eigen spans 20 years of diverse interviews and interactions with the acclaimed psychologist Michael Eigen, including interlocutors from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Sweden, Israel, and the United States, published together for the first time. This book explores the importance of soul reveries, psychoanalytic "prayers", and cultivation of psychoanalytic "faith" in Eigen’s work. The dialogues lay out Eigen’s privileging of emotions as messengers in need of recognition, as welcoming inner gestures for incubation, enabling a deep vitalizing contact of being with oneself and others. Eigen reminds us that struggling with one’s personality remains a life-long task, exposing us to various existential sufferings, agonies, traumas, and losses in need of soul confession, if not analytic prayer.The book seeks to help readers find, touch, and work with emotional realities a little better and support a growing intimate, creative relation to ourselves. The rich explorations of the interviews and interactions with Eigen help contribute to further appreciation of our experiential life and worlds it opens. Building on his work on mind–body–soul connections, Dialogues with Michael Eigen is an essential book for anyone interested in the spiritual side of psychoanalysis.

Dialogues with Michael Eigen spans 20 years of diverse interviews and interactions with the acclaimed psychologist Michael Eigen, including interlocutors from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Sweden, Israel, and the United States, published together for the first time. This book explores the importance of soul reveries, psychoanalytic "prayers", and cultivation of psychoanalytic "faith" in Eigen’s work. The dialogues lay out Eigen’s privileging of emotions as messengers in need of recognition, as welcoming inner gestures for incubation, enabling a deep vitalizing contact of being with oneself and others. Eigen reminds us that struggling with one’s personality remains a life-long task, exposing us to various existential sufferings, agonies, traumas, and losses in need of soul confession, if not analytic prayer.The book seeks to help readers find, touch, and work with emotional realities a little better and support a growing intimate, creative relation to ourselves. The rich explorations of the interviews and interactions with Eigen help contribute to further appreciation of our experiential life and worlds it opens. Building on his work on mind–body–soul connections, Dialogues with Michael Eigen is an essential book for anyone interested in the spiritual side of psychoanalysis.

This book explores the intertwining of myth, dream, and everyday reality, which mark the prose and poetry of both. It focuses on psychic reality, with psychoanalysis and Kabbalah tools in this great enterprise of learning to work with ourselves.

Damaged Bonds explores W. R. Bion's writings on dream-work growing within damaged bonds and concerns dramas revolving around difficulties in psychic digestion and clinical work in the trenches.

This book contains an eighteen hour seminar, given over a three day period, presented by Michael Eigen in Seoul, Korea, in 2009. The seminar traces the role of faith in transformational processes in psychotherapy.

This book contains an eighteen hour seminar - given over a three day period - presented by Michael Eigen in Seoul, Korea, in 2007. The seminar traces transformations of madness and faith in psychoanalysis - particularly Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott - emphasizing basic rhythms of experience steeped in clinical details, social issues and personal

This book explores nuances of faith-no-faith moments, twists and turns of living and focuses on variations of faith, beginning with nature, sleep, beauty, goodness, the opening-closing of the human face, and the paradox of the growth of faith through pain and shattering.

This book emphasises on Kabbalah and psychoanalysis and the two domains intertwining almost seamlessly. It focuses on birth processes at different ages and situations, exploring in detail how psychoanalysis interweaves with themes from life, clinical work, and Kabbalah.

This book examines the tension, caused by the conflict between poise and catastrophe, in the therapeutic relationship. It emphasizes positive contributions to growth of self made by seemingly pathological or disruptive movements within the therapy situation.

This book examines the key ordering—disordering processes of the psychotic self. It draws on Sigmund Freud, Jung, object relation and selfpsychologies, and, particularly, the work of Winnicott, Bion, and Elkin.

This book portrays a range of individuals who seek nourishment from poisons or, to variable extents, are poisoned by the nourishment they seek. It describes the analyses leading to de-programming the patients from their toxins and intoxicators.

This book is an extended reverie, reflection, confession, assessment, engagement with psychic reality. It offers further invitation into the mystery at the heart of the human experience that is, at its core, also at the heart of the psychoanalytic journey.

Between 2007 and 2011, Michael Eigen gave three seminars in Seoul, each running over three days and covering different aspects of psychoanalysis, spirituality and the human psyche. This book is based on a transcription of the third seminar, which took place in 2011, on the subject of Pain and Beauty. The first two were published as Madness and Murder (2010) and Faith and Transformation (2011).A conjunction of the pain that shatters and beauty that heals is made by many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate.This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

In this provocative and insightful new book, psychologist Michael Eigen presents a phenomenology of ecstatic states. Ecstasy is a force to be reckoned with -- sometimes creative, sometimes destructive. Eigen argues that there is an ecstasy that comes through the ever-necessary confrontation of our psychic cores with suffering and degradation, and he shows that when we can learn to be present with these feelings, they add to the tone and texture of our lives, and help us to feel real. The author draws heavily on autobiographical material, psychotherapy sessions, case studies and psychoanalytic thinking, along with literary and biblical sources, demonstrating his reputation as one of the leading creative thinkers among psychotherapists in America. The result is an extremely intelligent, lyrical work, which succeeds in being theoretically well-informed without being pedantic. Written as a subjective first-hand account, Ecstasy will appeal to psychotherapists as well as to readers and students interested in spirituality and philosophy.

"When two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created." This provocative quote by renowned psychoanalyst W.R. Bion is the point of departure for Eigen's new work. In the tradition of Martin Buber, Eigen explores the broad spectrum of emotions we experience in our relatedness to others, from feelings of longing, plenitude, and fulfillment to starvation, suffocation, and blind rage. Unlike authors of "easy" self-help books, Eigen embraces the storms of life as a critical aspect of our human bond. For Eigen, the emotional storm is not pathological, but rather integral to our humanity and instrumental to our growth and development. For this reason, he looks critically at our attempts to blunt our emotional response to the world around us. Like Eigen's other work, Emotional Storm weaves case studies, literary references, and psychoanalytic theory into an integrated, complex understanding.

Between 2007 and 2011, Michael Eigen gave three seminars in Seoul, each running over three days and covering different aspects of psychoanalysis, spirituality and the human psyche. This book is based on a transcription of the third seminar, which took place in 2011, on the subject of Pain and Beauty. The first two were published as Madness and Murder (2010) and Faith and Transformation (2011).A conjunction of the pain that shatters and beauty that heals is made by many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate.This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

This book includes material from Michael Eigen’s celebrated and long-running seminar series, to explore some of the classic and contemporary key concepts in psychoanalytic theory and practice.Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Bion and Lacan, Eigen explores key psychoanalytic themes which have risen to prominence over the last decade such as the place of politics in psychoanalysis, life, death and psychic deadness, and the role of lies and deception in the consulting room and our world.With over 50 years of experience in leading seminars and working psychoanalytically, Eigen's work is essential reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

This book includes material from Michael Eigen’s celebrated and long-running seminar series, to explore some of the classic and contemporary key concepts in psychoanalytic theory and practice.Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Bion and Lacan, Eigen explores key psychoanalytic themes which have risen to prominence over the last decade such as the place of politics in psychoanalysis, life, death and psychic deadness, and the role of lies and deception in the consulting room and our world.With over 50 years of experience in leading seminars and working psychoanalytically, Eigen's work is essential reading for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Wilfred Bion once said, "I use the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis." Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith, infinity and intensity of experience, shatter and growth of being that supports dimensions which sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life.This work is a psychospiritual adventure touching the places Kabbalah and psychoanalysis give something to each other. Michael Eigen uses aspects of Bion, Winnicott, Akivah, Luria and Nachman (and many more) as colours on a palette to open realities for growth of experience. Bion called faith "the psychoanalytic attitude" and Eigen here explores creative, paradoxical, multidimensional aspects of faith.Eigen previously wrote of psychoanalysis as a form of prayer in The Psychoanalytic Mystic. In Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis he writes of creative faith. Sessions as crucibles in which diverse currents of personality mix in new ways, alchemy or soul chemistry perhaps, or simply homage to our embryonic nature which responds to the breath of feeling moment to moment.This book brings out ways that a sense of infinity interweaves with everyday life, at the same time it faces the destructiveness of life and human nature and attempts to work with it. Read these chapters and see where they take you. They are meant as personal support for your own inner work, touching nooks and crannies hungry for touch.