Commentaries on the Work of Michael Eigen is an accessible and engaging introduction to this ground-breaking psychoanalytic sage. Through exploration of Eigen’s two key texts, The Psychotic Core and Emotional Storm, the author addresses universal human concerns of madness and the difficulties of our emotional life. In conversational style, the book mirrors Eigen's chapter-by-chapter approach, focusing on and amplifying important aspects of each work. Bagai follows threads of several key themes from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, religious thought, and the humanities, and chapters include discussion of relevant theory from Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Buber, and Levinas, among others. Rather than a comprehensive or systematic exegesis of Eigen's work, Bagai’s commentary expands nodal aspects, illuminating and probing seminal themes and ideas. Through clinical case examples, the author explores intertwining of mind and body, self and the other using an array of carefully selected quotes from Eigen's kaleidoscopic vision. Commentaries on the Work of Michael Eigen will be essential reading for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as anyone seeking a greater understanding of Eigen’s work.

Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen examines Eigen’s rich phenomenological work on the Obstructive Object. The contributors to this collection explore the core theme with reference to key Eigen works, including The Psychotic Core, Psychic Deadness, Toxic Nourishment, and Damaged Bonds. This volume seeks to elaborate on the Obstructive Object through essays and poems that include poignant clinical examples, the impact of exceptionally traumatized patients on their analysts, literature comparisons, and the more "mystical aspect" of Eigen’s influence on working with the obstructive object. Essays draw from Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante, Wilfred Bion, D.W. Winnicott, Andrè Greene, Christopher Bollas, and Adam Phillips, among many others, in exploring injury-rage, unwanted patients, psychoanalytic faith, toxic nourishment, and damaged bonds. Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen will greatly interest psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and those interested in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

This important book features collected essays on the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr Michael Eigen, who is an influential innovator within and beyond psychoanalysis. Drawing on the ideas of Bion, Winnicott, Kabbalah, and artists, Eigen’s work is noted for fusing spirituality with psychoanalysis and his extraordinary creativity. The book begins with Dr Eigen’s new essay "Rebirth: It’s been around a long time." The other essays feature a rich array of subjects and reflections, with many clinical examples and applications to domains beyond psychotherapy and include such titles as "Healing longing in the midst of damage: Eigen's psychoanalytic vision" and "Breakdown and recovery: Going Berserk and other rhythmic concerns." Dr Eigen is one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the current era and this collection of essays provides insightful discussion on his ideas. This celebration of Michael Eigen will fascinate any psychoanalyst interested in his work.

Psychoanalysis and Wisdom applies psychoanalytic insights into one of the great examples of wisdom literature, the Ethics of the Fathers, an ethical tractate of the Talmud. Paul Marcus quotes key passages from the Ethics of the Fathers, providing a psychoanalytic commentary to enlarge and deepen our understanding of its contents, focusing primarily on what constitutes a flourishing life. Marcus then considers what psychoanalysis can provide in its engagement with this classic of the wisdom teachings, such as illuminating aspects of the Ethics that are overlooked or underappreciated, and how “pearls of wisdom” from the Ethics can be incorporated into psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book contains clinical material as well as the insights of philosophers like Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas. Psychoanalysis and Wisdom will appeal to readers interested in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, religious studies, Judaic studies and philosophy.

This tightly edited volume opens a new vista in psychoanalysis by focusing upon positive and life-enhancing emotions and attitudes. The realms it covers include love, friendship, enthusiasm, courage, tact, resilience, and forgiveness, among others. Seminal papers on these topics have existed but remain scattered throughout the psychoanalytic literature. This book brings them together in a harmonious gestalt. It is more than an anthology, however. Each paper is followed by a freshly written commentary that critically evaluates the paper and brings it in consonance with up-to-date, contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge. Issues of development, adaptation, psychopathology, and analytic technique, as these pertain to the positive dimension of affective experience, are elucidated. The book also deals with the broader and overarching issue of the 'goodness' that accompanies, causes, and is enhanced by the positive emotions in consideration here. Thus the ever-elusive and puzzling issue of psychoanalytic morality finds a place in the discourse, with all its rich and complex theoretical and technical implications.

Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen examines Eigen’s rich phenomenological work on becoming a welcoming object. The contributors to this collection explore the core theme with reference to key Eigen works including Feeling Matters and Contact with the Depths. As a primary process psychoanalyst, Eigen’s writing reflects a unique rhythm of faith that is able to "revivify" union-distinction body-affect-thinking potentialities within a creative psychoanalytic dyad. In this book, alongside its companion volume, Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen, contemporary Eigen readers and writers articulate the various welcoming processes and attitudes needed to cultivate a "Hearing Heart," a central ingredient in reaching and touching those parts of self-deemed unwanted, unwelcomed, and even traumatized. Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen represents a wide range of psychoanalytic perspectives, and the chapters describe the genius of Eigen as well as contribute their own clinical and academic acumen. Presenting a key aspect of Michael Eigen's transformational aesthetic, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

Michael Eigen is widely regarded as a significant and increasingly influential figure in contemporary psychoanalysis. This collection of papers, by contributors in the USA, Israel, Australia and South Africa, reveal how his works yield creative and generative possibilities with profound clinical and cultural implications. Writers include well-known authors such as Mark Epstein, Anthony Molino and Brent Potter. The papers are divided into three sections: Reflections (psychoanalytic and philosophical concerns, such as Heidegger, the Hindu Goddess Kali, Buddhism, the sense of Time); Refractions (clinical implications, papers on murder and aliveness, the nature of the analytic interaction, addiction and work with the mother-infant relationship), and Responses (personal impacts of his works, as well as poetry and the thoughts of a creative writer on Eigen's oeuvre). There are also papers on the experience of supervision with Michael Eigen as well as on his weekly seminars on Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, ongoing for more than forty years, in New York.

Following Freud's rather cold conception of fathers and a relative neglect of their role in psychoanalytic theory is a challenge to continue more recent efforts to develop a psychoanalytically affirmative portrait of fatherhood. Here, fathers are attuned to relational mutuality and intimacy as a source of flourishing. Rapprochement is understood as a sub-phase of child development marked by a dramatic expression of conflict such as, "Hear me, see me, give me space, don't give me space." In addition, rapprochement is considered to characterize conflicts between autonomy and dependency across the lifespan. An often muted and subtle tension between holding and letting go persists. Working with what is felt entails entering a never fully completed negotiation marked by misreadings, bias, and illusion. 'Father' is understood to be a name pointing to a parenting function. With material that includes the grief of failed reunion, particular stories are mediated through thinking alongside philosophy and psychoanalytic theory in order to further explore the difficulty of integrating nurturing capacities into conceptions of masculinity. As a critique of gendered rigidity, a case is made for a social surround that declares mutual vulnerability to exist in a state of permanent inquiry and relational curiosity. Such openness can function to aid parents, clinicians, and respective community members to privilege the development of increased frustration tolerance. By extension, a good-enough father is one who recognizes breakdown, a need for refueling, and possesses and practices a willingness to encounter uneven rhythms in human dimensions. This thoughtful work brings fresh insight into the role of the father and masculinity and is essential reading for mental health professionals.

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, Relational Psychoanalysis continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, Volume 5 carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel.

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.