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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This insightful book critically reviews and presents an accessible introduction to the life and work of one of the most celebrated modern psychoanalysts, Michael Eigen. With work spanning over five decades, countless articles, and thirty published book volumes, Daws explores Eigen’s main works through key themes and concepts such as working with our psychotic core, psychic deadness, primary affects, and the need for spirituality for practicing psychoanalysts. The book covers Eigen’s early life and formative clinical years, explores his re-reading of Freud, Jung and Lacan, and lastly covers Eigen’s Seoul seminars, the impact of trauma, the importance of faith and the use of Kabbalah as a framework for analysis. This book will not only engage the first-time Eigen reader, but will also be of much interest to the experienced psychologist and psychoanalyst already familiar with Eigen’s work.

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.

"It is arguably the case," writes William Parsons, "that no two figures have had more influence on the course of Western introspective thought than Freud and Augustine." Yet it is commonly assumed that Freud and Augustine would have nothing to say to each other with regard to spirituality or mysticism, given the former's alleged antipathy to religion and the latter's not usually being considered a mystic. Adopting an interdisciplinary, dialogical, and transformational framework for interpreting Augustine's spiritual journey in his Confessions, Parsons places a "mystical theology" at the heart of Augustine's narrative and argues that his mysticism has been misunderstood partly because of the limited nature of the psychological models applied to it. At the same time, he expands Freud's therapeutic legacy to incorporate the contemporary findings of physiology and neuroscience that have been influenced in part by modern spirituality. Parsons develops a new psychological hermeneutic to account for Augustine's mysticism that will capture the imagination of contemporary readers who are both psychologically informed and interested in spirituality. The author intends this interpretive model not only to engage modern introspective concerns about developmental conflict and the power of the unconscious but also to reach a more nuanced level of insight into the origins and the nature of the self.

Over the course of the past 15 years, there has been a vast sea change in American psychoanalysis. It takes the form of a broad movement away from classical psychoanalytic theorizing grounded in Freud's drive theory toward models of mind and development grounded in object relations concepts. In clinical practice, there has been a corresponding movement away from the classical principles of neutrality, abstinence and anonymity toward an interactive vision of the analytic situation that places the analytic relationship, with its powerful, reciprocal affective currents, in the foreground. These developments have been evident in virtually all schools of psychoanalysis in America, from the most traditional to the most radical. The wellspring of these innovations is the work of a group of psychoanalysts who have struggled to integrate aspects of interpersonal psychoanalysis, various British object relations theories, and psychoanalytic feminism. Although not self-selected as a school, these theorists have generated a distinct tradition of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice that has become extremely influential within psychoanalysis in the United States. Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition brings together for the first time the seminal papers of the major authors within this tradition. Each paper is accompanied by an introduction, in which the editors place it in its historical context, and a new afterward, in which the author suggests subsequent developments in his or her thinking. This book is an invaluable resource for any clinical practitioner, teacher or student of psychoanalysis interested in exploring the exciting developments of recent years.