Michael Eigen

Michael Eigen (born 1936) is an American psychoanalyst and writer, perhaps best known for his willingness to allow for the role of mysticism in the therapeutic process.

Career

Eigen began by working with troubled children in his twenties, before moving on to treat adults. He took his B.A. in 1957 and his PHD in 1974,^[1] and trained as psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, before becoming one of the directors of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.

Seminal ideas

Described by Adam Phillips as bringing with him “a new kind of moral seriousness”,^[2] Eigen is self-confessedly interested in “varieties of spiritual experience and how the psychological and spiritual fuse”, while remaining aware that such “Psyche-talk can sound weird, extravagant, crazy...arouse suspicion and rejection by our normative self”.^[3] He draws (among other psychoanalytic mystics)^[4] on the work of W. R. Bion, particularly in his conception of O as the unknowable reality.^[5]

Eigen saw early experience as marked by an innocent, uncomplicated relation to life, which could be lost in early infancy;^[6] he was also interested in Freud's idea of the prevalence of the Narcissistic wound in human experience.^[7]

Selected Writings

Articles

___'The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion' International Journal of the Psychoanalytic Association (1981) 64: 413-33 ___'Incommunicado core and boundless supporting unknown', European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling (2007) 9: 415-22

Books

___The Psychotic Core (1986)

___The Psychoanalytic Mystic (1998)

___Flames from the Unconscious (2009)

___Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (2012)

References

^ Michael Eigen
^ Quoted in P. Peay, America on the Couch (2015)
^ Michael Eigen, Contact with the Depths (2011) p. 23 and p. 102
^ J. Belzen ed., Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud? (2009) p. 111
^ Michael Eigen, Contact with the Depths (2011) p. 69-70
^ Neville Symington, Narcissism (2003) p. x-xiv
^ E. Mark Stern, Elaborate Selves (2013) p. 107

External links

Therapist from the Depths

[1] Michael Eigen

[2] Quoted in P. Peay, America on the Couch (2015)

[3] Michael Eigen, Contact with the Depths (2011) p. 23 and p. 102

[4] J. Belzen ed., Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud? (2009) p. 111

[5] Michael Eigen, Contact with the Depths (2011) p. 69-70

[6] Neville Symington, Narcissism (2003) p. x-xiv

[7] E. Mark Stern, Elaborate Selves (2013) p. 107

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