Tag: Michael Eigen

we can not bully the psyche out of existence

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Psychoanalysis is one attempt to see what we can do if we open more boxes, combining models of control with models of affective exploration and emotional transmission. Whatever its limitations and failures, psychoanalysis addresses aspects of psychic reality that must be grappled with. Attempts to outlaw or ban the psyche – by science, spirit, laughter, or shouting – delay the work that has to be done. Work unknown. We can not bully the psyche out of existence.

Michael Eigen (2006). Feeling Matters. Karnac Books.

the psychoanalytic attitude of faith

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I am not a Kabbalah scholar, but aspects of its teachings have become part of me, as has psychoanalytic work. The two have many points of convergence. The main psychoanalytic writer I use in this work is Bion, partly because of his striking statement that he uses Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis, but largely because it is hard to miss connections between the two. Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith. Bion calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude. Both are preoccupied with infinity and intensity of experience. Both are preoccupied with shatter and the possibility of bearing and growing the kind of psyche that can work with the dimensions sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life. Bion, too, writes penetratingly about an ongoing crises of faith, basic to Kabbalah concerns.

As in all of my work, D. W. Winnicott plays an important background role. His writings on vital sparks connect with Kabbalah’s buried divine sparks scattered everywhere. His incommunicado core connects with Kabbalah’s Ein Sof, the infinite beyond bounds and conception. For Winnicott, too, faith is important, what I call a paradoxical faith (Eigen, 1998) because it spans and opens diverse dimensions without reductively taking sides. Winnicott also writes of the importance of creative illusion, which adds to richness of living, even helps one feel alive. He locates illusion in transitional experiencing, which takes different forms as one grows. It might be that what we call self is, partly, a transitional state, which, like dolls, games, hobbies of childhood, lose meaning as one grows. We outgrow self-identities once treasured as new dimensions of experience open and take us forward. Yet, paradoxically, old self-states might deepen when we touch them with who we are now.

Eigen, Michael (2012-07-02). Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (Kindle Locations 74-87). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

the primary of perception and attention

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Eigen (2005), whose thinking represents well the Romantic sensibility in psychoanalysis, sees the analyst as more of an agent who evokes new experience than an instrument for understanding what is. Similarly, Lacan has suggested that the purpose of interpretations is to “make waves” (Eisenstein , 2007). Openness to traveling the emerging pathway, what Casement (1985) calls “learning from the patient,” is a sine qua non of an analytic process that seeks to expand the patient’s ways of being (Summers, 2005a ; 2012). It follows that the analyst must adopt a technical stance of not knowing. The tempting desire for omniscience among those who sit in the analytic chair runs the underappreciated danger of suffocating the openness required for self formation (Eigen, 1993a). Interference with the analytic space can be subtle, but the consequences may impair the patient’s freedom to explore the unknown. It can be seductive for both parties to enact the roles of knower and known, but the more the analyst is able to sustain the openness of the analytic space, the greater is the opportunity for the analysand to uncover new possibilities.

Although Bion’s admonition to greet every analytic hour without desire or memory is fanciful on its face, one can appreciate the spirit of Bion’s interpretation of the analytic stance as openness to the unknown. Eigen (1993a) interprets Bion’s dictum as an injunction to “opt for the primary of perception and attention over memory and knowledge” (p. 125) and cautions that attempting to control where the truth goes risks imposing on the emerging truth of the patient’s experience. And here we come to a fundamental shift in the analytic stance. We have now reconceptualized the analytic task from knowing the patient to engaging her being, an analytic attitude suggestive of Heidegger’s (1968/ 1954) concept of openness to Being. When the analyst adopts this way of attending to the patient, he has shifted his top priority from discovering new knowledge to receiving the being of the other. This interpretation of the analytic task does not obviate the role of understanding; it sees the value of insight in its ability to make contact with and expand the patient’s experience. In this sense, contemporary analysis accords with the Romantic value system articulated by Fichte’s (1848) statement that Being is prior to knowledge. Knowledge, or self awareness, subserves the creation of new ways of being and relating.

Summers, Frank (2013-05-20). The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (p. 53). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

fusions of trauma and nourishment

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Fusions of trauma and nourishment mark all lives. Sometimes the balance tips very much to one or the other side. Trauma may be so severe that nourishment becomes less and less possible. Personality becomes so occupied with dealing with wounds that little is left over. Difficulties are even greater when trauma becomes nourishment. Still, there are cases in which deep lines cut by trauma provide access to depths that are otherwise unreachable. In such instances, nourishment follows trauma to new places. We wish things could be otherwise…easier. But we have little choice when illumination shines through injury.

Nevertheless, we do nourish each other and continue nourishing each other. Something comes through. We procreate and create, build cities and cultures, and nourish affections and creative efforts. That our nourishing efforts contain social and psychic poisons, that, to varying degrees, we ourselves are toxic, is part of the challenge we find ourselves forced to face. Our faith – ever tested – is that facing this challenge well brings us to places we could not have found otherwise, and that some of these places are very worth the trip.

Michael Eigen, (1999) Toxic Nourishment, p. 225. Karnac Books. 

Winnicott & unconscious boundless support

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Winnicott’s picture of healing involves creating conditions for a valued sense of continuity of being to grow. The therapist triggers a taste of unconscious boundless support, a generative boundless unknown accessed through the medium of a somewhat known personality. A continuity that survives discontinuity, perhaps not immediately , but in time, replenishing, returning. For Winnicott continuity-not discontinuity-is primary. He does not, as is fashionable, idealize discontinuity. If anything, he might idealize continuity, but it is within an overarching experience of the continuity of being, as core and background support, embracing disruption, that aloneness seeks the riches of life.

Eigen, Michael (2009-05-14). Flames from the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness, and Faith (p. 27). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.

explo-ration of a psychosphere

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The therapy situation provides a special, limited milieu for birthing or exercising contact with feelings and patterns of feelings in a more sustained, concentrated way than usual. It supports explo-ration of a psychosphere, cousin of the noosphere (de Chardin, 1959; Bion, 1994), finely nuanced psycho-spiritual domains. Here, without apology, one can pay attention to elusive processes one might not be able to access without dedicated support.

One of the side benefits of becoming a therapist is—if one has the need, bent, sensibility—the chance to open psychic reality by system- atic exercise of capacities often downplayed by the dominant culture and common sense—dimensions of uncommon sensing crucial for the feel and taste of life. A life that includes working with problematic, invisible emotional currents that add to the richness of being. I once heard Hanna Arendt (Eigen, 2001a) speak of the secret ecstasy of thinking. I feel, too, deep satisfaction and joy in the profound beauty of analysis, while all too cognisant of its pitfalls. The beauty, awe, and wonder of working with the forever unknown.

Eigen, Michael. The Birth of Experience. (2014) Karnac Books.