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 i...

Freud wrote that the greatest problem facing humanity is its destructive urge. There is no one factor that solves the issue. The Challenge of Being Human explores tendencies that make us up and capacities that try to meet them. The shock of ourselves is perennial. We are challenged by our own aliveness and a need to open doors as yet unknown. We are not done evolving, growing, learning, feeling, caring. Growth of capacity to tolerate and work with experience is part of our evoluti...

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 wo...

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...

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 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 concerns, and takes up problems of madness and faith besetting the world today. It is filled with clinical portrayals and discussions of person...

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.

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.

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.

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 a...

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...

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 use...