Conversations with Michael Eigen

Michael Eigen, Aner Govrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912276
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Chapter One
Thoughts

God

Aner:In The Psychoanalytic Mystic, you wrote that therapy is holy and that there are moments when psychoanalysis is a form of prayer. To most analysts these sentences might seem strange. Segregation between these two worlds—spiritualism and psychoanalysis—is the normative analytic stance. What personal experiences have led you to think that way?

Mike: For me these two worlds coincide. The first session I did as a therapist was like breathing fresh air. I felt like a fish in water. Finally, something natural, a fit, and a medium I could be in. It was a blessing after trying so many things—something that felt just right. I was nearly thirty and had worked as a therapist with children at camps, schools and treatment centres in my mid-twenties. That’s part of what got me interested in going more deeply into the therapy field.

I worked at other jobs too, too many to mention. Office work, restaurants, playing in bands, teaching. While teaching at a school for disturbed children, an incident occurred that made me determined to be my own boss. A boy brought in pheasants as gifts from a hunting trip with his father. My supervisor, the head teacher, lectured him about the evil of killing animals and wouldn’t accept the gift. I piped up and said to the boy, “Hey, that’s great, John. I’d love one.” This boy’s dad never did anything with him. How great they went hunting, did something together. The boy came in proud and generous and got shot down, shamed. My supervisor went on harping about how bad it was to gratuitously take life. I knew, in an instant, my days in institutional settings were numbered. Soon afterwards, I began graduate school to start work on my doctorate, to work towards greater freedom.

The shock woke me. People could treat animals with sanctity yet be sanctimoniously cruel to humans in their care. By the time I left the school I knew about my supervisor’s trauma history and difficulties he faced. I understood more about the risk people take in seeking help. Anything can be used as an excuse by a care-giver to unleash injury. Injury was inflicted and the care-giver felt morally right about it. I realized no one is exempt, and that this risk will apply to people in my care all my life. No one is outside of what we do to each other, for better, for worse. So my sense of holy has a positive and a negative source. The positive is the holiness of life and of human life. The negative is the awakening that comes from seeing the inevitability of injury and the wish to work with, struggle with, our nature. The holiness of therapy involves, in part, a practical application of this struggle with life to release life, to make life better. With me, the sense of holiness also has a sense of feeling free, connected, home: working with the human psyche as a kind of home.

Time is sacred. You and I are meeting during the Rosh Hashanah season and I was thinking that Rosh Hashanah is a Day of Remembrance. So, what are we supposed to remember? Who is supposed to remember what? There are passages in the Bible in which God seems to wake up. God comes to, suddenly remembers his obligations, His contract with His people, His mercy, His loving kindness. As if man wakes God and makes God remember we are here. We wake God in all sorts of ways, but one of the most effective is to cry out, to have nothing left but a cry. The turning point of the Passover Seder is our crying out to God and God hears us. A cry from the heart opens God’s heart.

Aner: So it is God who should remember?

Mike: God remembers. He is here and we are here. God awakens to Himself, remembers Himself. “I am here!”, as if God was dozing in a fog and suddenly is called to remember. God thinks, “People are calling me.” Calling wakes us and wakes God too.

To reverse the projection, one could say that one goes through life not fully awake. There are different kinds of awakeness. Freud’s Wolf-Man felt he had a veil over his soul. There is sound-proofing, psyche-proofing, an opacity surrounding the sense of contact. In this context, Rosh Hashanah is remembering that we are here, that we are alive. Waking up to aliveness, becoming alive to our aliveness. Rosh Hashanah tells us to remember that we are human. We are called upon to remember our existence, our relations to ourselves and other people. Thus the Shofar is a wake up call to remind us that we are alive and time is sacred.

Aner: I still don’t understand why therapy is a holy thing?

Mike: You keep asking me why when the reality is: it feels that way to me.

Aner: Do you believe in God?

Mike: Everything I have to say about God is written in my books. Yes. But then something whispers maybe I don’t believe in God. Maybe I’m agnostic or atheist. Maybe all three. Maybe I’m always all three, a believer, an agnostic, an atheist. Is a final decision necessary? I wonder if part of what I mean by therapy without rigid definition applies to this question, too. To be a questioner is important. To be a critic, a questioner. To be ignorant. Does one have to sacrifice this need if one also feels God? Does one have to sign on a dotted line? Faith is very important to me. I don’t cling to it. It is something that happens in my life. It is something that makes itself known to me. Must I also be a believer, subscribe to a literal belief system? I have done that for periods but found it does not work for me. Faith works. Belief in a concrete God system is another matter. I learn from concrete God systems, even am inspired by them. But faith is beyond or other or more than these categories. It comes to me, partly, through a precious feeling, immediate. It can be triggered by many things, a face, a gesture, a thought, a colour, an agony. But it also comes of its own accord, a grace, lifting life, touching life with wonder, a thrill.

Every time I say one thing, others come. Aren’t we that way, impossible to get to the bottom?

God does not distinguish between words and silence. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud calls the Jewish God a volcano god. Only death silenced Freud’s flow of words. But his was the kind of flow that ignites the flow of others. Look, just when the Freud embers appeared to be on the verge of dying, book after book flares up from this or that bit of his work. Freud could not stop talking about religion. Partly because it was his way of continuing his talk with Jung, an inner contact he could not cancel; partly because he was affirming science over religion; and partly because he could not stop talking with the Jewish God.

To be alive

Aner: What does it mean to forget that one is alive?

Mike: I think every one forgets that he or she is alive and goes through life semi-sleepwalking, in a somewhat hypnotic and hallucinatory state. A lot of life involves shared hallucinations. A lot of fights involve antagonistic hallucinations. Writings on schizoid and borderline personalities are about people who don’t feel alive or feel too alive or alive in the wrong way. Many have lost their sense of aliveness, more or less. I write about our varying sense of aliveness–deadness in Psychic Deadness.

You wonder how it is possible to lose your sense of aliveness and to still be alive. To be alive in order to say: I am not alive, or I am alive in some ways but not in others, alive somewhat. Schreber, a judge who became psychotic and wrote about it, describes a blackout when self and world disappear or die, and then the world gets “miracle’d up”, re-created through hallucination. Freud wrote a beautiful essay based on Schreber’s autobiography. Freud never treated Schreber, but his work about the latter is a masterpiece. He raises the possibility that hallucination is a way of re-creating a lost or destroyed other, a lost world returned in another key. Out of depersonalization and deadness, a new universe, a psychotic rebirth process begins. Aliveness returns in a semi-erotic, paranoid, attacking mode. I tried to bring out structures and dynamics of Schreber’s journey and Freud’s descriptions in Chapter Seven of The Psychotic Core. You might say it is an account of holiness run amok, the sense of holiness in a paranoid context.

Now, even when one is dead, one struggles to come alive. For many people, the sense of being dead acts as a disturbance that drives them towards life, often unsuccessfully. One falls back trapped in deadness, behind the veil. But disturbance pushes one to try again, as if there is a tropism towards life, and death makes one restless. The schizoid individual flattens or cuts off emotion, as if emotion chronically is drained away, like blood that has been drawn out.

Aner: How can it be possible that there is a mix of aliveness and deadness in the same person?

Mike: That is a very good question and we don’t know. Many writers have written about dehumanization and depersonalization in our world: T. S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land”, and “The Hollow Men”, Heidegger’s writings on the machine and the need for poetry, Ortega Y Gasset on art and dehumanization, aspects of Beckett’s work. One could go on and on. Deadness, emptiness, meaninglessness, as well as madness, have been important themes of art and literature in the twentieth century. Destruction wreaked by wars complemented them. Critiques of the structure of modern life multiplied. Marx targeted the worker’s alienation from the products and profits he contributed to. Weber spoke of a “secular asceticism” accruing to the Protestant work ethic. Spengler wrote of the receding of intuitive man in favour of economic man and has a chapter on money in The Decline of the West.

Our words are misleading. In chemistry, doesn’t mixture mean materials that can be brought together and separated out again? Is that what we mean by coincidence or co-existence of deadness–aliveness? Perhaps it’s easier to tease out alive and dead areas in a tree—after all, a tree can be alive and have dead or dying areas. Maybe people studying the brain can discover the chemistry/neurology underlying the sense of aliveness–deadness. Then again, chemistry and organ function vary with environmental impacts.

Aner: Could you say more about hyper-stimulation as a sign of aliveness?

Mike: Winnicott wrote about people keeping themselves in aliveness because they are afraid to drop out of aliveness or fear aliveness will drop away and they will be stranded in—what? Nothing? Emptiness? Deadness? Nowhere? Something worse? Unrepresentable agonies beyond agonies.

Aner: Aliveness will drop away and one will no longer be a person. One will lose the capacity to be a person who is in life.

Mike: One will reach the point of no return and enter the beyond where there is no link with life, no connection. Gone. As therapists, as people, we are learning a lot about “gone.” A way of saying this, too, is that the heart of the past stopped beating. A broken heart, we say. But often it is more than broken: warped, poisoned, strangulated, and pulverized. We like words like arrested development, frozen self, catastrophe, and permanent shock. There are many formulations of deadness now. We know more and more about it. We begin to perceive cultural dimensions to it too, the violence of civilization. Now our focus is on war and terrorism and corporate violence. Trauma and upheaval is a constant in our lives, part of the brew that makes up life. Whether or not we can exist any other way remains to be seen.

A clinical example Winnicott gives near the end of his transitional object paper is of a woman who had to be a transitional object for her mother in order to keep her mother in life. This woman did not have the freedom to drop out of life. She couldn’t just drop into nothing or chaos. She had to keep reviving up existence to keep her mother in life. It is natural to take time off, to leave, to vacate, and to become unintegrated. To maintain oneself as an integrated unit, a hyper-integrated unit, can become artificial. This woman pumped herself up for her mother’s benefit, a kind of psychic oxygen pump for her mother. It is natural to drop in and out of being a person, to take vacations from oneself for a time. Perhaps this is another aspect of a basic rhythm I describe in The Sensitive Self.

Some of Winnicott’s best clinical portrayals involved setting up conditions in which people can drop out. One gets the hang of dropping in and out: of oneself, of presence, of absence. In Playing and Reality, he tells of giving a woman open-ended sessions that could go on and on until she felt ready to stop. What enabled her to stop was reaching towards a state of unintegration, dropping out of her usual self-organization into chaos; a safe freshness that enables her re-forming and un-forming. I’m tempted to call it “oiling the hinges”, except there are no hinges, no door.

It is a paradoxical moment or dimensionality. Drifting into nothingness, chaos, meaninglessness, unintegration where meaningful experience emerges. To let go into formlessness is itself meaningful for one who chronically maintains life by self-gripping or pushing. In a related way, Bion spoke of meaning becoming meaningful if one is able to let go of meaning, if one can also experience meaninglessness. A bit like the contrast full–empty, a real aspect of an infant’s feeding at the breast.

Aner: It is possible the kind of session Winnicott described might end with something emotionally meaningful growing out of chaos, fresh contact after letting contact go.

Mike: It might also end savouring relief at not having to force oneself to be. To be free of having to be this or that version of oneself, time off from personality. Chaos and nothingness as welcome, not merely terrifying, visitors. Winnicott’s sense of unintegration has something in common with Berdyaev’s “neonic freedom” and Sartre’s pour soi, the open nothingness of consciousness. What I am terming “neo-plasticity”.

Aner: What sort of feeling is this?

Mike: Would you ask what does being horny feel like? Is it possible to take a vacation from oneself, from one’s performativity, from one’s tie to particular images? Is it possible not to experience my desire through another’s? Can one breathe without pressuring another to think of one in a certain way? Can I only keep myself in life by enlivening someone’s desire? Do these imaginary scenes always have the last word? Is there another word? Wordlessness? A hiatus, chasm? Are Hindus wrong to place so much on the pendulum rhythm of breath, the gap, the stop after each swing, after each in or out?

Aner: Can someone live like that forever?

Mike: Forever? It’s not hard enough living it for a moment in a session? Once one tastes the possibility of vacating in a positive way (contradiction in terms?) one finds ability to take off from oneself more often during the day, mini-vacations, even in sessions. It’s a matter of growth of capacity. Of making room for not being there as well as being there. Developing a better rhythm in one’s feel for life.

Guntrip–Winnicott

Mike: Guntrip spoke of not being able to just be, an inability to let activity go. He hoped his analysis with Winnicott would give him a taste of letting down control. Guntrip was a doer rather than a be’er. He came to Winnicott, partly, to taste this missing capacity. It’s like someone having to be on stage all the time, not being able to be off stage. Guntrip got a taste or vision of less defensive being through the kind of attentiveness Winnicott offered.

This therapy couple has been harshly criticized for not going far enough, not dealing with hidden aggression, creating a mutual appreciation society. I doubt if Guntrip would have been able to work with many of these critics. There are certain borderline and narcissistic patients who will not allow themselves to go very far in therapy if they feel the therapist is too alien, too normal perhaps, too “analytic”, too out of reach with regard to—let’s call it a basic vision of self or life, a feel for things. Guntrip emphasized a schizoid aspect, a way of being out of contact, withdrawn, perhaps to preserve a modicum of core self-feeling, perhaps out of fear that contact would be devastating or somehow take one’s sense of self away. Perhaps there is not a firm enough sense of the restorative, resilient nature of interaction, a rhythm of injury, recovery, growth, a lived dialectical happening. One gets set on not being there, living life out of the corners of being, peeking at the enemy, or simply closing one’s eyes. Some of these people need a sense of felt agreement on a very deep level, a profound cohering or overlapping of vision of self as valued, precious, and sacred. It is a feeling emitted and transmitted self-to-self. Call it symbiosis, fusion, collusion—whatever you like. But it is real. At its centre is a belief, a conviction— no, more: a sensation of the holiness of self, a sense of quality, something of intrinsic worth or value. I think Guntrip and Winnicott read this agreement in each other’s beings, a core-to-core respect and caring. It is this that made work between them possible, with whatever limitations. This core “agreement” does not preclude differences. Winnicott never gave up his sense that Guntrip was too goody-goody, that sadism and aggressiveness was part of the self, part of basic aliveness. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Thoughts
• CHAPTER TWO Life
• CHAPTER THREE Supervision
• CHAPTER FOUR Afterword