Dialogues with Michael Eigen

Psyche Singing

Michael Eigen, Loray Daws

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367278717
• eBook ISBN: 9781000145076
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Part I

Emotions as messengers

Chapter 1

Demons and wounds

Interview for Dharma Café online by William Stranger, September 2008.

WS: Michael Eigen, first of all I want to welcome you to Dharma Café.

ME: A pleasure.

WS: I came across your essays and references to your books in a number of books by psychoanalysts who I’ve read and respected. And I would say that at the risk of shameless flattery, your work has been treated with a respect verging on awe.

ME: Thank you.

WS: And I sat down and got some of your books and I read them and I said this guy’s not only a thinker; he’s a writer. And you write honestly and you write from your own experience. You’re able to swing the full spectrum of human experience from the depths of disillusion and madness and fear to the heights of ecstasy, and able to see the inner dialectic in these moments and to settle down with people in a disposition of obviously enormous respect.

ME: Now, if I only knew the guy you’re talking about. He’d be something else.

WS: It comes across. You’re one of the resources that everyone should know about and that spiritual practitioners should make use of. More than anything else, you have made, I would say, a career about admitting to the madness that’s in the normal person.

ME: And now in social reality.

WS: And now in social reality. And so today we want to talk about your own work with your patients, and how you got into it, and also talk to you about the current world situation, in a variety of books, not all of which I have here, but which again you dare to choose some very interesting titles. Not many psychoanalysts will title a book Rage (2002) or Ecstasy (2001) because it just doesn’t look clinically detached and scientific enough. But you like to speak about things both from the inside and the outside; it’s not like you’re just an open heart making confessions. You’re clearly a serious and disciplined, appreciative student of the psychoanalytic tradition. Your books are almost a dialogue with your sources as well as a revelation of your work with your patients and a constant cycling around. So, let’s just talk a little bit first about how you yourself got into psychoanalysis. I want to read to you a part of your own confession:

I’ve never been interested in defining what psychoanalysis is or isn’t. I’m not much at definitions. More into living it, whatever it may be. Psychoanalysis has always been a living fact for me, a part of my lifeblood for more than four decades. Part of a search, an ax to crack the frozen sea within (as Kafka said about writing), a probe, a point of entrée into pain, a breaking through crust, a way to open heart. I went into it because I was desperate and it became part of the way I live.

(The Sensitive Self, 2004, pp. 165–166)

Tell us about this.

ME: Well, I came into contact with psychoanalysis or some version of psychiatry when I entered as a freshman at Penn. We had to undergo a physical examination and I was sitting and talking with the psychiatrist and he suggested that I go into therapy. I didn’t take him up on it then but when my girlfriend went into therapy, I decided to go also. I began therapy in my junior year.

My freshman psychology teacher specialized in frog reflexes. I felt this wasn’t going to work for me although it was of value. But two paragraphs in the introductory psychology book especially interested me — one mentioned psychoanalysis, and one Gestalt psychology. I was turned on by both of these paragraphs and felt here was something I wanted to learn more about. When I was a junior, my roommate commuted to New York City to see a Jungian analyst once weekly. He told me a dream he had and the way his analyst interpreted it. A bell rang. It was one of the most beautiful things I ever heard. I fell in love with dreams and dream interpretation instantaneously. I read everything I could on dreams. Erich Fromm’s Forgotten Language (1951), all of Jung, all of Freud. I found Freud very hard, much harder than Jung. It wasn’t until later that I really got into Freud. When I left school, I sought this man and went into analysis with him and that’s how it began. He was a kind of living Socrates for me at the time. Nevertheless, I left after a year and went to Cape Cod, Mexico, and North Beach.

WS: Kind of a beat scene.

ME: I was an aspiring beatnik. [Laughter]

WS: Did you have an interest in literature at the time?

ME: Very much. I was writing all the time! I heard Ginsberg read Howl.

WS: Oh, you were at the famous Howl reading. You were actually there, one of the 10,000 people there.

ME: I could hear my coughs on the recording. After about a year of this, I suddenly realized I belonged in New York, and I didn’t know why that should be so. I had more friends in San Francisco but felt when I looked at people in New York I could recognize my kind of loneliness. In California, I didn’t get the same mirroring effect. There is loneliness everywhere but perhaps a special kind of loneliness in New York. I went back to New York and started going downhill, then sought help from a woman I roomed with in Cape Cod. After staying at her place awhile she said, “You know, you’re not cut out for this kind of life. I’m Ok with it but it’s not for you”. I felt that I was not going to make it as a beatnik so went back into analysis and little by little built myself up, many years, many starts. Jung said some people have no choice; they’re going to be inside a mental institution either as a patient or a doctor. It turned out as time went on working with psychic depths became a basic part of my life.

WS: So you made your demons your angels.

ME: Well I still have demons. I respect demons. I don’t want to make them into something they’re not. But I also have angels. A demon is a fallen angel after all but what’s fallen is fallen. If God wants to do something with it we’ll let God do it. But I respect the evil in us.

WS: Your first book was The Psychotic Core (1986), and I think it’s probably still the best known of all your books. You say in it, “Understanding the psychodynamics of madness is essential to the therapy of most patients”. Your work is characterized by a sense that even what people ordinarily call neuroses may be masking a deeper psychosis. Even in the ordinary moments, so-called “normal” people have psychotic parts in places that can and do come into play in all kinds of ways. At the same time, there’s no idealization or minimization of the pain and suffering and true horror that can be involved in psychosis. You seem to have gravitated towards working with what are generally regarded as the most difficult patients in psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry all together: psychotics. What drew you?

ME: Well, it’s hard to really know what draws one, but I went for a job at Rockland State Hospital, and when they introduced me to the patients I felt instantaneous relief. I felt at home. I felt, “Oh, my God, here’s someone I can be at ease with”. And when a person went hiding under the bed, I didn’t want to be intrusive and move into their space, but I would sort of go under the bed too and hang out a little bit. Someone told me a story about Simic, a mathematician. A physicist told his colleague I must meet Simic, he’s brilliant. I’m going to talk with him. His colleague advised him not to talk, just sit quietly. The physicist followed this advice and sat with Simic for several weeks. Eventually Simic felt comfortable and started talking. Maybe I felt a little like Simic and the psychotic person hiding under the bed released me. Who found who in that place?

WS: So there’s something about your own character – it sounds like what drew you to the beat scene and to psychoanalysis was a kind of lack of interest in playing the usual social personality game.

ME: At the time, I came across Holden Caulfield saying the adult world is phony. And I felt, yes, it really is phony. Or worse, now: it’s criminal actually.

WS: Were you touched by the existentialist philosophers about authenticity?

ME: Yes, very much. As a young man, I was touched by Albert Camus and Jean Genet and, later, religious existentialists like Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel. To an extent, Nicolai Berdyaev had a big impact on me. He talked about neonic, neonatal freedom. He didn’t mean simply going back to the womb in the sense of only withdrawing, hiding. He evoked a sense of embryonic life, an embryonic aspect of our beings filled with possibility. Later I read Wilfred Bion, who talked about malevolence, immaturity, and various deformations, but also embryonic potential: a precious undeveloped core that always remains undeveloped, the unborn. No matter how much gets born there will always be more that is unborn, which is actually a freedom because it keeps on creating.

WS: Well, the Buddha himself says there is the unborn. There is primordial consciousness that is never touched by experience, sometimes called the witness or the self. And it seems like there’s an inherently religious and spiritual element in your work that not only characterizes you but a lot of the people who have become major resources for you. Most often people speak of D.W. Winnicott, the famous child psychoanalyst who was enormously influential, both in England and in the United States; Bion, who was in the Kleinian tradition, who worked with World War I veterans and pioneered group therapy and created this very unusual scheme of understanding some of the deepest aspects of psychotic states, the so-called “grid”.

ME: Let me just say one minor thing: in World War I, Bion was a tank commander still in his teens, which was absolutely traumatizing. What people can do to each other and what it brings out scarred him. He wouldn’t have been Bion without having gone through something so bloody. He said many things about his war experience as a young man. He felt it crazy not to be afraid and had the realization it was as easy to get killed running away as running towards the enemy. These are experiences he later applied to psychoanalysis. He suggested if you weren’t afraid with a patient then you weren’t in the room with the latter. What direction do you run at this moment – towards, away, both? I heard him say when you’re in a tank, the metal turns to jelly. Explosions become liquid all around you, through you, metal no longer metal.

During the Second World War, he was already a psychiatrist and involved in psychoanalysis. He had been decorated for bravery in WWI, although he often said he thought the medal was a mistake. As an army psychiatrist in WWII, he formed groups to work with war-shocked soldiers. He was supposed to ameliorate war trauma in order to help soldiers go back into battle. He came into conflict with authorities because his goal was simply to help those he worked with, which often entailed long-term work and return to civilian life. Conflict with authority followed him on and off throughout his career. In the military, helping people in his care for its own sake, for the good of the person rather than the good of the army was kind of radical. There’s help and there’s help. He formulated important aspects of his group-work in a book published a few years after the war, Experiences in Groups (1961).

WS: And part of his ability was to go into these profoundly dissociated, disturbed states that they had.

ME: The traumatized self, yes.

WS: These traumatized states, yes.

ME: The thing itself.

WS: You say basically, in sum: the ego is sane and mad. And a lot of your work is in that tension. It seems to me in your work you look for that primitive place and describe experience as a play between union and distinction.

ME: Wow, you really know my work.

WS: Yeah. And it’s what my own teacher would talk about – the paradox of relatedness, where in relationship there is both separation and apparent unity, a kind of constitutional ambivalence of moving towards and away, separation-connection. You discuss this in The Electrified Tightrope (1993), a collection of your essays beautifully introduced by Adam Phillips. He talks about the kind of work you’ve done in primary process. And for those of us who were children of the 60s, primary process was a reference to Freud’s language about the primary process or the unconscious or the id’s way of processing experience, with secondary process a more conscious, volitional activity. These were themes that affected the work of writers like Norman O. Brown and Herman Marcuse. To some, the primary process was seen as the good part of you, free of the constraints of society. I think you would describe that as an idealized view of the primary process. You describe it in terms such as soft boundaries, primordial self and other, permeability, symmetrical unconscious, Wilfred Bion’s O, alpha function, contact barrier, and Jacques Lacan’s pulsations of the slit. All these terms are a kind of ambivalent connectedness, a place where you work. What is it that makes this so protean and productive a place for you?

ME: There are threads that interweave; primary process is certainly an important one. David Bohm’s implicate order, where everything is connected with everything else. The explicate order emphasizes difference, separate you and me, discrete beings. Merleau-Ponty also portrays dimensions of invisible interlacing, while perception gives us the world as figure-ground and patterns. So many ways to experience time and space, including ways we take for granted in everyday life.

WS: By convention.

ME: So-called convention is made of many conflicting tendencies with preferential organizations. Worlds of possible experiencing underlie our preferred ways of seeing things. Although we tend to agree this is a spatially structured universe, we are often unaware of so many options. What is space and what kinds of space can we taste and configure. Thomas Traherne called perception a form of imagination. What kind of imagination? Where can it lead us? If you tune into what space can be there is no end to spatial sensing-imagini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• About the editor
• Preface: Soul to soul: living with Michael Eigen
• Preface: So many voices within a voice
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “Meeting” Michael Eigen: a personal reverie
• PART 1 Emotions as messengers
• PART 2 Incubation
• PART 3 Constant struggle and suffering
• PART 4 Confession and prayer
• Index