This book is a transcription of a three-day, eighteen-hour seminar Michael Eigen gave in Seoul in 2009. It takes forward and complements the Seoul seminar in 2007 ("Eigen in Seoul 1: Madness and Murder"). Eigen believes that faith plays an important role in transformational processes in psychotherapy. I don't mean belief . Belief may be a necessary part of the human condition but it tends to prematurely organize processes that remain unknown. For me, faith supports experimental exploration, imaginative conjecture, experiential probes. The more we explore therapy, the more we appreciate how much our response capacity can grow. We are responsive beings, for good and ill. Too often, our responses hem us in. We short-circuit growth of responsiveness. Yet it is possible to become aware of the rich world our responsive nature opens, places it takes us, feelings with as yet no name, hints of contact that may never be exhausted...."The author uses parts of W. R. Bion's and D. W. Winnicott's texts as points of departure for some of the explorations in the seminar and draw from his own work as well, weaving clinical and cultural concerns, the state of our persons and nations, how we feel, get along with ourselves, and obstacles that dog us but are widely undefined or defined wrongly. He concludes that if psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that we are persecuted by our own nature, which finds voice and resonance in structures of the outside world."

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 knowing and wordlessness, ways we transmit emotions, the need to start over, and harm we cause by trying to get rid of and misuse tendencies that are part of our makeup. Our contact with life, ourselves, each other is challenged. And through it all, we have need for deep contact, contact with the depths, fulfilling and suspenseful. Contact we never stop growing into, part of the mystery, care and love of everyday life.

This book is an 18 hour seminar in Seoul, 2007, given over a three day period. It traces transformations of madness in psychoanalysis, particularly Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott, and takes up problems of faith and madness besetting the world today. It is filled with clinical portrayals and discussions of personal and social issues. Michael Eigen describes ways we live through challenging experiences in therapy relevant for how life is lived. Discussions go back and forth between clinical details and cultural dilemmas, touching the taste of life, how one feels to oneself. This work is at once personal, learned, down to earth. One gets the feel that a lifetime of dedicated work is being condensed and transmitted, mind to mind, person to person, soul to soul.The seminar traced transformations of madness and faith in psychoanalysis, emphasizing basic rhythms of experience steeped in clinical details, social issues and personal concerns. The reader will feel he or she is a member of an ongoing seminar alive today, this moment, carrying the work further.

* Exploration of how the psychotherapeutic action of allowing feelings to freely unfold helps the patientPsychotherapy is based on the premise that feelings matter. Michael Eigen explores feelings as they are experienced in psychoanalytic sessions. One patient fears her feelings, another experiences his world through the lens of "killer words," for another delusional thinking in the present is maintained by delusional ideas about his past, and yet another feels the profound impact of world events. As these and other therapeutic cases unfold, complex, painful, deadening, and rejected feelings are revealed and we see what happens when the therapist and patient give these feelings time, space, and attention.As Eigen writes: "A positive contribution therapy makes is to give people time. Yes, therapist and patient rush past each other or over each other, as is common in daily life. But an overall aim in therapy is to make time for experiencing...not to rush off after ten minutes because things are getting too complicated or uneasy. To stay with feelings building in the room, and stay some more."This book will be welcomed by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and by all with an interest in Eigen's work.

Advocating a call to the return to the spiritual in psychoanalysis, the author of this text illustrates his writing with the work of Bion, Milner and Winnicott. He expands on his call to celebrate and explore the meaning of mystical experience within psychoanalysis and considers how both patient and analyst to be immersed in each other. In the text he explores how this immersion restores and enriches, and drains.

Presents relevant theory from other disciplines as needed. Accessibly written. Centers on two key texts, The Psychotic Core and Emotional Storm. Rather than a comprehensive or systematic exegesis of Eigen's work, Bagai's commentary expands nodal aspects, illuminating and probing seminal themes and ideas.

Presents relevant theory from other disciplines as needed. Accessibly written. Centers on two key texts, The Psychotic Core and Emotional Storm. Rather than a comprehensive or systematic exegesis of Eigen's work, Bagai's commentary expands nodal aspects, illuminating and probing seminal themes and ideas.

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 many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate. This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

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 many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate. This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

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.

Damaged Bonds explores W. R. Bion's writings on dream-work growing within damaged bonds and concerns dramas revolving around difficulties in psychic digestion and clinical work in the trenches.

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere.

The author relates the stories of two patients reshaping their lives into something they could believe in, and examines the complex roles of the therapist and therapy, self/other and mind/body relations, and the dramatic interplay of faith and catastrophe.

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.

To feel like an impostor is a recurrent theme among artists and to feel false as a person is a crucial theme in psychoanalysis. The sense that one is living a lie is important to many and often goes with a sense that an important flame is waning. Fused with this is fear that self-discovery is sinful. Guilt, fear and shame attaches to development and to failure to develop. Fusion of opposites is the rule in psychic life. Creative theft melds with destructive dreads. Unbearable agonies prompt easeful lies and falsity to escape pain and helplessness ... Real touches real, sometimes for evil, sometimes for good, often the two indiscernible, indistinguishable. This book affirms that there is something in us that works with all its might to tip the balance towards the good.- Michael Eigen, from the Foreword

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.

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 evolutionary challenge. This book seeks to support us in whatever ways we can begin to meet this challenge.

The birth of experience goes on all life long. Giving birth to oneself involves many processes. The first chapter of this book expands on Eigen's final talk on 'Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah' for the New York University Postdoctoral Contemplative Studies Project, and focuses in particular on an intertwining of beauty and destruction. Beauty is the heart of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, intricately linked both to other capacities and to catastrophic devastation. Interestingly, Bion also links faith and catastrophe, and writes of psychoanalytic 'beauty', thereby creating a rich dance of psychoanalysis with Kabbalah. Winnicott adds his own special touch, associating the fate of a vital spark with trauma as the personality begins to form, and with the work of spontaneous recovery that is a profound part both of living and of therapy sessions. The second part of the book is new and focuses on birth processes at different ages and situations, exploring in detail how psychoanalysis interweaves with themes from life, clinical work, and Kabbalah. Failed birth processes are part of living but so is the need to 'midwife' existence.Eigen suggests that there may be some kind of organ that permeates, scans, and tastes shifting centers of experience, taking note of their fate and partnering their development - a kind of inner tuning sense in search of cultivation, spanning what we call conscious and unconscious life, mind and body, and testing the weather for favorable birth conditions. Often we do not know exactly what is happening or how, but sense something germinating. Domains open that are not confineable or restricted by the tools at hand - which is perhaps one reason why analysts are called toolmakers, as experience and the tools used to understand it become part of further birth processes. In this way, Eigen shows how the intimate fusion of psychological and spiritual currents generate new tastes of living.

This book picks up where Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (2012) left off. It is based on two expanded transcriptions of seminars given for the New York University Postdoctoral Program Contemplative Studies Project. As noted in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, W. R. Bion once said that he uses the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis. This book enlarges the inner sense of this statement. The seminars depict intricate intertwining of processes in psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, processes important in helping us live more richly. Religious language helps bring out nuances of psychological states and psychology helps make the language of the spirit more meaningful to emotional concerns today.Bion and Winnicott are the main psychoanalytic heroes of this work, each adding richness to a root sense out of which their clinical and written work grow. A felt sense, spans many dimensions, traversing sensory life, vital sensing, common sense, the sense of language, cultural sensing, intuition, Freud's use of consciousness as a sense organ of psychical perception, and other qualities still unknown.Case descriptions include extended work with an alcoholic man, opening new paths to living, and a detailed account of helping a creative, tormented woman die well.Aspects of psychosis, creativity, mysticism and everyday life blend and have a say. The main focus is psychic reality, with psychoanalysis and Kabbalah tools in this great enterprise of learning to work with ourselves.

This book emphasises on Kabbalah and psychoanalysis and the two domains intertwining almost seamlessly. It focuses on birth processes at different ages and situations, exploring in detail how psychoanalysis interweaves with themes from life, clinical work, and Kabbalah.

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 knowing and wordlessness, ways we transmit emotions, the need to start over, and harm we cause by trying to get rid of and misuse tendencies that are part of our makeup. Our contact with life, ourselves, each other is challenged. And through it all, we have need for deep contact, contact with the depths, fulfilling and suspenseful. Contact we never stop growing into, part of the mystery, care and love of everyday life.

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

Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image. In this compelling book, the author leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of "no", shame, his session with Andre Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner.

This book is an extended reverie, reflection, confession, assessment, engagement with psychic reality. It offers further invitation into the mystery at the heart of the human experience that is, at its core, also at the heart of the psychoanalytic journey.