Main description:

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.

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

1 Demons and wounds

2 Emotional transmissions and fluctuations of experience

3 On violence

4 Sensitivity and sense

5 Psyche singing

PART 2

Incubation

6 Beginning to wait and waiting as beginning

7 Silence and intimacy

8 Flames and aloneness

PART 3

Constant struggle and suffering

9 Toxins, damage, and processing traumatic emotions

10 The ever-healing wound: psychoanalysis and Kabbalah

11 I am turning into a barnacle

12 I want to be a woman: caesura, blackout, rebirth

13 The naked beginner

PART 4

Confession and prayer

14 Psychoanalytic faith

Reply: from touch to touch

15 Swimming in the psyche

16 Faith's breath

17 In the land of the unknown

Index