ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to use Michael Eigen's illuminating thinking to bring understanding to those psychic events in pregnancy, birth, and the first year of life, where the most intense experiences of human existence are exposed as the mother–infant couple struggle for survival out of a core of chaos and a sense of catastrophe. It discusses this from the perspective of concepts Eigen developed out of the work of Freud, Jung, D. W. Winnicott, and W. R. Bion. Many of Aboriginal mothers like Kirra had suffered from loss, an absence, which our therapeutic presence attempted to counter. Eigen's central thinking focuses on the nameless dread of catastrophe. He writes the nameless sense of catastrophe Bion points to moves between nothingness–somethingness–everythingness. It was a journey that united intellectual understanding with a deep spiritual awareness, not being afraid of either as an integral part of analytic thinking.
