ABSTRACT
To read Michael Eigen's work, to participate in his seminars, and to experience him as a human being, is to become aware of all that psychoanalysis can be for each of us—the possibility of a psychoanalysis as big as the world. His level of comfort with fragmentation, whether the fragmentation of Lurianic Kaballah, psychotic states, or the everyday expansions and contractions of self, invites an openness to experience, creative thought, and to the inclusion of what has previously been omitted. Eigen's writings have a boomerang effect. The reader reads, the reader learns, the reader takes the teachings in, and the reader goes out into the world emboldened by the teachings. In a interview conducted by Regina Monti for Dharma Cafe, Eigen points out how in The Psychotic Core he describes Sigmund Freud's tripartite structure of the mind as "heavily steeped in a phenomenology of psychosis." These structures of the mind are universal, and Eigen describes them as having psychotic-like qualities.
