ABSTRACT
Michael Eigen brings us into the living pulse of his psychoanalytic vision and praxis. Psychological processes and person-to-person affective engagement constitute dynamic unfolding events that take precedence over static states and content. Emotional pain, evolving struggle, and ambiguity, erase categorical thinking. Eigen does not attempt to create a systematic theoretical paradigm with well-differentiated concepts. Eigen's approach does not characterize feeling as a self-enclosed, solipsistic psychic event; rather, feeling reaches out beyond itself, connecting us to self, world, and others. It generates change in psychotherapy, co-constitutes the nature and wordless meaning of words, and helps to create ethics, the experience of space, and the dream. Eigen has given psychoanalysis a heart. His work transfigures the psyche as traditionally set forth in psychoanalysis. He contributes a new and heartfelt mode of writing as a viable language for psychoanalysis. The evocative, poetic style of his work forms a coherent unity with its subject matter, expressing ineffable feelings, unspeakable wounds, wordless communications, living moments.
