ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Michael Eigen's main trauma statements and their relevance to the therapeutic praxis of "unwanted patients". It emphasizes not so much the "hard to reach patient", but, rather, the "hard to reach interface between therapist and patient" and the importance of Eigen's notion of primary impact work. Eigen's psychoanalytic reverie makes special mention of our nourished and traumatized selves when he writes, "In the beginning there is nourishment; in the beginning there is trauma, and in the beginning there is nourishment–trauma". In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell wrote of an experience he had in 1901, articulating the "region" so thoughtfully mapped by Eigen's many works. That is, Russell describes a brief moment wherein contact with the depths enabled the nourishment of a "soul space," enlivening a transformational perspectivism able to touch unendurable loneliness. The mystic insight, which imagined to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself.
