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In the preface to Ecstasy, Michael Eigen expresses the hope that the book will be “a kind of dance, perhaps a kind of psychoanalytic poetry.” He succeeds in this endeavour and also in having offered us a book of great clinical value that can help guide us in our encounters with patients who have lost touch with their own vitality or, alternatively, are hopelessly gripped by the gratifications of ecstatic pain.
Eigen invites us into the very heart of the ecstatic moment, which he defines in terms of an intensity of experience that at once brings us closer to the core of our being and to the edge of the Absolute. He is inclusive in his vision of ecstasy, while affirming our desire to be exclusive: to have the pleasure of it without the pain. This is a desire that creates its opposite through a disjunctive wishful splitting of reality. In the yearning toward ecstasy, we inevitably encounter the whole of it, rather than the wished for demi-self, demi-reality. As we desperately try to define our ways out of and into existence, we inevitably encounter both the presence of whatever we would rather omit from reality and the lack of whatever we feel we need.
We seek transcendence, in part, as a wish to move beyond the pain to some realm of pure pleasure: an impossible illusion. In our inability to attain the transcendent moment with any duration and still survive, we encounter the inevitability of locating ourselves in space and time. As we define ourselves as “body” and therefore as finite in space and time, we tend to lose our moorings from those more ephemeral aspects of self that are beyond space and time.
We are plunged deeper and deeper into paradox, as Eigen teases us, with our inability to rest at one extreme or another. Ultimately we must find a way to be both finite and infinite, in pleasure and in pain. In vignettes from his own life and his encounters with patients, Eigen illustrates how we attempt to short-circuit these essential dilemmas and avoid their immediacy.