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With his 26th book, Michael Eigen once again has taken the challenge of being human to heart, and has expanded many of his ideas from his early books in a wonderfully poetic, encapsulated way. His own humanity is revealed in his marvelously transparent description of his psychoanalytic encounters with the people who have sought him out, encounters that are profound, poignant, illuminating - and inspiring. In reading chapter after chapter, I knew that I was learning more and more about becoming more and more the psychoanalyst I want to be, and will become. Eigen leads us through the realms of unconscious process, and intense encounters with the deepest, and, often, darkest realms.
Eigen's Preface immediately plunges the reader into the theme of the book. The opening two sentences spell out what we need to encounter, “The challenge of being human faces us throughout our lives, a never-ending challenge individually and communally. What to do with the many tendencies that create and live us and we live, capacities that lift us to unimaginable places and cast us down to nameless horrors?” (p. ix).
What is it we need to face? Eigen begins with destructive urges, with the bold, and most likely irrefutable, statement, that “as a group we commit a lot of murder” (p. 2). He addresses a theme he has written about since he first began publishing, psychosis. The challenge of being human includes madness. “Murder seeks a perfect solution, hallucinates totality” (p. 5). In exploring what Eigen calls “a treasure, the human psyche” (p. 9), he leads us to wonder how we apply the brakes. And then, his very next chapter is “Psychopathy in everyday life.” He considers the likelihood that psychopathy fuses with much else in our inner life, that psychopathy could be a part of survival. He considers psychopathy as a denial of dependency, and then links idealization and death.
For all the dread evoked by his exploration of this topic, he also is deeply empathic, and ultimately, supremely conte