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I was attracted to this book by its title, and there are interesting pages in it: a summary of Freud - oceanic feeling and the (also pre-oedipal) father as a centre of psychic drama; long and frequent musings on Bion and Lacan, both of whom Eigen admires - O and jouissance; and useful clinical material including some vignettes. But I was disappointed for several reasons.
Firstly, I have the impression that he has not read other writers - mystical or psychoanalytic - in a scholarly way. I am no enthusiast for Bion or Lacan, and no scholar of theirs either but, when Eigen rhapsodizes about (ostensibly) Bion's O, I do not recognize it as faithful to Bion's intentions. Eigen quite allowably is less concerned with ‘ideas about’ mysticism than about what he considers to be mystical experiences; he is experientially based. But Bion's O has, I think, something to do with ultimate meaning or deepest significance, and is focused and worthy of focus. Similarly, it is my impression that Lacan's jouissance is more precise and austere than Eigen's version of it. Readers will need to judge for themselves.
Secondly, Eigen appears to define as mystical all or most experiences of depersonalization or loss of personal integration, and only these. He, and the people he works with as a soi-disant analyst, experience waves of sensation, often unpleasantly, and to these Eigen attributes mystical status. Indeed he writes as though he equates them with jouissance and/or O. He values these states highly, and sometimes attributes to them something of the status given to the encounters which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had with their God. Eigen is very much not of the quietist persuasion. The encounters seem uproarious, rumbustious, like Handel's setting of ‘For He is like a refiner's fire’ and, as far as I can judge, without moral content. If there is an encounter, it is with something that has nothing of interest to say. The medium is the message. It is like attributing deep significance to a rol