Reading Michael Eigen: A Review of The Sensitive Self by Michael Eigen Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.

P.S. Mother, Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

By my count, Michael Eigen has now published eleven books and scads of essays over a period of more than thirty years, making him one of the most prolific of analytic writers. He has created a body of work that spans enough time and territory to be read organically for its collective coherence. And that, I'm afraid, is the rub. The brilliant quirkiness of Eigen's individual efforts, tickling, teasing, provoking us around aspects of analytic-human experience, now present a greater challenge: In an age when psychologists in California are warned by their Licensing Board to “fear lawyers with knowledge of the research literature,” what are we to make of all this elaborated talk of mysticism, faith, dreamwork, and madness X? In an age when influential psychologists preach the moral value of “evidence-based treatments” (like “decency,” who can question the rightness of “evidence”?) and suggest that all else is fraud, what are we to do with a psychotherapeutic approach that leans toward unconscious processing and the need to repair the id? For many of the sharpest thinking scientist-practitioners among us, my guess is that the jury is already in.