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Many years ago I listened to an album by tenor saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, a protégé of John Coltrane. From the highest highs to the lowest lows, and everywhere in between, I found it a compelling, engrossing musical journey through the spectrum of everything human. Reading Michael Eigen's Ecstasy was viscerally like listening to this music. Ecstasy is a passionate outflowing of the heart, an invocation, a prose poem. It is full of the unexpected: discordant imagery; linkages that shock; vigorous, in your face style; vivid, embodied language. If you are looking solely for descriptions of bliss states—sexual, spiritual, or otherwise—you've come to the wrong place. This is the distillation of a lifetime of working with the most troubled patients, a lifetime of spiritual seeking, of psychoanalytic journeying, of living the depths: painfully, honestly, and occasionally joyfully. Eigen brings his entire being into his writing, his thinking, his clinical work, and his spiritual explorations. Ecstasy is a book that needs to be lived with for a while. Eigen says that because he tends to break contact too quickly, he has learned to wait, and wait some more. This is the way to read this book, perhaps the only way. Certainly, it was the only way I could read it.
Eigen's voice is part psychoanalyst, part Biblical prophet, part psalmist. Just when you think you've got a hold of him, can feel the ground under you and begin to agree or disagree, he morphs, gives you another side, plucks it away. He takes you to dark places, to luminous places. The journey is herky-jerky, a bumpy roller coaster of pulsating life. The ride is a scream, a primal scene ride, and we look for a rest, a breather. It is like a psychoanalytic koan—no easy answers—a celebration of the agonies and ecstasies of living and dying. If we can bear the tortuous twists and turns, being constantly knocked off kilter, the ride is well worth it. Eigen doesn't talk about ecstasy, about psychoanalysis, about mysticism—h