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This superb volume, a work of both science and art, is written by a psychoanalyst, Michael Eigen, who is probably relatively little known outside of New York City and the Boston/Washington corridor. This might be because Eigen is a psychologist and, second, because Eigen is somewhat eclectic and cannot be easily classified in any one school. I found this book extremely wise clinically, moving, and penetrating in its understanding of the problems and possibilities of the human psyche and, indeed, an esthetic experience in its reading per se. On the one hand, Eigen very elegantly presents us with an artistic and creative phenomenology of what he calls the “psychotic core.” Apart from psychosis itself, he thinks of psychotic experience as part of the inner life of deeply disturbed, borderline patients or patients with profound affective disorders. On the other hand, Eigen is also extremely clinically astute and pragmatic. Despite his extremely profound scholarship and knowledge of the literature, he never floods the reader with his ideas, nor does he tend to obtund the psychoanalytic practitioner with abstruseness or too deep or complex elaborations. On the contrary, he is most lucid in both his original work and his synthesis evolving from various authors whom he has presented in his discussions. Broadly speaking, Eigen leans most heavily on two areas for his text:
Comments of a theoretical nature by Freud, Jung, Winnicott, and Bion.
His own excellent writings and some 25 years of psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis with very disturbed and psychotic patients.
I first became aware of Eigen some six years ago, when I read his excellent paper “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion” in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Eigen has a whole series of articles dating back to 1974 that involve his interest in object relations theory (particularly Winnicott and Bion), in existentialism, and in writers in the French psychoanalytic school such as Lacan an