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This short, wonderful book is a transcript of a series of seminars given by Michael Eigen over three days in Seoul, 2007. Eigen states that his purpose is to talk about madness in psychoanalysis, but he also presents the talk as being ‘a sample, a little dip into certain aspects of psychic reality through the eyes of Klein, Winnicott, Bion and of course Eigen’. His thoughts on murder appear on the third day, although murder and madness are interwoven throughout the whole talk. The beauty of the book lies in reading words that were first spoken live and spontaneously, and obviously without the aid of notes, on such fundamentally difficult and challenging issues as madness and murder. The shortness of the book makes for intense, concentrated reading, but it is thoroughly accessible and riveting throughout.
Eigen explores a psychic reality that very much involves core existential difficulties in life, at the heart of psychoanalytic concern and endeavour, such as how to survive ourselves, how to live without killing off ourselves and others. His journey through four main psychoanalytic thinkers is to illustrate how they engaged with these struggles and the points of overlap and difference between them. He illuminates rather beautifully the central philosophical differences between Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott, and how each seemed to take up a different truth, a different aspect of human nature, a different