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“Whoops—I hear someone saying nothing is always the same. But no, nothing varies too.”
Bits of Psyche (2024) is a collection of seven continuous seminars by Michael Eigen. For fifty years, he has been offering these seminars, which have studied Winnicott, Lacan, Bion, and his own material. Having attended some of the seminars, I find that this collection captures what it is like to attend the seminars and provides insight into Eigen's creative force. Eigen has published over 27 books and numerous articles. He relies on the great thinkers of psychoanalysis and history yet retains his own authentic spirit. At 88, Eigen often remarks about how he is still working on himself, still trying to get to know himself, still trying to grow. Eigen is not afraid of free-association and he uses it to gain access to places that might be harder to reach through formalization. He integrates his own experiences with the texts that he is teaching and provides highly original outside sources from literature, religion, philosophy and poetry. He also makes connections between the readings he assigns and the current political atmosphere, linking intrapsychic processes with political processes. Recently, Eigen has dedicated most of his seminars to studying Bion's A Memoir of the Future (1991). Each week the group is assigned a section of the text and then it is discussed during the seminar. In essence, Bits of Psyche is about Eigen teaching the group about this often-ignored text. While A Memoir of the Future is the main text, Eigen pulls from the entire corpus of Bion's work.
From the chosen seminars, I want to focus on his work on self-states, numbing processes, and the relation between self, other and war. In the seminars, Eigen will sometimes tell the group to say hello to themselves. The assumption is that one would not need to do that, one is already there. Yet Eigen remarks: