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In The Psychotic Core, the author addresses a subject that has been all but ignored by mainstream American classical analysts (with a few notable exceptions) thanks to their sustained interest in neurosis and character disorders, aided and abetted by considerations of analyzability. The profound interest in psychosis expressed by the Kleinians and the British object relations school ran up against ideological and political barriers in this country, and psychosis went into eclipse, to be taken over by empirical psychiatry. Moreover, the idea of a “psychotic core” in an otherwise normal or neurotic personality seems to have been a predominant belief in British, European, and South American psychoanalytic thinking, but it never gained a foothold here.
Eigen helps to rectify this foreclosure in the first major contribution on the phenomenology of psychosis since the seminal contributions of Searles. Many features distinguish this work. One is the balance between the intensity of his focus in psychotic phenomenology and the diversity of his perspectives. He travels comfortably and knowledgeably between Freud, Hart-mann, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Jung, Kohut, Lacan, and others. The depth of his familiarity with Jung, Bion, and Lacan in particular is impressive.
Further, and this is for me one of the quintessential features of this work, the author's keen clinical eye for the psychotic experience is informed by an unusual respect for a dialectical ordering of his data and conclusions. Lamentably, Freud perfunctorily dismissed Hegel and his dialectics but nevertheless came up with a revolutionary theory of mind that, though unwittingly dialectical in nature, fell short of true dialectics by settling on psychical conflict and deficiency based on a “master-slave” hierarchical paradigm rather than one of balance-imbalance. Paradoxically, it is to neuropsychology's credit that it has discovered the importance of dialectical balancing between the two cerebral hemispheres - where eac