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From the prolific pen of Michael Eigen, Coming Through the Whirlwind affirms still further the author's capacity to enlist the reader as a secret sharer in the intimate experience of treatment. His previous volume, The Psychotic Core , focused on his work with severely disturbed patients; this present study traces the treatment of two well-functioning professionals, Ben and Cynthia, both attractive, both motivated to enrich the quality of their lives, yet painfully conscious of something psychically amiss, some blight, an emptiness.
Before embarking on case material, the author devotes two generous chapters to elucidation of his central views regarding therapy and the sources that have illuminated his approach. “Winnicott, Bion, and Elkin,” he explains, “are among the writers who have influenced my clinical work most in the past twenty years. One can also see the silent influence of C. G. Jung, whom I read earlier … before Freud, and [I] continue to share Jungian concerns with a deeper self vis-a-vis reality” (10). Also garnered have been specific insights of Freud, Federn, Matte-Blanco, Mil-ner, and Ehrenzweig; these encouraged his perception of psychoanalysis as more than a remedial undertaking—the recognition that it constitutes a transformative experience serving a deep, frequently unconscious need for transcendence in “an aesthetic or spiritual sense.” Such attunement is notably evident in Eigen's feedback to one of Ben's dreams following a long history of terrifying nightmares. The patient reports that in the dream he was “helping rabbits build houses that were intended to be sold.” As a well-trained analyst, Eigen would certainly have been aware of the possibility of mockery of the analytic process in Ben's dream. Instead, he accords with Ben's assessment of this as “a good dream” compared to the nightmares, commenting only that previously “night and day worked against each other, adding to each other's terror. No successful building process could be sustained