Rage. By Michael Eigen. Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press. 2002,  192 pp.

In reading Michael Eigen's writings, a reader comes to ask questions that implicitly rise from the body of his work and might be organized as follows:

So much psychoanalytic literature is needlessly lifeless. This is true of psychological literature in general. Why might this be so? Is there false need to deaden one's writing in order to appear scholarly or scientifically respectable? Is there fear of life, fear of psyche from which the written word protects us?

Michael Eigen's work breaks the mold; it is vital. The lens through which he visions life and clinical material for his readers captures living and soul. The images that this lens records connect with life and move and resonate with it, rather than leaving it behind. To review Eigen's Rage, which he describes as a “meditation on rage and pain and self” (p. 5), is a daunting task. Exposed to such celebratory writing, shall the reviewer, borrowing the author's style, write a meditative response on Eigen's meditation, or should one, instead, attempt to offer commentary on the above-noted questions that I have attributed to him? Perhaps both forms can live together in the following thoughts, which seek simultaneously to report on and to historically contextualize Eigen's latest contribution.

In the beginning was the Image, and die Image birthed die Affect, and they were inseparable, one from the other. Thus spake Sigmund Freud.

Freud (1915)1 argued that die Unconscious was constituted by vorstellungen, by visual scenarios that were the inseparable joining of objects and the actions or triebe (drives) with which these objects act upon each other.2 These earthy and primal images were dragged toward consciousness by external happenings and, just at the moment they arose into consciousness, biruied emotions that were their immediate conscious precipitates. In certain cases and when there was a perceived and potential risk of one affect coming into conflict with