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Ecstasy, for Eigen, is a crucial and ubiquitous emotion: It comes in many guises—from destructive ecstasies that burn through die soul, to life-affirming ones that add depth, texture, and verve to life. There are ecstasies of suffering, madness, murder, psychological understanding, and spiritual illumination. Ecstasy “helps us feel real, adds to life's color, fuels vision, and is part of the tone and texture of our lives” (p. viii).
Eigen tells us in the preface that he wrote Ecstasy in response to “an inner pressure to express the ecstasy underlying psychoanalytic work, as well as life more generally—an ecstasy coming through, often wedded with, the most excruciating states” (p. xii). To Eigen Ecstasy is a psychoanalytic meditation on the agony and bliss that commingle in a human life.
Such an inclusive agenda demands breadth, depth, and creativity-virtues that Ecstasy demonstrates in abundance. Eigen's reach is enormously broad: Drawing on Freud and Federn, Milner and Winnicott, Bion and Blake, Shakespeare and Rabbi Akivah, Wilhelm Reich and Lacan, Ecstasy examines a range of topics from madness and mysticism to cultural blind spots and creativity. Eigen is grounded in, and respectful of, the theoretical wisdom and clinical acumen of analytic tradition and its predecessors—without being bound by them. As a result, his own inimitable and ecumenical voice emerges—full of the insight and wisdom one associates with gifted clinicians, the compassion that derives from spiritual seeking, and the prophe'tic outrage one sometimes sees in mystics.
Ecstasy is not a conventional psychoanalytic text. “Its ‘argument’ is less rationalistic and linear, more a moment-to-moment showing of creative and destructive ecstasies at work” (p. vii). Eigen is a painter of moods and moments—of the luminous radiance and abundance of ecstasy, the catastrophes and torments that threaten to sink die soul— rather than die proponent of a systematic theory of ecstasy or psychoanalytic treatment.