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Michael Eigen's latest book, Feeling Matters: From the Yosemite God to the Annihilated Self, is a collection of ten essays, half of which have been previously published. Some readers may object to the inconsistency of form. Chapters range from spiritual musings after a visit to Yosemite National Park, to extended case material, to notes from an online seminar the author gave in 2005. A unifying thread, however, is the author's continued, unflinching exploration of the human psyche, “slowly rubbing joy and horror together” (p. 1).
Here, however, Eigen has a new political emphasis. He dedicates this book “To a Better World: Which cannot happen without more attention to experience and psychic life. As long as feelings are second-class citizens in public dialogue, people will be second-class citizens.” Although the author gives us a positive spin—in his introduction he sees the book as “a love of life, an affirmation” (p. 7)-he also acknowledges what is perhaps the more genuine theme: a feeling of powerless-ness that he observes on occasion both in the treatment room and in the larger social-political context.
He expands his search for ways to understand the political climate in the United States, as well as his rage and helplessness at the current Administration and the war in Iraq. The author strives to link the micro with the macro: “Social forces play off unconscious areas of annihilation, exploit it, titillate and irritate it, scapegoat it,” he states (p. 7).
A theme of this book, he says, is to illustrate the need to “try to sustain the growth of psychic taste buds, not play them down or pretend they don't exist. They DO exist and permeate experience. A world tilted toward profit has little time for them, except to exploit them, make money out of them, convert them into the will to power” (p. 2).
Further, he states that the minimization of trauma can have individual and far-reaching effects: A patient may consider suicide rather than face a trauma. The country can go