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Full disclosure: At the time I am writing this review, Michael Eigen is editor-in-chief of The Psychoanalytic Review, and I am associate editor. Most likely by the time this review is published that will have changed. I have been reading his published work for over twenty years, and have been inspired and moved each time I discover a new work or reread portions of prior work. I collect his work the way people collect rare gems. I am a fan.
A work by Eigen is recognizable by its accessibility, its immediacy, its lack of jargon, its depth, and its mystical underpinnings. He is a psychoanalyst and human being in profound contact with unconscious process and symbolic communication, and with a lived mystical experience. In his work he attempts to communicate the ordinariness of the divine, the pitfalls and terrors of the human experience, and the possibilities of active contact between two people in the communication of what may be thought of and described as the ineffable, states of being which are both every day occurrences and overwhelmingly difficult.
Eigen takes his book title from a quotation from Bion (1994), “When two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created” (p. 321), which is used as an epigram in introducing his book. Taking issue with Freud's notion that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego (and incidentally forsaking the language of ego, superego, and id to talk about ourselves), taking issue with the notion that we develop from the outside in, from perception of the outside world to self-expression, Eigen considers a psyche-soma unity, an immediate psychic storm of infancy. “I believe the scream of infancy never stops. It is part of our beings all life long. We never stop hearing, if only in whispers, a screaming self. A storm with infinite faces” (p. 1). Eigen listens for the storms of pain, the storms of pleasure, the whispers of screams, and hears them in nature, in poetry, in art, in philosophy, and person to person, in his practice of psyc