You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I first encountered Michael Eigen's writings as far back as the early 1980s when, as a recent graduate of a psychoanalytic training institute1 and just brought on as a faculty member, I was full of the excitement of recent advances in the treatment of borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, and the writings of the British analysts, especially Winnicott and Bion, not only pioneers in the treatment of these disorders, but also theoreticians of rich and suggestive conceptualizations that seemed to open psychoanalysis into new realms of understanding (e.g., with theoretical concepts such as Bion's “O” and his Grid and Winnicott's maternal holding, transitional object, and incommunicado core). Eager to learn more, I was sitting in the University of Pennsylvania Library periodicals room leafing through an edition of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis when I came upon an article by Michael Eigen (1981) entitled “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion.” Up to that time, I had never heard of him, but the subject matter —faith, a topic that was just beginning to come out of the closet in some analytic circles—drew my interest along with the names of three analysts whose work was innovative and controversial.
Looking back now on that article with 40 years' hindsight, what still strikes me about it is the straightforward way in which Eigen introduced faith and religion into a psychoanalytic discourse which at the time still regarded spirituality and religion as delusions rather than meaningful human experiences. Eigen's inference was that faith, defined heuristically by him as the space between not knowing and knowing, between the absence and presence of the object, was a source of growth and development in the infant, and by extension, the adult. By defining faith as a kind of inductive leap made by the infant in the absence of the object, Eigen asserted that faith (and by extension mysticism and religion) is a “built-in”