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Every psychoanalyst approaches the clinical situation in the spirit of scientific inquiry-to find what is true. The analyst moves in and out, from the patient's productions, to theory, to self-reflection and back to the patient. Current day psychotherapists do work that is informed by many models of the mind, various psychoanalytic languages, as well as by medicine, science, art, literature, religions, philosophy, ethics and spirituality. The burgeoning of information, reformulations and reworking of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical theory, challenges one to fine-tune a reliable model of how the mind works and how treatment helps. Like the dancer of today, whose strength surpasses that of the athlete of yesterday, and the athlete who is informed by the grace of dance training and music, today's therapist needs to incorporate a range of intellect and spirit influenced by information From all comers of life and study.
Michael Eigen shares his work with an athletic courage and intellectual grace and spirit, He also offers a specific model of what he believes is curative about analysis. Reshaping the Sep Reflections on Renewal through Therapy is a book about the therapy of two patients, Les and Lynn, and the experience of their therapist, M. Eigen. Dispensing with complex metapsychological concepts, Eigen's language is an experience, a near poetic depiction of their (and his) deepest wishes and fears. As he describes their often painful journeys to regain the denied and split off aspects of their abhorred and feared selves, one discovers that this is not an easy book to read. The demands are less intellectual than they are emotional as Les and Lynn's stories unfold, resonating with the therapist/reader's experience in professional practice, and in life.
Eigen organizes his thinking about the work of living and therapy around the dual coordinates of mind-body. self-other. His dual coordinates encompass intrapsychic conflict, object relations, and relational persp