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Michael Eigen writes about experience in psychoanalysis. His work defies theoretical categorization, certainty, and modes of organization common to theory development and scientific objectivity in psychoanalytic literature. The writing is organized around themes of toxicity, catastrophe, faith, and endurance for what is real in intimately personal and interpersonal realms.
Part of a body of work that includes eleven books and hundreds of articles, The Sensitive Self continues Eigen's effort to find a language for emotion and sensation in lived experience. His view of individual subjectivity integrates post-Kleinian views of nature and nurture with philosophical and theological views of life in the universe. Stephen Mitchell (1993) wrote, “Michael Eigen is one of the few contemporary writers to describe the radically innovative project shared by the more visionary recent analytic authors. He has written about the way in which Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan “express the subject's struggle to live faithfully … The primary object of creative experiencing is not mother or father, but the unknowable …” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 33).
The Sensitive Self opens in language so simple that the reader's first impression may be that it has been written for the mass market. The danger of this deceptively easy read is to treat it cursorily or dismissively. The subject of sensitivity is a complex one for psychoanalysts to consider. To examine the unfolding of sensitivity from within the proprioceptive, kinesthetic and mediating functions of the psyche-soma expands a view of psychic reality to include sensation, which has largely been