Under the Totem: In Search of a Path

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Totem conveys spirit, a sense of the sacred. Freud attempted to get under the totem and explore psychic forces and pressures below the surface. Jung opened further depths in exploration of the sacred. Engagement with a sense of mystery that permeates existence lives in many quarters, including art, music, religion and depth psychologies.

This book is an extended reverie, reflection, confession and encounter with psychic reality, a profound intertwining of multiple dimensions of existence. Psychotherapy spans all dimensions of life, often drawing on capacities we did not know we had. Anything may enter a session and help or harm at a given moment. Under the totem psyche is speaking. Can we hear and transmit it, and to what extent, with what quality?

The method of this book is fragmentary. Different facets of experience emerge, recede, reappear, while others enter. The emphasis is on feeling and imaginative reflection. A good deal draws on therapy sessions and ongoing dialogues with workers who have touched the author, including Bion, Winnicott, Freud, Jung, Klein, Buber, Suzuki, Milner, Wittgenstein, and Wertheimer. The writing grows from love of the psyche, its difficulties and gifts, what we sense as well as the vastness beyond sensing, a love affair ongoing for nearly sixty years of work and acts of shared faith.

Living Moments: On the Work of Michael Eigen

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Michael Eigen is widely regarded as a significant and increasingly influential figure in contemporary psychoanalysis. His writings represent a singular interpretation of Bion and Winnicott, as well as being characterised by a striking and poetic style. This collection of papers, by contributors in the USA, Israel, Australia and South Africa, reveal how his works yield creative and generative possibilities with profound clinical and cultural implications. Writers include well-known authors such as Mark Epstein, Anthony Molino and Brent Potter.

The papers are divided into three sections: Reflections (psychoanalytic and philosophical concerns, such as Heidegger, the Hindu Goddess Kali, Buddhism, the sense of Time); Refractions (clinical implications, papers on murder and aliveness, the nature of the analytic interaction, addiction and work with the mother-infant relationship), and Responses (personal impacts of his works, as well as poetry and the thoughts of a creative writer on Eigen's oeuvre). There are also papers on the experience of supervision with Michael Eigen as well as on his weekly seminars on Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, ongoing for more than forty years, in New York. The book is a long-overdue celebration of and homage to a creative and unique figure in contemporary psychoanalysis.

With a Foreword by Dr James Grotstein, and a complete bibliography of Michael Eigen's writings compiled by Loray Daws.

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Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life

Image, Sense, Infinities, and Everyday Life

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Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image.

In this compelling book, Michael Eigen leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of 'no', shame, his session with André Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner. The author concludes with notes on his life as a young man leading him into the therapeutic vocation he has fostered and which has fostered him for nearly sixty years.

See also

Living Moments: On the Work of Michael Eigen