Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen: Becoming the Welcoming Object

Editor : Loray Daws, Editor : Keri S. Cohen

Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen: Becoming the Welcoming Object

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : June 2024
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 228
  • Category :
    Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 97678
  • ISBN 13 : 9781032346045
  • ISBN 10 : 1032346043
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Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen examines Eigen’s rich phenomenological work on becoming a welcoming object.

The contributors to this collection explore the core theme with reference to key Eigen works including Feeling Matters and Contact with the Depths. As primary process psychoanalyst, Eigen’s writing reflects a unique rhythm of faith able to 'revivify' union-distinction body-affect-thinking potentialities within a creative psychoanalytic dyad. In this book, alongside its companion volume, Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen, contemporary Eigen readers and writers articulate the various welcoming processes and attitudes needed to cultivate a ‘Hearing Heart,’ a central ingredient in reaching and touching those parts of self-deemed unwanted, unwelcomed, and even traumatized. Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen represents a wide range of psychoanalytic perspectives, and the chapters describe the genius of Eigen as well as contributing their own clinical and academic acumen.

Presenting a key aspect of Michael Eigen's transformational aesthetic, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

Reviews and Endorsements

Meaning in Eigen's works always reflects the readers' efforts as much as they do Eigen's. In this book, Eigen's experts creatively discuss Eigen's texts on primary process impacts and dreaming. What a life project these authors imagine – one that encourages us to grow the capacity to open up and welcome any experience, including catastrophic ones. Irrespective of your analytic school, this book will profoundly influence your understanding of patients because it articulates the most thorny dimensions of human existence – the scream inside, the catastrophic change, the primary emotional storm, vulnerability, and permeability.
Professor Aner Govrin, The Program for Hermeneutics & Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

This unique book Primary Process Impact and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen edited in a highly committed way by Loray Daws and Keri Cohen, promises readers an extraordinary journey in which, chapter by chapter, fourteen authors, in a conversational style, share the inspirational work of Michael Eigen in both, clinically and personally. They also present sparkling and original ideas that show the creative internal dialogue that every author holds with Michael; in doing it, at every turn of the page, the reader will find infinite emotional experiences.
Jani Santamaría, child and adult psychoanalyst, Mexican Psychoanalytic Association

This volume emerges as a breath of fresh air. Inspired by the work of Micheal Eigen, his many compatriots of writers, poets, and clinicians have recast the very nature of psychoanalysis, from one that was obsessively preoccupied with identifying and managing patient pathology, to the sublime study of what it means to become a vessel for healing, promoting health through the concept of the “Welcoming Object.” This immensely readable volume frees the practitioner from the repressive constructs of traditional psychoanalytic dogma to a new frontier of relational therapeutic encounter. Both building on and casting off the traditions psychoanalytic reasoning, this volume introduces us to a completely revolutionary paradigm that reformulates the concepts of transference, resistance, dream analysis, and relational encounter. This reformulation represents a much-needed refocusing of psychoanalytic theorizing and clinical application, creating a refreshing, humanely descriptive language to psychoanalytic rhetoric, that will no doubt define what psychoanalysis will look like in the years ahead. These many outstanding contributors are a testament to Michael Eigen’s growing legacy, replete with insight, passion, and the true poetic, and even mystical nature of psychoanalytic discourse. To that end, this enlightening volume’s central motif will, as Freud’s work once did, inspire generations of psychoanalysts that are to follow. Anyone interested in the deep study and advancement of the field as well as their practice, owes it to themselves to read this essential book.
Jack Schwartz, PsyD, NCPsyA, Faculty Member, Training and Supervising Analyst, The New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Object Relations Institute, NYC

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments
About the editors and the contributors
Editors Introduction
Foreword by Dr Michael Eigen
Poem - Living Moments by Rachel Berghash

1. Becoming a welcoming object: Personal notes on Michael Eigen’s impact
Jeffrey L. Eaton

2. The “Hearing Heart” and the Vanishing Scream of Being
Ofra Eshel

3. Welcoming Suchness
Jeffrey L. Eaton

4. The Join and Distinction-Union: A Resonant and Complex Oneness
Adam Shechter

5. Nomad to NO-MAD - Welcoming the Psychotic Core - The Primary Process Psychoanalysis of Michael Eigen
Loray Daws

6. “The Welcomed Object”
Alitta Kullman

7. Welcoming Dreams
Willow Pearson Trimbach

8. Ah, Strawberries!
S. Masih

9. Welcoming the Eye/I of the Storm: A Homecoming Story
Epsita Sandhu

10. Listening in with Michael Eigen
Isolde Keilhofer

11. Faces of the welcoming object: musings on Midlife, madness, and Mysticism - Welcoming and being welcomed
Marian Campbell

12. Music as Dreaming- Welcoming absence through music
Stephen Bloch

13. Moving to Inner Lights
Ebru Salman

14. Seer, Sage, Mystic: Luminous Presence in the Work of Michael Eigen
Paul DeBlassie

Poem, Air Currents by Rachel Berghash

About the Editor(s)

Loray Daws is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist currently in private practice in British Columbia, Canada. He is founding member of the South African and British Columbia Masterson Institutes as well as a faculty member of the International Masterson Institute in New York where he completed a post-graduate training program in the disorders of the self. He has published articles on dreaming, psychosomatic disorders (burning mouth syndrome and eating disorders) and the disorders of the self in journals such as the International Journal of Psychotherapy, Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, South African Rorschach Journal, and Clinical Counselling and Contemporary Psychotherapy. He has supervised and taught in South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and Turkey and currently serves as assistant editor for the Global Journal of Health Sciences.

More titles by Loray Daws

Keri S. Cohen is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a Board-Certified Diplomate in clinical social work. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Lancaster, PA. Her work is with adults, adolescents and children. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice and holds a certificate from the William Alanson White Institute's Online Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Programme. She is a published writer, has presented papers at national and international conferences, and is a co-moderator of the international online Studying Eigen group. She teaches and has attended Michael Eigen's Bion seminars for nearly 15 years.

More titles by Keri S. Cohen

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