Toxic Nourishment

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Summary: Peels away veils in exploring pathogenesis and psa phenomena
Review: I am increasingly convinced that no psychological writer I know of combines the compassionate humanism and intellectual bravery and humility of this author. Michael Eigen is steeped in the conventions of contemporary psychoanalytic writing, as evident in earlier, more conventional essays such as those contained in The Electrified Tightrope, and difficult epistemological and semiotic wrestling with the thorns of Bion as in Psychic Deadness. He is also an erudite if unconventional interpreter of 20th century philosophy, Jewish and Eastern mysticism, music and the dismantling/dissolution and transformation of self evident in sources as disparate as Zen and Paul Auster. In recent books, and most notably so Toxic Nourishment, Eigen more and more rejects schematic theory-building in favor of a distinct approach to familiar psychoanalytic territory, and links past and present meaningfully but without simplistic causal or pseudo-scienteific pretense. Eigen takes a poetic paradox expressed in the title, and offers a distinctive, evocative and disturbing take on processes elsewhere covered by Fairbairn and the lineage of Klein, Bion and Winnicott. Preferring process, paradox and the flow of experience to reified objects and introjects, and Taoistically insisting on the interdependence of contrary forces embedded both in language and psychic dynamism, as elsewhere in nature, Eigen replaces the still-stilted conventional jargon with vivid clinical descriptions of patients carrying forward in time the more-or-less failing effort to extract meaning and an authentic engagement in life and self from the wide menu of familial agenda-ridden love and indigestible emotional intrusions. He offers much to consider in developmental psychology (as well as body development and the psyche-soma connection) and the parent-child and patient-therapist interaction without, again, ever doing so in a schematic or ontogenetic manner, such as that which is embedded still in even some of the best writings from the intersubjective vantage point. Poetry instead of science, but a poetry with rigor. The sense of people whose life task becomes that of extracting life and dignity from nullifying or agonizing forces, frozen by having experienced polarities of ecstasy and pain, repeated experiences of glimpsing denied promised lands, reveals more than ever the literary quality of Eigen's efforts to illuminate his subjects. In applying Bion's most difficult musings on the infinities and extremes of human knowing and experiencing to the interpersonal encounters and moment to moment flavor of experience of his patients and himself, he perhaps does more to illuminate the practical relevance of those daunting ideas than any living biographer or advocate of Bion's work.

Stylistically, there is very little a reader of Kernberg or Guntrip would recognize - although the love and hope for the hidden potentiality of the wounded championed by the latter finds a direct descendant here. Eigen's writing combines the visceral effort at conveying the weight and flavor of the moment - the person, the dynamic, the flow of energy, the intersubjective intensity - of a sort of psychoanalytic beat poetry, rhythmic, succinct and often hypnotic, but with the sophistication of a cutting edge analyst unconcerned with theoretical boundaries or conventions. If there is a flaw, to this reader, it is in the nearly-flawless effort to extend to book length the clinical and theoretical possibilities of his title metaphor, which at times reads as a beautiful notion, a tragic paradox stretched beyond its textual limits. However, this revealed itself, to this reader, to be often a matter of wavering faith as I found myself searching for theoretical terra firma; when I engaged a willingness to indulge his knowing and compassionate riffing on the challenges of inauthentic and poisoned living, and on the individuals themselves, I found myself increasingly drawn in to the evocative flow of unknowing, experiencing via a courageous proxy the lives and flow-of-self of people, and thoughts on those lives and selves, as informed by a guide who champions unknowing and its therapeutic potential.