1st Edition
A Michael Eigen Companion Moments of Wisdom from a Psychoanalytic Mystic
Foreword by Ebru Salman
Preface and Acknowledgments
Credits
Introduction
Selected Quotes and Commentary
Holiness
Beauty and Ethics
Wonder, Awe and Not-Knowing
Ethics of the Unknown
Sensitivity and Ethics
Wordless Immensity
Awesome Living Being
Knowledge and Being
A Circle We Must Live With
The Brain and Experience
Evolution of Experience
Health and Suffering
Mastery and Mystery
Horizon of Humility
Our Mad Psyche
Absolute States and Possessiveness
Mutual Correctiveness
A Mix of Infinities
Psychic Binocularity
On Hierarchy
On Self-Destruction
Can Life Survive Itself?
Destructiveness Itself
Creative Murder
Psychic Destruction as Freeing
Realness and Mystery
Feeling Normal, Feeling Alive
Beyond Reparation
Actual and Ideal Satisfaction
Music
Wordlessness in Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy as Letting Be
Staying in Therapy
Struggle
Lie and Truth
Emotional Experience
Impact of Reality
Medication
Openness Within Closed Depths
Sensing
Instinct and Spirit
The Fire that Never Goes Out
Tolerating Frustration
Insoluble Conflicts
Disproportion with Ourselves
How Does Change Happen?
Psychological Amphibians
Surviving Psyche's Pressures
Full and Empty
Artists of the Invisible
Faith and Belief
An Intimate Presence
Ein Soph Within
Inside Eyes
Letting Emotion Speak
Evocation of Meaning
Inner Scream
What Can We Give?
Faith as Opening
Psychoanalytic Intuition
Infinity, Invisibility, and Experiencing
Exploitation of Emotional Capacity
Emotional Anorexia
Assimilating Our Products
Distinction-Union
More Distinction-Union
Mystical Distinction-Union
Like Saint Augustine
You Can't Literalize the Psyche
Confucius and Compassion
Surviving Aliveness
Tool-Making and Reversal
Psyche Never Stops
Your First Patient
A Root Sense
Partners in Evolution
Many Species
Making Room for Experiencing
"Have to" Thinking
It Feels Right
Blurring Complexity
Chanting "I Don't Know"
Psychosis and Creativity
Knowing One Another
Limits of Understanding
The Beauty of Therapy
Therapy for the Human Race
Knowing and Not Knowing
Practicing I Don't Know
Unknown Intimacies
Clinical Not Knowing
Unsolvable Problems
Words Touching Wordless
Confessing Ignorance
Unsolvable Difficulties
Hatred in Response to Deficit
Murder as Delaying Tactic
Boundless Presence Inside Aloneness
Love of the Invisible
Beginning Never Stops
Opening Doors
Relief in Not Knowing
Aliveness and Deadness
Primary Process and Psychic Digestion
Survival Needs and Integrity
Psychic Infancy
Reconciling Languages
Real Water
Imaginal Capacity
Trying To Do Better
Wholeness and Humility
Transformational Processes
Trauma Worlds and Sensitivity
Sensing as Multidimensional
St. Paul and Freud
Substituting Pleasure for Pain
Quality of Unconscious Life
Modifying Winnicott's Use of Object
Fighting Over Differences
Waiting
Building Tolerance and Deflecting Experience
Making Room for Insufficiency
Speaking and Breathing
Creative Waiting
Am I Alive Now?
Smile and Scream
Uneven Evolution
Excitatory Powers
Control and Impulse
Faith and Catastrophe
Faith and Destruction: Both are Deeper
Toward Dreaming's Reach
Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
Light and Faith
Invagination
Shame and Grandiosity
Support for Dreaming
Object Seeking and Projective Identification
Our Drive for Psychophysical Nourishment
Intolerant Object and Murderous Superego
Sparks
What is Faith?
Therapy and Uncertainty
Stainless Light and Stain of Life
Frustration Modification and Evasion
Hallucinatory Murder
Quality of Life
Common Sense and Visions of the Ideal
Self as Family
Wars Within and Without
A Deeper Love
Biography
Robin Bagai, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon, who has been practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy for over 35 years. His book Commentaries on the Work of Michael Eigen (Routledge), adds to his publications in journals and anthologies. Dr. Bagai has been leading in-person and international seminars on over a dozen of Michael Eigen’s books since 2014.
“I am grateful Robin Bagai is sharing aspects of my work touching moments of feeling and reverie that enrich and nourish. His selections increase appreciation of our multi-dimensional existence and deepen a sense of being. Say hello to new and old experiential possibilities and the wonder and care they inspire.”
—Michael Eigen, Ph.D., author of The Challenge of Being human and Contact with the Depths
“Robin Bagai offers a luminous tribute to Michael Eigen. He has carefully and lovingly curated a treasure trove of quotes that throb with feeling, depth, aliveness and Eigen's timeless wisdom. A book to savor, return to, and be transformed by.”
—Shalini Masih, United Kingdom, Psychotherapist and Author, Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness
“Robin Bagai has accomplished an impossible feat, hand-selecting some of Eigen’s most memorable quotes, a creative task in itself. The book reads like mantras, each to be meditated upon, opening up new spheres of experience.”
—Joon ho Lee, Korean translator for Michael Eigen’s Seminars in Seoul 1,2,3, and Director of the Korean Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
“In this Eigen Companion, Robin Bagai enlivens what companioning could mean in many of Michael Eigen's works: honoring the spirit, listening to the heart, bearing witness by walking alongside, cultivating stillness, discovering the gift of sacred silence, and partnering disorder, if not fertile confusion. Eigen's mystical clinical-theoretical touch is artfully illuminated through Bagai’s psychoanalytic vision.”
—Loray Daws, Ph.D., D.Psa, Psychoanalyst and Clinical Psychologist
“Robin Bagai provides us a gift with this stimulating compendium of Michael Eigen's psychoanalytic insights. Moments that touch spirit and soul from quotes that both edify and enlighten.”
—Ofra Eshel, faculty, training and supervising analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society; author, The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis
“What a delight it is to meander through the fertile garden of Mike Eigen's enduring and generous testimony to the richness of analytic and lived experience as opened up by the many vivid selections in this book.”
—Jeffrey Eaton, psychoanalyst and author of A Fruitful Harvest: Essays after Bion
“Robin Bagai's book is an invitation to know Michael Eigen's work more intimately. It sheds light on Eigen's insights into the conditions, conflicts and inexplicable mystery of being human. And much like Eigen himself, Bagai's book is a wonderful friend and a fantastic teacher.”
—Selma Duckler, Honorary Member of The American Psychoanalytic Association
“Through 'Wisdom Moments' Robin Bagai takes the reader on a mystic path along the shadow lines of the human mind to come out eager and in love with Eigen's oeuvre and psychoanalysis.”
—Shifa Haq, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Assistant Professor, Ambedkar University Delhi. Author of In Search of Return— Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir
“In this book Robin Bagai brings together 150 quotations that have accompanied the prolific psychoanalyst Michael Eigen in and out of the consulting room. Displaying knowledge, respect, and affection for Eigen, he transports us with gentleness and fearlessness into the depths of Eigen's work. The result is a unique collection in which each quote has a life of its own; the author turns the reading into an eloquent transformative experience. This book is an extraordinary contribution to the great themes of contemporary psychoanalysis.”
—Jani Santamaría, PhD, co-editor of The Bion Seminars at the A-Santamaría Association and editor of Bion, Dreamwork and the Oneiric Dimensions of the Mind (both Routledge)
"It is Michael Eigen's compassion for his fellow human beings that is the foundation of his many achievements. Robin Bagai gives us a sample of the thoughts this compassion engendered by carefully culling one hundred and fifty remarkable quotes from Michael Eigen's books, a daunting task that Bagai nevertheless manages to complete successfully. This collection of quotes will be welcome to those who are very familiar with Eigen's work and to those who are not."
— Thomas R. Federn, New York City; grandson of Paul Federn, a founding member of Freud's Viennese Psychoanalytic Society
