1st Edition
Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen Working with the Obstructive Object
Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen examines Eigen’s rich phenomenological work on the Obstructive Object.
The contributors to this collection explore the core theme with reference to key Eigen works, including The Psychotic Core, Psychic Deadness, Toxic Nourishment, and Damaged Bonds. This volume seeks to elaborate on the Obstructive Object through essays and poems that include poignant clinical examples, the impact of exceptionally traumatized patients on their analysts, literature comparisons, and the more "mystical aspect" of Eigen’s influence on working with the obstructive object. Essays draw from Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante, Wilfred Bion, D.W. Winnicott, Andrè Greene, Christopher Bollas, and Adam Phillips, among many others, in exploring injury-rage, unwanted patients, psychoanalytic faith, toxic nourishment, and damaged bonds.
Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen will greatly interest psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and those interested in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.
Acknowledgments
About the Editors and the Contributors
Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen: Working with the Obstructive Object and Primary Process Impacts
Foreword
Morning Blues
1. The Obstructive Object
Jeffrey L. Eaton
2. A Fish in the Stream: Life in Creativity with Virginia Woolf
Meg Harris Williams
3. Occlusions, Metabolic Excess, and Other Risks to Subject Formation in the Child.
Michael O’Laughlin and Mila C. Kristie
4. Abraham’s and Isaac’s Fear and Silence
Louis Rothschild
5. Grappling with the Obstructive Object in the Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante: A Reflection Based on the Works of Michael Eigen
Marlene Goldsmith
6. Undreamable Dreams
Françoise Davoine
7. Impenetrable Obstructive Object: A Poem
Robin Bagai
8. Dreaming a Long Day With Michael Eigen
Stefanie Teitelbaum
9. Unwanted Nearings and Therapeutic Clearings: Holding on, in a Difficult Encounter, to Michael Eigen’s Clinical Wisdom
David Smith
10. Raging against Love – Surviving Injury-Rage Patients: A Personal Reverie
Richard Raubolt
11. Transcendent Intuition: Linking Fragments to Psychic Attunement across Time and Space
Keri Cohen
12. Welcoming Faith, Forgiveness, and Destruction: Being-with Sara
Brent Potter
13. A Cup of Love
Gagandeep Kaur Ahluwalia
God by Rachel Berghash
Biography
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 Pennsylvania, USA.
Loray Daws is a registered Clinical Psychologist in South Africa and British Columbia, Canada. He is currently in private practice and is a senior faculty member at the International Masterson Institute in New York, USA.
"This work is the product of 13 experienced clinicians who are creative thinkers and thought-provoking writers. These thoughtful essays, enriched with clinical material, urge us to deepen our insight into Eigen's welcome-obstructive qualities of human relations. It is landmark work for all clinicians from beginning to highly advanced. Read this book to understand how to work with Eigen's dualities and intricate ideas.” - Professor Aner Govrin, The Program for Hermeneutics & Cultural Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
“Keri Cohen and Loray Daws have done an outstanding job editing the book Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen. With a palpable affect and gratitude for Michael, thirteen authors offered their ideas to an experience in depth-reading of his work. The authors express their views in a Language of achievement, which, as Bion (1970) defined it, manages to hold onto uncertainties and mysteries without an irritating search for reasons and truths. Through their contributions, readers will be magically transported and enveloped in Eigen's vital work.” - Jani Santamaria, child and adult psychoanalyst, Mexican Psychoanalytic Association
Building on the pioneering work of Michael Eigen, this remarkable compendium speaks to the heart of every clinician’s internal and external struggle involving the art and science of sustaining a healing encounter, against the severe toxic agents of trauma and mental/relational conflict. The volume boldly extends and reformulates object relations theory, which will both illuminate and challenge today’s practitioners. As with the companion volume (Primary Process, Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen, Becoming the Welcoming Object 2024) this work is filled with insight and humanity, written in a highly accessible language that tackles the key therapeutic conundrums that belie traditional psychoanalytic thought and practice. Michael Eigen encourages, through his concept of the evolutionary nature of psychoanalysis, that our psychic work is never quite done. This volume is a testament to that sentiment, and even more, it is an antidote to the stale theorizing about resistance and un-treatability, and with every chapter of exemplary writers, offering a new creative recalibration of what it means to face the most difficult and perplexing questions about the human condition. If there was ever a book for this time, it is this one; anyone who is serious about the field of psychoanalysis should have this on their bookshelf. - Jack Schwartz, PsyD, NCPsyA. Faculty Member, Training and Supervising Analyst, The New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Object Relations Institute, NYC.
