Psychic Deadness - Hardcover

Eigen, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568217358 ISBN 13: 9781568217352

Publisher: Jason Aronson Inc. Publishers, 1996

Synopsis

This book portrays attempts to fathom psychic deadness, but more important, it shows what is involved in enduring and working with deadness on a day-to-day, session-by-session basis. Often, the therapy relationship becomes a laboratory in which varying states of deadness-aliveness can be tied to what is going on between patient and therapist, as well as in the patient's life. In many cases, according to Eigen, the emotional tone of the therapy can be the most important element. Patient and therapist work to discover what the patient is looking for, that is, the precise combination of psychic nutrients, responses, attitudes, and tones required for a given individual, or even a given moment, so that a person can begin to open, and the deadness can lift.

About this title

Review:

'Michael Eigen has time and time again drawn powerful and highly unique perspectives for us on fascinating and troubling clinical issues. In Psychic Deadness, he brings his exciting vitality to bear on a clinical syndrome that has long eluded significant understanding and formulation - the phenomenon of being emotionally "dead". In elucidating this enigmatic, widespread entity he does "due diligence" to the works of a vast array of relevant contributors on the subject. His clinical examples, drawn as they are in such exquisite depth, reveal the tragic unaliveness of each patient with unforgettable poignancy. His depictions of his psychoanalytic resuscitation methods for treating them alone is worth more than the price of the book.'- James S. Grotstein'In Michael Eigen's remarkable new book, risks of tone and content in the writing are mirrored by risks of intuition and technique in the clinical encounter. No-one, perhaps since Ferenczi, has seen psychoanalysis as so essentially an experiment and therefore as something that, by definition, invites a wide range of response. Eigen's work is unusually open to the reactions of his readers, who are never indifferent to what he is doing. It is a paradox surely close to the heart of his work that he can make something so inspiring out of the ways in which we patch ourselves with deadness. Psychic Deadness will add immeasurably to Eigen's subtle, though not always acknowledged, influence on much of the most interesting contemporary psychoanalytic theory.'- Adam Phillips'This prolific writer offers us a stimulating, in-depth investigation of psychic deadness and demonstrates the way in which therapy can help the growth of psychic aliveness and achieve a balanced oscillation between these two states. Psychoanalysis is fortunate to have in its ranks a fine thinker who can vividly communicate through his writing (described by him as "one of my favorite torments") his passionate devotion to the study of the kaleidoscopic nature of human behaviour.'- Francesca Bion

About the Author:

Michael Eigen, Ph.D., is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he also supervises. He is a senior member, training and control analyst, and faculty member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. The author of The Psychotic Core, Coming Through the Whirlwind, The Electrified Tightrope, and Reshaping the Self, he maintains a private practice in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jason Aronson Inc. Publishers
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1568217358
• ISBN 13: 9781568217352
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 234