General Information
from Therapist from the Depths: A Conversation with Michael Eigen:
"When I was a little boy I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness."
"With Bion I felt a deeper sense of – what to call it? An unpopular word now – essence. Essence to essence in the passing moment. I felt he somehow found me."
"One moment can help things. It’s not just a matter of reliving lost or dead parts. More like something happened, something changed, opened. Something totally new was going on within me. It was like an intuition, a birth of intuition, vision, a taste bud talking to you. Freud calls the dream ‘the other space.’ Sometimes I feel it as a talking from the heart, from another space within you. It is like a trance of reaching out of yourself. "
“At the beginning I didn’t know that therapy deals with unsolvable fracture. When I began practicing I thought it could be mended. Today I understand that it cannot. You can try to soften the rupture. Actually, I don’t believe in therapy. Therapy is a path, a dedication, a search.”
"Sometimes we hide ourselves to survive. To make pain go away we simply make ourselves go away, and that is how madness is created. Freud teaches that trauma is overwhelming, like a baby after screaming out of hunger, that unknowingly sinks, falls asleep, ‘loses consciousness.’ We also do the same, as adults. But we always return and always survive."
