Contact with the Depths

This book explores ways we make contact with the depths in ourselves and each other. We are deeply moved by contact we make with life, yet also puzzled by a need to break or lose contact, and often suffer wounds by failure of contact to be born. Our sense of contact is tenacious and fragile, subject to deformations, plagued with a sense of jeopardy. Chapters focus on ways we make-and-break contact in the wounded aloneness of addiction, the wounded beauty of psychosis, the importance of not knowing and wordlessness, ways we transmit emotions, the need to start over, and harm we cause by trying to get rid of and misuse tendencies that are part of our makeup. Our contact with life, ourselves, each other is challenged. And through it all, we have need for deep contact, contact with the depths, fulfilling and suspenseful. Contact we never stop growing into, part of the mystery, care and love of everyday life.

Table of Contents:
Introduction and acknowledgements , Distinction–union structure , Spirituality and addiction , I don’t know , Wordlessness , Ring–hang up, start–stop, on–off , Tears of pain and beauty: mixed voices , Arm falling off , Music and psychoanalysis

About the Author :
Michael Eigen

Review :
"Like a flower slowly unfolding its petals to reveal its hidden mystery, Michael Eigen's Contact with the Depths shows us how moving, surprising, and joyous the therapy experience can be. He is a master clinician and a major thinker and this work will inspire for years to come."--Mark Epstein, MD, author of Thoughts without a Thinker "Michael Eigen's work is uncompromising in the best sense. He addresses problems that really matter to him, and he will accept nothing less than thinking and feeling a route through them that is thoroughly and uniquely his own. You don't add what he has to say to your store of knowledge so much as steep yourself in the experience of reading him, an experience that offers, and requires from the reader, a personally authentic sensibility that is sometimes mystical. He invites you to feel your way into a rapport with him, especially around his experience with patients, but also with what he conveys about his longstanding relationships with Bion, Winnicott, Buddha, Jesus, the Kabbalah, and others. Eigen manages to succeed in all these ways in a text that nevertheless remains accessible and expressive throughout, and therefore a real pleasure to read. The title of this fine and moving book, Contact with the Depths, is a description of what we gain from it: we contact Eigen's depths, and our own, and we are better for the experience. Eigen has produced another important contribution to the psychoanalytic literature."--Donnel B. Stern, author of Unformulated Experience and Partners in Thought