Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen: Becoming the Welcoming Object

Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen examines Eigen’s rich phenomenological work on becoming a welcoming object.

The contributors to this collection explore the core theme with reference to key Eigen works including Feeling Matters and Contact with the Depths. As a primary process psychoanalyst, Eigen’s writing reflects a unique rhythm of faith that is able to "revivify" union-distinction body-affect-thinking potentialities within a creative psychoanalytic dyad. In this book, alongside its companion volume, Toxic Nourishment and Damaged Bonds in the Work of Michael Eigen, contemporary Eigen readers and writers articulate the various welcoming processes and attitudes needed to cultivate a "Hearing Heart," a central ingredient in reaching and touching those parts of self-deemed unwanted, unwelcomed, and even traumatized. Primary Process Impacts and Dreaming the Undreamable Object in the Work of Michael Eigen represents a wide range of psychoanalytic perspectives, and the chapters describe the genius of Eigen as well as contribute their own clinical and academic acumen.

Presenting a key aspect of Michael Eigen's transformational aesthetic, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

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.

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.