Customer Reviews

Ecstasy

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Eigen's "Ecstasy" is a profound book that moves spirituality and psychoanalysis into a dialogue in which neither loses and both are enriched. The struggles of a day and of a lifetime are given conceptualization here in the author's seemingly stream-of-consciousness style that rests on a disciplined study of literary, biblical, and psychoanalytic wisdoms. The reader feels a sense of discovery, of self and other, as deeply personal battles are rendered by Eigen in ways that leave one thinking, and feeling, long after putting the book down. And this book is hard to put down! An intellectual and spiritual work that reads like a fine poem, "Ecstasy" is a cogent antidote to society's de-ontologizing tendencies.

Michael Eigen is a wonderful writer and psychoanalytic thinker. I have
greatly enjoyed several of his previous books: "The Electrified
Tightrope," "The Psychotic Core," and "Toxic Nourishment." They combine
fascinating case histories from his practice, stories from his own
life, with Eigen's unique contributions to analytic thinking -- often
stimulated by the writings of Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, as well as sources
as diverse as Shakespeare, Greek philosophy, and the bible.

His books strike a resonant chord in me, emphasizing the range and
intensity of human emotions and the power of empathic therapeutic
listening. Reading Eigen makes one more accepting of the variability of
experience and more open to the mystery and paradoxes of life.

Eigen's newest book, "Ecstasy," is his most personal book to date.
Written in a free-flowing poetic style based on association and metaphor,
it is almost like a collection of journal entries and thus difficult to summarize.
As in his previous books, there are wonderful stories from his and his patient's lives.
The theme of "ecstasy" leads him to write about his deepest spiritual and religious beliefs.
Although I do not share his vision, I admire his
willingness to speak so passionately and openly.

I found myself moved by the many feelings and moods evoked by the mostly short, seemingly unrelated passages separated by spaces on the pages of Ecstacy by Dr. Michael Eigen. Some of these passages describe clinical episodes, living interactions between the author and his patients. Some express thoughts and truths which the author seems to have had percolating within him for ages. Ideas and images seem to burst forth unpredictably yet subtly connected to each other and to everything else on the pages.
Reading this flow seems to release my own thoughts and images. I have the feeling of participating in an open and ongoing creative process that does not end with the actual reading but continues into my work, thoughts of my life-all suffused with a powerful uplifting feeling; A kind of ecstacy.

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This is an amazingly poetic book. Experientially, it reads as if a series of "day dream" remnants, that is, "primary process" in its purest and most psychological/spiritual form. It captures the primitive "feeling of the blood" that is the heartbeat of all culture, for better and for worse. There is such a rich sense of passion in this ecstatic experience and yet we know, for example, that the Nazi's fortified their macabre horror story, justified in "das blutgefuhl" ("the feeling of the blood") as the justification for distinguishing those of pure... stock from all other inferiors. Eigen's treatise on Ecstasy is enormously compelling, capturing both what drives us while in many cases also risks our destruction as well. There is a synthesis of what is most complex in our thinking and feeling with the primitive in a fashion that is unusual to the vast body of literature that even comes within a whiff of Eigen's subject. >>

I read Mike Eigens Ecstasy while on a dream-sharing retreat during the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico and found it resonated with the spiritual comings and goings. Ebb and flow is important to Mike Eigen as it is to me--the ebb and flow of agony and ecstasy, darkness and light,death and life, male and female...all of the so-called opposites in dream and so-called real life.As both a dreamer and a therepist I want to thank Mike for Ecstasy and for my share of agony as well. I have read all his books and this one is my favorite.

Ecstasy is a significant contribution on the subject to the fields of psychoanalysis, spirituality, and philosophy. It demonstrates through autobiography, psychotherapy sessions, case studies, and literature how we live the experiences these divergent intellectual fields address as a vibrant, indissoluble unity. The writing - poetic, lyrical, fluid - evokes not just a cognitive but a lived understanding of ecstasy. The reader participates with mind/heart/body/soul. It is not a book for the timid. Eigen addresses not only an ecstasy of bliss but a multifaceted ecstasy, encompassing intense suffering. Torment, murder, and destruction all involve ecstasy. The book is a source of healing for those struggling with the events of September 11, which have increased despair and injured spiritual sensitivities. Ecstasy is a book of and for our time.

There are moments in this book where your eyes tear up because you never realized how this side of us, ecstasy, has such strong power, yet so little way to work itself out with words. Then you read Dr. Eigen's descriptions -- his waves of wonderment, love, and joy, of being swept away by his own, his friend's and families' and client's positive emotions and you want to keep thinking about them over and over. Positive psychologists should flock to this eternal book and have every student read it, discuss it and embrace ways to discuss the psychological sublime. Perhaps psychology has come around late to its positive sides because it has not had a vocabulary for it, those omelet eggs had yet to be cracked upon. Eigen pours himself and his personal and professional insights here in a manner that everyone will find, well, I think perfect.

Consider the varieties of verity: there is the naked truth, the whole truth (and its halves...and have-nots), the unvarnished truth, the awful truth,the real truth (whatever that is)...and the nothing-but-the-truth. Then consider "Ecstasy," whose truth is neither light nor dark. Call it, perhaps, the dappled truth. The kind that lingers in the long shadows of an eternal Sunday afternoon. A spacious, generous truth which allows you to look, to really see this time, the awkward, painful process of your own becoming. Telling you to find the courage--that place in the hot core of your cowardice--that will let you gaze unflinchingly at what it means to be human. On the other hand, Eigen seems to say you can flinch if you want; sometimes he does.

This is an admirable book from a therapist humble enough to maintain silence in the face of stubborn mystery, daring enough to wrestle nothingness to the ground and if not to triumph,then not to succumb either. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, he lives till morning. A limp is a small price to pay for the sheer, diaphanous joy of survival.

The book gets five stars. The author gets the purple heart. We all come away just a jot and a tittle more sane than we were at the first page.