Toxic Nourishment [Paperback]

Michael Eigen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999

A profound look at the origins of patient's maladies and the way they lead their lives. The author describes the analyses leading to de-programing these patients from their toxins and intoxicators. The spirits of Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan grace the text.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Toxic Nourishment Michael Eigen has found a profound and elegant metaphor for the origin of his patients' maladies and the road map for how they lead their self-defeating lives. De-programming them from their toxins and beloved intoxicators occupies most of their analyses. In his poignantly graphic clinical portrayals of his patients' lived, unlived, and badly lived scenarios Eigen, the psychoanalyst, becomes transformed into an existentialist, phenomenologist, mystic, and a "novelist-of-the-Real" as well as "rebirthing healer." One can see that the spirits of Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan grace his work. This is a remarkable book. I richly enjoyed it; it's beautiful, poignant, and real. -- James S. Grotstein

Michael Eigen has gone on trying to fathom the terrors of aliveness by asking 'as he does in this remarkable new book' the disarming question: "what is normal about being alive?" And the title Toxic Nourishment alerts us to the kind of visionary paradox that has always been the touchstone of Eigen's work. Equivocation is the language of the unconscious: and it is this language, at once daunting and inspired, that Eigen's work thrives on. In Toxic Nourishment psychoanalysis acquires a new kind of moral seriousness by being the art of the informal. No one in contemporary psychoanalysis writes with this cunning, wholehearted openness. -- Adam Phillips

Michael Eigen's writings are inspired by his clinical encounters with his patients, and like Harold Searles a generation before him, his reconstructions of psychoanalytic theory reflect the depth of a creative mind open to the self's ever new experiencing of the other. -- Christopher Bollas

About the Author

Michael Eigen is a psychologist and psychoanalyst as well as a senior member and training analyst with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is also Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology and supervisor for the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. His other books include Damaged Bonds (Karnac 2001), Rage (2002), The Electrified Tightrope (Karnac 2004) and Feeling Matters (Karnac, 2007).

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Karnac Books (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1855752123
• ISBN-13: 978-1855752122
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,000,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peels away veils in exploring pathogenesis and psa phenomena, November 11, 1999

By 

D. J. Sapen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Toxic Nourishment (Paperback)

I am increasingly convinced that no psychological writer I know of combines the compassionate humanism and intellectual bravery and humility of this author. Michael Eigen is steeped in the conventions of contemporary psychoanalytic writing, as evident in earlier, more conventional essays such as those contained in The Electrified Tightrope, and difficult epistemological and semiotic wrestling with the thorns of Bion as in Psychic Deadness. He is also an erudite if unconventional interpreter of 20th century philosophy, Jewish and Eastern mysticism, music and the dismantling/dissolution and transformation of self evident in sources as disparate as Zen and Paul Auster. In recent books, and most notably so Toxic Nourishment, Eigen more and more rejects schematic theory-building in favor of a distinct approach to familiar psychoanalytic territory, and links past and present meaningfully but without simplistic causal or pseudo-scienteific pretense. Eigen takes a poetic paradox expressed in the title, and offers a distinctive, evocative and disturbing take on processes elsewhere covered by Fairbairn and the lineage of Klein, Bion and Winnicott. Preferring process, paradox and the flow of experience to reified objects and introjects, and Taoistically insisting on the interdependence of contrary forces embedded both in language and psychic dynamism, as elsewhere in nature, Eigen replaces the still-stilted conventional jargon with vivid clinical descriptions of patients carrying forward in time the more-or-less failing effort to extract meaning and an authentic engagement in life and self from the wide menu of familial agenda-ridden love and indigestible emotional intrusions. He offers much to consider in developmental psychology (as well as body development and the psyche-soma connection) and the parent-child and patient-therapist interaction without, again, ever doing so in a schematic or ontogenetic manner, such as that which is embedded still in even some of the best writings from the intersubjective vantage point. Poetry instead of science, but a poetry with rigor. The sense of people whose life task becomes that of extracting life and dignity from nullifying or agonizing forces, frozen by having experienced polarities of ecstasy and pain, repeated experiences of glimpsing denied promised lands, reveals more than ever the literary quality of Eigen's efforts to illuminate his subjects. In applying Bion's most difficult musings on the infinities and extremes of human knowing and experiencing to the interpersonal encounters and moment to moment flavor of experience of his patients and himself, he perhaps does more to illuminate the practical relevance of those daunting ideas than any living biographer or advocate of Bion's work.

Stylistically, there is very little a reader of Kernberg or Guntrip would recognize - although the love and hope for the hidden potentiality of the wounded championed by the latter finds a direct descendant here. Eigen's writing combines the visceral effort at conveying the weight and flavor of the moment - the person, the dynamic, the flow of energy, the intersubjective intensity - of a sort of psychoanalytic beat poetry, rhythmic, succinct and often hypnotic, but with the sophistication of a cutting edge analyst unconcerned with theoretical boundaries or conventions. If there is a flaw, to this reader, it is in the nearly-flawless effort to extend to book length the clinical and theoretical possibilities of his title metaphor, which at times reads as a beautiful notion, a tragic paradox stretched beyond its textual limits. However, this revealed itself, to this reader, to be often a matter of wavering faith as I found myself searching for theoretical terra firma; when I engaged a willingness to indulge his knowing and compassionate riffing on the challenges of inauthentic and poisoned living, and on the individuals themselves, I found myself increasingly drawn in to the evocative flow of unknowing, experiencing via a courageous proxy the lives and flow-of-self of people, and thoughts on those lives and selves, as informed by a guide who champions unknowing and its therapeutic potential.