Routledge Feeling Matters: From the Yosemite God to the Annihilated Self

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere. Review Each of the patients described in Feeling Matters exemplifies a major dilema for even the most experienced psychoanalyst. This book allows the reader to see a dilemma dthrough the eyes of a master and also to arrive at this or her own creative response. Feeling Matters is a gripping work of psychoanalytic art spanning the breadth of our field. We venture inside Eigen as he struggles to find and stay with his patients. These are riveting accounts of work with patients who defy every attempt to "treat" them and insist on being encountered raw.-- (11/01/2007) "A gripping work of psychoanalytic art encompassing the breadth of life for those touched by our field. We venture inside Eigen as he struggles to find and stay with his patients. He teps deep into the primal layers beneath everyday events and onnocuous words. These are riveting accounts of work with patients who defy every attempt to 'treat' them and insist on being encountered raw."--Mark V. Mellinger, PhD, Faculty and Supervisor, Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy "In an era when emotional processing and affective expression is either trivialized or comodified, Michael Eigen gives passionate voice to the need to grapple with psychic reality. A poet and psychoanalytic visionary, Eigen presents a humanistic, spiritual, and ethical conception of psychotherapy that refuses to ignore the dark side, but rather recognizes that suffering and even agony must be borne, and destructiveness faced head on, to enable development and growth in the individual and society."--Lewis Aron, PhD, New York University, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis "Michael Eigen is a living national treasure of psychoanalysis. His words have the fire and intensity of the Old Testament but his wisdom is ageless and of our time. Feeling Matters is a declaration of our common humanity written by an uncommonly human psychotherapist. It is a gift for all who read it."--Mark Epstein, MD, author of Thoughts Without a Thinker and Open to Desire "Michael Eigen's latest work reads like a gripping existential novel were it not for its sound psychoanalytic moorings. The title of the book expresses the theme with stark poetic compression: 'Feeling (the verb) Matters.' We have come to realize that feelings (as a noun) matter, but Eigen takes a dramatic step further by asking us to take the risk of uniting the verb feeling with our sense of personal agency. He further reveals the theme of his book with another example of poetic compression: 'To try to sustain the growth of psychic taste buds...'. This is an extraordinary and extraordinarily moving archive of how we lead our daily lives as derelict non-feelers--with a reminder of what we are ever missing. I highly recommend this work for all mental health professionals and for the lay public as well."--James S. Grotstein, MD, author of Who is the Dreamer who Dreams this Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences About the Author Michael Eigen