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Appendix 7. Meeting Mike Eigen – a psychoanalytic mystic – by Alistair Ross
This paper was originally written as a section of a chapter in a PhD thesis on the emergence
of religion and spirituality in contemporary psychoanalysis. This paper was presented at a
theology research seminar at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education
in 2007, and at the West Midlands Institute for Psychotherapy in 2008.
In December 2006 Alistair Ross travelled to New York to meet and interview a number of
eminent psychoanalysts as part of a doctoral programme. The transcripts and their
subsequent thematic analysis are dealt with elsewhere, and what follows is a study of Eigen
based on his seminal text following their meeting at his Central Park West consulting
rooms.
Michael Eigen is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and a training analyst recognised by the
National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) a key organisation in the
USA, but of particular importance in New York. 576 He is also the Associate Clinical
Professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, another key organisation in the development of
psychoanalysis in the USA, and again in New York. Stephen Mitchell, the leading founder
of the relational school of psychoanalysis, largely established the ‘intersubjective’ track for
psychoanalytic training. This approach combines ideas about intrapsychic processes based
on object relations with ideas about person-to-person interaction from interpersonal
psychoanalysis pioneered by the William Alanson White Institute, New York that
developed ideas by Sullivan, Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, Thompson and the Ricohs.
Consequently the ‘intersubjective’ strand adopts a pluralistic approach to analysis including
feminist thinking, post-modern approaches as well as Jung and Lacan. Eigen is the current
editor of The Psychoanalytic Review, the oldest, continuously publishing psychoanalytic
journal (since 1913). The Review, the official journal of the NPAP is interested in the
engagement of psychoanalysis with wider cultural issues and offers a trans-theoretical voice
for all forms of psychoanalytic thinking.
Eigen wrote extensively on a wide range of psychoanalytic issues before his first critical
engagement with religion and spirituality in his 1981 paper ‘The area of faith in Winnicott,
Lacan and Bion’. 577 The ideas developed in this 1981 paper form the foundation of Eigen’s
thinking expressed in a collection of essays published as The Psychoanalytic Mystic (Eigen
1998). It is a critical examination of this collection of essays (that made his ideas more
widely available) that is the basis of this paper. This critique uses four perspectives with
which to view Eigen’s work. These include: his religious and spiritual history; his
understanding of mysticism; his understanding of psychoanalysis; and his hermeneutic
synthesis.
576 The NAPA established in 1948 was the first non-medical psychoanalytic training institute and ‘pivotal in
establishing psychoanalysis as an independent profession in New York’ (Appel in Casement 2004: 160).
577 Subsequently published in The electrified tightrope (1993).
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