Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

1. Eigen’s religious and spiritual background
Eigen’s starting point is his own experience and he recalls speaking with God since early
childhood, though he recognised (through an allusion to Wordsworth, presumably the poem
Tintern Abbey), a spiritual existence before this. ‘Before words and the creation of our
world, souls probably breathed freely together’ (1998: 11) and later he adds ‘we are children
of God before we are children of our parents’ (1998: 189). His parents were Jewish, though
this religious tradition appears to have become much more significant to him following his
father’s death in the later 1980s (1998: 25, 190) when he explored the Kabbalah. Parsons
describes their significance:
One more schema of spiritual transformation is the Tree of Life, in the Kabbalistic
tradition of Jewish spirituality. This is a remarkable diagram which sets out ten
sephiroth, or centres of energy, to describe different elements in the nature of man.
It is potentially of special interests to psychoanalysts, because more than any other
spiritual tradition that I know of, this offers a clearly worked out, indeed a highly
elaborated, account of the psychic structure (Parsons 2006: 124).
As a young man Eigen was instructed in Catholicism, which illness prevented him from
completing, yet despite various crises with the Catholic Church he discovered truths that he
has retained while pursuing another religious path (1998: 25). Eigen as an ‘idolizing youth’
(1998: 154) was impressed by hearing D. T. Suzuki speak about Zen Buddhism and
especially his passivity and presence. ‘What I saw was a man being himself, not trying to
make an impression, gracious perhaps, but solid as rock’ (1998: 153). Suzuki was the most
influential figure to bring the Zen variant of Buddhism to the USA. 578 Zen is essentially a
religious form of enlightenment which occurs in moments of intuitive or unconscious
awakening that defy logical argument or comprehension. These are referred to as satori ‘an
intuitive apprehension of the nature reality that transcends conceptual thought and cannot be
expressed through words and letters’ (Keown 2003: 256). This spiritual experience is the
key focus as ‘Zen has an iconoclastic tendency, and seems to regard the study of texts,
doctrines, and dogmas as a potential hindrance to this spiritual awakening’ (Keown 1996:
77). Suzuki was also knowledgeable about aspects of Christian mysticism, especially
Eckhart, and he found parallels between the two (Suzuki 1957). Some of these concepts and
experiences, Zen and Eckhart, re-appear in Eigen’s psychoanalytic work.
Around this time Eigen also heard Martin Buber, then in his mid-eighties, speak at a
synagogue when visiting America. Buber had developed a philosophically based,
existential Jewish spirituality that focused on the very personal I-Thou encounter between
oneself and God. This was contrasted to the I-It encounter between oneself and the created
material world. Though this latter encounter is the essential for human survival, it is not
sufficient for truly human life and being. 579 Eigen describes the experience of hearing
Buber. He stood as if he were,
578
See the Oxford dictionary of Buddhism (Keown 2003).
579
Buber’s thinking was influential in other disciplines such as theology in the work of Emil Brunner, and the
pastoral theologian Frank Lake (Ross 1993).
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