Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

experience, allied to a formidable psychoanalytic understanding. Eigen states his position
very clearly on the opening page of his introduction.
Many analysts are deeply mystical, or have a foot in mystical experience, or are
friendly towards mysticism. For me, there are moments when psychoanalysis is a
form of prayer. There is, too, a meditative dimension in psychoanalytic work.
Psychoanalytical-mystical openness to the unknown overlap. Analytic workers, not
religious in the literal sense, may be touched by intimation of something sacred in
the work (1998: 11).
Eigen’s mystical approach can be expressed in five overlapping concepts.
1) The whole of life can be a place of spiritual and mystical encounter, with the potential to
illuminate and paradoxically the ability to destroy. So ‘mystical elimination and the facts of
life need to learn how to live together. The body needs warmth, spirit illumination… spirit
can annihilate or inspire everyday life, as the latter can nourish or suffocate spirit’ (1998:
13). Eigen believes that the role of prophet has a vital part to play in keeping alive this
mystical dimension.
2) There are distinct and different kinds of mysticism.
There are mysticisms of emptiness and fullness, difference and union, transcendence and
immanence. One meets the Superpersonal beyond opposites or opennrss to the void and
formless infinite. There are mystical moments of shattering and wholeness – many kinds of
shattering, many kinds of wholeness. In moments of illumination, not only one’s flaws
stand out, one’s virtues become a hindrance (1998: 13). Eigen appears to suggest that there
is a co-mingling of God and creation, one inhabits the other.
3) Mysticism and madness have a symbiotic relationship. ‘They’ve had enriching and
destructive impacts’ (1998: 24) on each other in a way that enhances the capacity to be fully
human. Eigen identifies through the struggles of his patients the tightrope of madness and
mysticism.
4) Mystical experience is understood in the context of a dualistic God.
We worship a God who loves and destroys, creates good and evil, is compassionate and
angry, blissful and severe. We try to separate and divide these poles to gain some clarity,
but often can't tell one from the other. Satan is luminous; God is dark, as well as the
reverse. We move between positions in which Satan is part of God, God part of Satan,
desperately play one off against the other (1998: 21). Eigen’s thinking here more closely
resembles Taoism with its emphasis on acknowledging and uniting and integrating the
opposites found in the Universe and in the self so they are in harmony (Keown 1996: 75).
5) Mystical experience needs to be understood, paradoxically while it cannot be fully
apprehended, as it was the failure to agree an understanding of the mystical that Eigen sees
was a part influence in the split between Freud and Jung (1998: 27). For Eigen the roots he
found in Buddhism and Judaism gave a context with which to understand the mystical and
provided ‘umbilical connections to the universe, lifelines to the mother-ship, as I swim in
space’ (1998: 153).
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