Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

tradition. He rather adopts a Zen approach that retains the aliveness of the clinical
encounter and is willing to embrace the whole of life. The unknown residing in the
unconscious as an ever present ‘breaking-in’ of truth and experience is valued through the
agency of encounter with another who can offer a language and a relational framework for
meaning and sense making of the most profound experiences. Eigen advocates what he
calls ‘paradoxical monism’ (1998: 24, 37f.) that something sacred runs through all events
and experiences (1998: 25). This could be seen as a key interpretative tool in his writing,
that while Eigen is clearly very psychoanalytically and philosophically informed (as
evidenced by his numerous publications in the psychoanalytic journals) he is able to put
words to and reach a depth of clinical encounter. By acknowledging the sacred within
himself, within religious traditions (East and West) and within the Universe, Eigen offers
new ways of reading, understanding and experiencing psychoanalysis. By combining all
these facets of thinking, experience, self, client and world Eigen can reach a point of
illumination that he speaks from ‘my own experience, my life, my truth’ (1998: 24).
Eigen offers a unique synthesis of religious and philosophical ideas from long before Freud,
allied to psychoanalytic ideas from Freud onwards that are formed into an intersubjective
analytic encounter that exists in time and beyond time, partly conscious and partly
unconscious. This link into Eigen’s personal history steeped in an early but unorthodox
spirituality and a later recovery of orthodox Hassidic form of Judaism. Meaningful
encounter becomes generated in the transitional and transcendent but paradoxically
immanent space of the intersubjective moment. Eigen thus is a psychoanalytic mystic
whose presence in person is as powerful as his words.
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