Contribution of Michael Eigen to Psychoanalysis

Organised by:

Tavistock Relationships

Description

Theme: Psychic life as an ongoing struggle to survive fragmentation while remaining open to renewal, connection, creativity.

With Dr Michael Eigen, Dr Loray Daws & Dr Aner Govrin (Chair).

This programme offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from Michael Eigen, who will open the event with a one-hour presentation. Now aged 90, Eigen remains one of psychoanalysis’s most original and influential contemporary thinkers, making this a particularly significant occasion for clinicians, psychotherapists, and psychoanalytic practitioners. Many attendees will be drawn by the unique chance to engage with his work firsthand. Should unforeseen circumstances prevent his participation, the programme will be thoughtfully reconfigured to ensure a rich and engaging exploration of his ideas.

Michael Eigen’s psychoanalytic explorations of the inviolable or indestructible offer a distinctive pathway through the complexities of psychic becoming. Drawing on his work with severely detached, unwanted, and psychically endangered patients, as well as deeply entrenched states of mind, Eigen illuminates how the self emerges through repeated experiences of rupture and reunion across mind, body, and relationships.

Central to his thinking is the dynamic interplay between tendencies toward separateness and connection. These forces may relate in antagonistic, symbiotic, parasitic, dissociative, nullifying, or nourishing ways, shaping both psychological suffering and growth. Eigen also highlights the importance of cultivating a dialectic between catastrophe and faith, grounded within a sustaining rhythm of experience. In this respect, he extends and develops ideas associated with Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, and Henry Elkin.

Loray Daws, the co-editor-in-chief of the Michael Eigen Series at Routledge, has contributed significantly to the exploration of Eigen’s work. Daw’s will offer two talks after Eigen which will be chaired by Aner Govrin. There will be time for discussion.

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