The Challenge of Being Human , by Michael Eigen, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 146pp.
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ook Review The Challenge of Being Human, by Michael Eigen, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 146pp.
With his 26th book, Michael Eigen once again has taken the challenge of being human to heart, and has expanded many of his ideas from his early books in a wonderfully poetic, encapsulated way. His own humanity is revealed in his marvelously transparent description of his psychoanalytic encounters with the people who have sought him out, encounters that are profound, poignant, illuminating – and inspiring. In reading chapter after chapter, I knew that I was learning more and more about becoming more and more the psychoanalyst I want to be, and will become. Eigen leads us through the realms of unconscious process, and intense encounters with the deepest, and, often, darkest realms. Eigen’s Preface immediately plunges the reader into the theme of the book. The opening two sentences spell out what we need to encounter, ‘‘The challenge of being human faces us throughout our lives, a never-ending challenge individually and communally. What to do with the many tendencies that create and live us and we live, capacities that lift us to unimaginable places and cast us down to nameless horrors?’’ (p. ix). What is it we need to face? Eigen begins with destructive urges, with the bold, and most likely irrefutable, statement, that ‘‘as a group we commit a lot of murder’’ (p. 2). He addresses a theme he has written about since he first began publishing, psychosis. The challenge of being human includes madness. ‘‘Murder seeks a perfect solution, hallucinates totality’’ (p. 5). In exploring what Eigen calls ‘‘a treasure, the human psyche’’ (p. 9), he leads us to wonder how we apply the brakes. And then, his very next chapter is ‘‘Psychopathy in everyday life.’’ He considers the likelihood that psychopathy fuses with much else in our inner life, that psychopathy could be a part of survival. He considers psychopathy as a denial of dependency, and then links idealization and death. For all the dread evoked by his exploration of this topic, he also is deeply empathic, and ultimately, supremely contemporary. Considering the political campaign leading to the current presidency, he speaks of a class of children he heard about in 2016 who were worried that they would be shipped to Africa if Trump were elected. He closes the chapter on psychopathy by wondering, ‘‘How does each of us navigate our mixed nature, contribute to growth of possibility, honor the wound of being human?’’ (p. 23). As I finished reading the chapter of psychopathy, I was much relieved, and quite delighted, to discover the very next chapter, ‘‘Image, fullness, void.’’ Although not without its terrors, it is a celebration of image, sensation, and feeling, a hallmark of Eigen’s thinking. Eigen leads us through a brief, intense review of a few key elements
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BOOK REVIEW
in Western poetry, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, evoking Rumi, William Blake, Wordsworth, Susanne Langer, and Winnicott. We enter the realm of the symbolic, of feeling, and, eventually, mysticism
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