Toxic Nourishment

In Toxic Nourishment Michael Eigen has found a profound and elegant metaphor for the origin of his patients' maladies and the road map for how they lead their self-defeating lives. De-programming them from their toxins and beloved intoxicators occupies most of their analyses. In his poignantly graphic clinical portrayals of his patients' lived, unlived, and badly lived scenarios Eigen, the psychoanalyst, becomes transformed into an existentialist, phenomenologist, mystic, and a "novelist-of-the-Real" as well as "rebirthing healer." One can see that the spirits of Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan grace his work. This is a remarkable book. I richly enjoyed it; it's beautiful, poignant, and real. -- James S. Grotstein

Michael Eigen has gone on trying to fathom the terrors of aliveness by asking 'as he does in this remarkable new book' the disarming question: "what is normal about being alive?" And the title Toxic Nourishment alerts us to the kind of visionary paradox that has always been the touchstone of Eigen's work. Equivocation is the language of the unconscious: and it is this language, at once daunting and inspired, that Eigen's work thrives on. In Toxic Nourishment psychoanalysis acquires a new kind of moral seriousness by being the art of the informal. No one in contemporary psychoanalysis writes with this cunning, wholehearted openness. -- Adam Phillips

Michael Eigen's writings are inspired by his clinical encounters with his patients, and like Harold Searles a generation before him, his reconstructions of psychoanalytic theory reflect the depth of a creative mind open to the self's ever new experiencing of the other. -- Christopher Bollas

Michael Eigen is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University, and a Senior Member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of a number of books, including Toxic Nourishment, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Feeling Matters and Flames from the Unconscious.