Psychoanalysis, Emotions--essays, Professional-Patient Relations--essays, Psychoanalytic Theory--essays, Psychoanalytic Therapy--methods--essays 

This text is about the capacity to experience of both the therapist and the patient. It asks how this capacity can be sustained and discusses the many blunt and subtle ways it can be sabotaged. The title of the book refers to the shocking tension due to conflict between poise and catastrophe in the therapeutic situation. Eigen illustrates that when a person says or does something new or startling to someone who is listening and watching with sympathetic understanding, the rewards can be great for the analyst and for the analysand. The request for help and to be treated differently from the way one has been previously treated challenges the ability of the therapist to respond in the new way that he discovered during his own training. Eigen's detailed afterword gives details of the development and training that led to his work in America as a psychologist involved in the developing interest in analytic training. Although interested in the influence of Freud and the early European analysts, Eigen examines, in more detail, the occurences in Britain since Melanie Klein began her work there. His references to Klein, Winnicott, Milner and Bion help connect the reader to his background tolerance of the complex relationships between instincts and their many derivatives, especially the interrelationships between individuals' development and their most significant others. This leads to attempts to understand transference and counter-transference relationships. Eigen's insistence on using the continually developing themes as they appear in free association is illustrated. Editorial Reviews Review 'Eigen is one of the dozen or so most interesting psychoanalysts writing today. The Electrified Tightrope presents him in his familiar function as scholar-healer; his speciality: the construction and reconstruction of the breathing, seeing, moving, electric, and, yes, electrifying self. For the mental health practitioner, what Eigen presents are a hundred points of entry. What may seem in our work dim, dismal, even worrisomely "disruptive moments" are show by him to be "necessary steps" in the "profound process by ego repair or formation". Writing from a base that includes institutional and clinical care as well as the private practice, he has much to say to workers everywhere: And how he writes! Don't miss his Afterword or Adam Phillips' elegantly attuned introduction.'- Harold N. Boris'Michael Eigen's writings on psychoanalysis represent a unique clinical and theoretical contribution. Of the many psychoanalysts writing today, Eigen is one of the few who have captured in writing the emotional intensity of the analyst's encounter with himself as well as his patients. Not content to coast on the surface provided by a professional language, Eigen pushes psychoanalytic theory into the vortex of lived experience of anxiety and pain, but also hope. Even as he is enveloping his radical devotion to phenomenological reality in the Winnicottian tradition, Eigen refuses to throw out Freudian theory - as he writes, "We do not know what to do with this multiplicity, but we are not free to evade it." Even when he is the theoretical virtuoso, he offers the reader a sense of one mind working to fathom another mind. And even as he conveys the struggle of analyst and patient to overcome the deadness of not feeling, he offers no facile rhetoric of authenticity, no sense of having the answer. It is hard to imagine any clinician or scholar who will not be moved by Eigen's writing to feel and understand the psychoanalytic project afresh.'- Jessica Benjamin --This text refers to the Paperback edition. About the Author 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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.