Feeling Matters: From the Yosemite God to the Annihilated Self

169 Pages·2007·0.53 MB·English

by  Michael Eigen

FEELING MATTERS
Books by Michael Eigen
Karnac Books
The Psychotic Core (1986, 2004)
The Electrified Tightrope (ed. Adam Phillips) (1993, 2004)
Psychic Deadness (1996, 2004)
Toxic Nourishment (1999)
Damaged Bonds (2001)
Other Publishers
Coming Through the Whirlwind (1992)
Reshaping the Self (1995)
The Psychoanalytic Mystic (1998)
Ecstasy (2001)
Rage (2002)
The Sensitive Self (2004)
Emotional Storm (2005)
Lust (2006)
FEELING MATTERS
From the Yosemite God to the
Annihilated Self
Michael Eigen
First published in 2007 by
Karnac Books
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Eigen
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as the author of this work have been
asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN13: 978 1 85575 411 9
ISBN10: 1 85575 411 8
Edited, designed, and typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
Dedication
To a Better World
Which can not happen without more attention to experience and
psychic life.
As long as feelings are second class citizens in public dialogue,
people will be second class citizens.
Michael Eigen
v
Wounds hide in disbelief. We can’t believe this happened, is happen-
ing, that such things can be. The traumatizing aspect of power
counts on the time lapse between disbelief and horror, between the
horror that leads to disbelief, and the horror that awakens realiz-
ation of one’s condition.
Election Rape (Chapter 5)
vi
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE
Yosemite God 11
CHAPTER TWO
Tiny Quivers 22
CHAPTER THREE
Words 35
CHAPTER FOUR
Trauma Clots 50
CHAPTER FIVE
Election Rape 68
CHAPTER SIX
Healing Longing 78
CHAPTER SEVEN
Alone Points 93
CHAPTER EIGHT
Filling Up with Rage 109
CHAPTER NINE
Boxes of Madness 121
CHAPTER TEN
The Annihilated Self 139
POSTSCRIPT 152
REFERENCES 155
INDEX 157
vii
CREDITS
CHAPTER TWO
Tiny Quivers. Journal of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 42(1): 1–121
(2006). Reprinted with permission of The William Alanson White
Institute.
CHAPTER FOUR
Trauma Clots. POIESIS: A Journal of the Arts and Communication, VI
(May 2004).
CHAPTER SIX
Healing Longing in the Midst of Damage. Psychoanalytic Dialogues,
15(2): 169–183 (2005). Reprinted with permission of The Analytic
Press.
CHAPTER NINE
Destruction and Madness, in J. Mills (Ed.) (2006). Other Banalities:
Melanie Klein Revisited. London: Routledge.
CHAPTER TEN
The Annihilated Self. The Psychoanalytic Review, 93(1): 25–38 (2006).
Reprinted with permission of the National Psychological Associ-
ation for Psychoanalysis.
Introduction
Do books have desires? If so, the desire of this book is to add
to the sum of human experience. It does so by small vari-
ations, a little like a piece by Philip Glass, or placing color
slides on one another, or slowly rubbing joy and horror together.
Experience is an endangered species. It is getting flattened out
and blown up, channeled with accelerating force through the will
to profit. Profit and power set the tone for turning experience into
sound bites, political hype or strategy, that at once excite and dull.
Education and the media can be added to religion as opiate of the
masses. Political strategy shrinks experience into narrow bands of
intensity (outrage, indignation) and plays on deeper helplessness,
including loss of will or ability to think for oneself. I suppose it can
be said that psychotherapy also shrinks experience. The word shrink
spontaneously gravitated to therapists, who thought they were try-
ing to expand human possibility. Politics and therapy can expand
possibility but neither is without their areas of disaster.
A positive contribution therapy makes is to give people time. Yes,
therapist and patient rush past each other or over each other, as is
common in daily life. But an overall aim in therapy is to make time
for experiencing, to give an ear to how people feel. Not to rush off
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