Psychic Deadness

Freud writes of a "force against recovery," Klein writes of "a destructive force within," Bion of "a force that goes on working after it destroys existence, time and space." Michael Eigen questions, "What kinds of personal and social destructive forces are we up against? How do we work with self-deadening processes in our own lives?" This book whittles away at the deadness that runs through the social fabric and scars many individuals.

This book portrays attempts to fathom psychic deadness, but more important, it shows what is involved in enduring and working with deadness on a day-to-day, session-by-session basis. Often, the therapy relationship becomes a laboratory in which varying states of deadness-aliveness can be tied to what is going on between patient and therapist, as well as in the patient's life. In many cases, according to Eigen, the emotional tone of the therapy can be the most important element. Patient and therapist work to discover what the patient is looking for, that is, the precise combination of psychic nutrients, responses, attitudes, and tones required for a given individual, or even a given moment, so that a person can begin to open, and the deadness can lift.

There are individuals for whom a sense of fluctuating deadness-aliveness is a radical discovery, while others scarcely notice anything else. Therapists, Eigen suggests, need to learn how to become better partners with their own mixed or double capacity for aliveness-deadness, so that they, their patients, and this precious, dumbfounding, and maddening capacity, can evolve together.