This is an astonishing and gripping psychoanalytic meditation on the collective psyche and the experiences of the recent traumatic past.
As always, Michael Eigen has an extraordinary ability to use language in a way that opens and deepens psychic reality. His form evokes what his theory proposes, the constant ebbing and flowing, opening and closing of our ability to stay in contact with that reality. He is a master of psychoanalytic theory who nonetheless brings us up constantly short in the face of what is shockingly raw and untheorizable in life. A master of the dialectic between theory and practice, of holding opposites in tension, Eigen is no less a poet of psychoanalysis, who weaves between metaphor and theoretical analysis as if they were always meant to be the warp and woof of our apprehension—and while doing so tries to keep our minds equally focused on what is warped in our social body as well as our personal psyches without denying the surges of hope and inspiration that make it meaningful.
