As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist. A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere.

We are organized around the double coordinates of mind-body and self-other, says author Michael Eigen. The story of therapy is, in part, the story of how the unconscious sense of self-other and mind-body expands to allow a fuller, more open self to emerge. This volume centers around the therapies of two individuals. Lynn and Les came of age in the 1960s, and their inner beings were stamped with the turmoil and personalist sensibility of that era. As the ensuing years swept them on into careers, marriage, family, they felt a nagging sense that something was lacking. Their lives were full but disappointing. Les and Lynn's dissatisfaction is mirrored in the problems being experienced by many others of their generation. The cutthroat world of business in which Les operated and the bureaucratic school system of which Lynn was a part worked against expression and fulfillment of their personal values. They needed help in finding ways to pursue their careers and fashion productive lives that were congruent with who they felt they were. Without this help, they were in danger of losing what was most precious to them: their very sense of self was being corroded by destructive forces they could not cope with. Unfolding on these pages is the story of how Les and Lynn struggled through the fears involved in initiating the changes necessary to reshape their lives and their selves into something they could affirm and believe in - something at once useful and fulfilling for themselves and their communities.

This book is an extended reverie, reflection, confession, assessment, engagement with psychic reality. It offers further invitation into the mystery at the heart of the human experience that is, at its core, also at the heart of the psychoanalytic journey.

Image and sensing have been underrated in Western thought but have come into their own since the Romantic movement and have always been valued by poets and mystics. Images come in all shapes and sizes and give expression to our felt sense of life. We say we are made in the image of God, yet God has no image. What kind of image do we mean? An impalpable image carrying impalpable sense? An ineffable sense permeates and takes us beyond the five senses, creating infinities within everyday life. Some people report experiencing colour and sound when they write or hear words. Sensing mediates the feel of life, often giving birth to image. In this compelling book, the author leads us through an array of images and sensing in many dimensions of experience, beginning with a sense of being born all through life, psychosis, mystical moments, the body, the pregnancy of "no", shame, his session with Andre Green, and his thoughts related to James Grotstein, Wilfred Bion, and Marion Milner.