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CPD Credits
3
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Recording
Time (UK)
2:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Standard
£80.00
Trainee/NHS
£68
Friday, November 6, 2026
The Contribution of Michael Eigen to Psychoanalysis
Psychic life as an ongoing struggle to survive fragmentation while remaining open to renewal, connection, creativity
With Dr Michael Eigen, Dr Loray Daws & Dr Aner Govrin (Chair)
This programme offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from Michael Eigen, who will open the event with a one-hour presentation. Now aged 90, Eigen remains one of psychoanalysis’s most original and influential contemporary thinkers, making this a particularly significant occasion for clinicians, psychotherapists, and psychoanalytic practitioners. Many attendees will be drawn by the unique chance to engage with his work firsthand. Should unforeseen circumstances prevent his participation, the programme will be thoughtfully reconfigured to ensure a rich and engaging exploration of his ideas.
Michael Eigen’s psychoanalytic explorations of the inviolable or indestructible offer a distinctive pathway through the complexities of psychic becoming. Drawing on his work with severely detached, unwanted, and psychically endangered patients, as well as deeply entrenched states of mind, Eigen illuminates how the self emerges through repeated experiences of rupture and reunion across mind, body, and relationships.
Central to his thinking is the dynamic interplay between tendencies toward separateness and connection. These forces may relate in antagonistic, symbiotic, parasitic, dissociative, nullifying, or nourishing ways, shaping both psychological suffering and growth. Eigen also highlights the importance of cultivating a dialectic between catastrophe and faith, grounded within a sustaining rhythm of experience. In this respect, he extends and develops ideas associated with Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, and Henry Elkin.
Loray Daws, the co-editor-in-chief of the Michael Eigen Series at Routledge, has contributed significantly to the exploration of Eigen’s work. Daw’s will offer two talks after Eigen which will be chaired by Aner Govrin. There will be time for discussion.
Programme
14.00 Introductions
14.10 Dr Michael Eigen
Sojourns into becoming a Psychoanalyst - A personal reverie.
15.10 Break
15.20 Dr Loray Daws
'I had to go' Exploring a schizoid analysand’s orphogenic account of psychic survival through the lens of Eigen’s Basic Rhythm
In “A Basic Rhythm,” Michael Eigen explores the psyche’s capacity to survive wounding and continually seek renewal. He proposes that psychic life unfolds through recurring rhythms of breakdown and recovery, catastrophe and faith, death and rebirth. Drawing on the work of Henry Elkin, D.W. Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion, Eigen shows how growth emerges through encounters with terror, loss, and destructive forces. The analytic relationship becomes a space where disaster anxiety can be endured, symbolized, and transformed. Faith, in this sense, is not a denial of suffering but a capacity to remain open to life, enabling the self’s ongoing regeneration, creativity, and becoming. A case will be presented to illustrate Eigen’s Rhythm of Faith.
16.00 Q&A
16.15 Break
16.30 Dr Loray Daws
Eigen’s transformational aesthetic: wounded nourishment, primary process work and the purple period.
In this section, Loray Daws will explore Michael Eigen’s transformational aesthetic through the concepts of wounded nourishment, primary-process work, and the rhythm of faith. Drawing on Eigen’s integration of Elkin, Winnicott, and Bion, psychic development is understood as a continual movement through trauma and nourishment, breakdown and recovery, death and rebirth. Central to Eigen’s vision is the transformation of “trauma globs” and damaged psychic residues into usable feeling, imagining, and thinking. The analyst functions as a welcoming other who can receive, dream, and metabolize catastrophic experience. Through faith, presence, and primary-process engagement, the analytic relationship becomes a space where damaged selves may rediscover vitality, meaning, and the possibility of psychological renewal. The case of Pete, caught in the purple period of crying, will serve as an illustration.
17.10 Q&A
17.30 End
Dr Aner Govrin
Aner Govrin is a psychoanalyst, philosopher and clinical psychologist based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is the director of the doctoral track, 'Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics', at Bar-Ilan University and is a member of Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is the series editor of the Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis book series, author of How Philosophy Changed Psychoanalysis (2024), Ethics and Attachment (2018), Conservative and Radical Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Knowledge: The Fascinated and the Disenchanted (2015), and Conversations with Michael Eigen (2003). He is also editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (2024) and Innovations in Psychoanalysis (2019). His two forthcoming book, Interpretation - A Contemporary Intrioduction and The Craft of the Psychodynamic Case Study: A Practical Guide, will be published by Routledge.
Dr Loray Daws
Loray Daws, PhD, DPsa, is a psychoanalyst and registered Clinical Psychologist in South Africa and British Columbia, Canada. He is a Senior Faculty Member of the International Masterson Institute, Director of Studies at the Parkmore Institute, a board member and faculty member of the Object Relations Institute, and a faculty member at the Blanton Peale Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Daws has taught and presented internationally on psychoanalysis, object relations theory, disorders of the self, existential analysis, and psychosomatics. He is the author and editor of 9 books and serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Michael Eigen Series at Routledge. His current work explores the psychoanalysis of annihilation anxiety, psychic survival, and the ontology of being.
Dr Michael Eigen
Michael Eigen, PhD, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst and the author of more than thirty books and countless peer-reviewed papers. These include The Psychotic Core, Contact With the Depths, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, The Sensitive Self, and Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. He is a teacher and supervisor at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and New York University Postgraduate Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has given a private seminar on Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, and his own work for over fifty years
- Psychotherapists
- Psychoanalysts
- Psychologists
- Clinical Psychologists
- Psychiatrists
- GPs
- Counsellors
- Social Workers
Session one
- Describe Eigen’s Rhythm of Faith.
- Conceptualize Henry Elkin’s, D.W.W Winnicott’s, and Wilfred Bion’s understanding of psychological growth and mental pain.
Session Two
- Understand Eigen’s approach to the psychotic core, psychic deadness, and damaged bonds.
- Listening with an Eigenesque body-transcendental ego in the area of union-distinction.
Standard Online Registration: £80
Trainee, NHS staff and Third Sector: £68
Trainee and NHS Discount: To qualify for this offer you need to be taking a course which provides core practitioner training in counselling or psychotherapy that is at least 1 year full time or two years part time and recognised by the BACP or UKCP. TR Together reserve the right to ask to see evidence of training being undertaken. Please contact [email protected] to recieve the discount code.
Group Rates (for 4 or more): Contact [email protected] for customised pricing.
Alumni: If you are a TR Alumni (TRAPC member) please email [email protected] for a discount code to add at checkout
Your CPD Certificate will be available to download from your TR Together account within 48 hours of the event.