Where Is Peace? (A Few Therapy Moments Spread Over Time)

Abstract

An extended therapy vignette touches dialectics between self-attack and moments of peace. The patient draws on implicit trauma worlds in tension with a deep sense of strength and beauty, as well as helplessness. Change occurs in partly unknown ways, growing out of therapy talk, sensing, and felt interaction. Therapeutic exercises add to the background mix, making use of fusions-oppositions of self-attack and moments of peace, both adding to growth.

Keywords:

• self-attack
• peace
• being
• trauma
• dreams
• survival

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Eigen

Michael Eigen, PhD, is the author of many papers and thirty books, most recently The Challenge of Being Human, Psyche Singing, and Pain and Beauty, Terror and Wonder (all published by Routledge). He is faculty and supervisor at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, as well as for the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has offered ongoing private seminars on Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, and his own work for nearly fifty years.