In story after story Mike Eigen lucidly describes how it shows up in lives and how great a struggle it is to keep rage from destroying them. This work neither fuels rage nor explains it away. Nor does it drift into grieving or despair or hope. Rage is the author’s homing signal and he stays on track throughout the work. He leaves the reader with no sense that rage is something that can be transcended or ignored. He brings rage close to you, so you, as he has, can come away with a sense that it is possible to be near rage and to still learn and grow without being consumed in the process.

The final chapter was written after 9-11, an event that gives rage a significance that is impossible to ignore. The aftershocks from this event still touch the lives of many people around the world and they have not stopped. These last words, written after this world-changing tragedy, evoke tears for all of us. Tears can be necessary and appropriate but they are no substitute for listening to what Mike Eigen can share from his first hand experience.

Stylistically, there is very little a reader of Kernberg or Guntrip would recognize - although the love and hope for the hidden potentiality of the wounded championed by the latter finds a direct descendant here. Eigen's writing combines the visceral effort at conveying the weight and flavor of the moment - the person, the dynamic, the flow of energy, the intersubjective intensity - of a sort of psychoanalytic beat poetry, rhythmic, succinct and often hypnotic, but with the sophistication of a cutting edge analyst unconcerned with theoretical boundaries or conventions. If there is a flaw, to this reader, it is in the nearly-flawless effort to extend to book length the clinical and theoretical possibilities of his title metaphor, which at times reads as a beautiful notion, a tragic paradox stretched beyond its textual limits. However, this revealed itself, to this reader, to be often a matter of wavering faith as I found myself searching for theoretical terra firma; when I engaged a willingness to indulge his knowing and compassionate riffing on the challenges of inauthentic and poisoned living, and on the individuals themselves, I found myself increasingly drawn in to the evocative flow of unknowing, experiencing via a courageous proxy the lives and flow-of-self of people, and thoughts on those lives and selves, as informed by a guide who champions unknowing and its therapeutic potential.

This is an admirable book from a therapist humble enough to maintain silence in the face of stubborn mystery, daring enough to wrestle nothingness to the ground and if not to triumph,then not to succumb either. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, he lives till morning. A limp is a small price to pay for the sheer, diaphanous joy of survival.

The book gets five stars. The author gets the purple heart. We all come away just a jot and a tittle more sane than we were at the first page.

Eigen's book made me think about my biases toward therapy as somehow drawing clients away from God or a higher power. He crosses many boundaries (spiritual, emotional) to present a theory of the psychoanalyst as spiritually aware. Yet he also manages this without taking a Jungian, archetypal approach, which is a refreshing change. This is a technical discussion that presumes a great deal of prior reading (especially Bion), but it's worth the work. I found the case studies particularly absorbing.