Abstract
We wish to focus on one particular concept from Eigen's oeuvre, the notion of toxic nourishment. While Eigen works exclusively with adults this work has extraordinary implications for our understanding of the origins of human subjectivity and the hazards of misattunements and misrecognitions in the critical early relational experiences of the infant and young child. We explore the complexity of Eigen's concept of toxic nourishment, and we illustrate how prescient Eigen's writings on this topic are to our understanding of what gets subjectivity off to a good start and how early occlusions can limit a patient's aliveness and thereby impair their capacity to live life fully.
The "cure" for failures involving toxic nourishment in infancy, Eigen notes, is the kind of ethically attuned, sensitive, and clinically tactful, therapeutic fearlessness for which Winnicott argued. Such breakdown in infancy can be relived, and reclaimed through psychotherapy. Eigen's writing shows the beautiful complementarity between acutely attuned adult psychoanalysis that places emphasis on the genetic origins of adult capacity in early experience and that values the work of those theorists who have devoted their lives to understanding the origins of human subjectivity, and the complex difficulties some children have in experiencing unfettered filiation and belonging.