Dr. Edith Eva Eger

Robert F Mullen, PhD
Director/ReChanneling

For each new subscriber, ReChanneling donates $25 for workshop scholarships.

One of my former clients died earlier this year at the age of 98.

Edith Eva Eger, a native of Hungary, was a teenager during World War II. She was a ballet student and part of the Hungarian Olympic gymnastics team. 

In March 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, Edie, her parents, and her sister Magda were forced to live in the Kassa ghetto. In April, they spent a month in a brick factory with 12,000 other Jews. At the age of sixteen, she and her parents were sent to Auschwitz.

Hours after her parents were killed, Nazi officer Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, forced Edie to dance for his amusement and her survival. As a “thank you,” she received a loaf of bread that she shared with other girls.

Eger stayed in various camps, including Mauthausen. When the Nazis evacuated concentration camps as the Americans and the Red Army approached, she was sent on a death march with her sister Magda to the Gunskirchen concentration camp, a distance of roughly 34 miles. Conditions there were so terrible that Edie had to eat grass to survive, while other prisoners resorted to cannibalism. 

When American troops liberated the camp in May 1945, Edie was left for dead. After noticing her hand move, an American soldier pulled her from a pile of corpses. He quickly sought medical help and saved her life. She weighed 71 pounds and suffered from a broken back, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and pleurisy.

After being treated in American-run hospitals, Edie met her husband, a former resistance fighter, and together with their daughter, they emigrated to America.

Eger befriended Victor Frankl, entered therapy, and earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1978. She opened a therapy clinic in La Jolla, California, where she lived and where I spent a week working with her on a speaking and publicity campaign. She was later appointed to the faculty at the University of California, San Diego.

When she gave a lecture at Stanford University, she and her two standard white poodles stayed with me in San Francisco. I vividly remember babysitting her dogs, their nails painted bright red, on the campus outside as she gave her lecture. The looks I got from passing students was a lesson in humility.

Edie spent decades battling flashbacks and survivor’s guilt, choosing to remain silent and hide from her past. Thirty-five years after the war ended, she returned to Auschwitz and was finally able to heal completely and forgive the one person she had been unable to forgive—herself.

In her work as a psychologist, Eger helped her clients to free themselves from their own thoughts and to ultimately choose freedom. She taught them never to wait for someone else to make them happy but to look within and find happiness inside themselves, as this will then change how they see the world around them. Her strong faith in the camps led her to pray for the guards who held her there, understanding that they had been brainwashed.

Edie shared her inspiring personal journey alongside heartfelt stories of those she has helped heal in her first book, The Choice. She explored how we can get trapped in our own minds and showed us how to find the key to freedom. 

“I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story…The Choice is a reminder of what courage looks like in the worst of times and that we all have the ability to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to pay attention to what we still have.”—Oprah

The Choice is a life-changing book that offers hope and comfort to generations of readers. It became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. In her second book, The Gift (2020), she encouraged readers to change the thoughts that, according to her, “imprison us and the destructive behaviors that would hinder us. What happens to us in life is not the most important thing in the end. … Rather, the most important thing is what we do with our lives.”

“Dr. Eger’s life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others. She has found true freedom and forgiveness and shows us how we can as well.” —Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

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It is one of the best investments I have made in myself, and I will
continue to improve and benefit from it for the rest of my life. – Nick P.

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To contribute to reader reviews on Amazon, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. 

If you don’t have a Kindle and find the $16.99 price of the paperback out of reach, the publisher allows us to email a copy of the book to anyone willing to post a review. Contact me at rmullenphd@gmail.com, and I will gladly send you a copy.

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Upcoming Seminars

October 14, 2026. 1,200 readers in Branford, CN.
October 29, 2026. 1,800 readers in St. Paul, MN
December 12, 2026. Lakeshore Unitarian Society, Winnetka, IL

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BOOK REVIEW

TYPO. The Art of Imperfect Creation
by Sierra Melcher

The award-winning author of 12 books, TYPO: The Art of Imperfect Creation, is Sierra Melcher’s first in a series on writing called Story Ink. So, she knows what she’s talking about when she describes the “countless doubts and fears, obligations and obstacles, real and perceived, logistical and emotional” that women face when they try to put pen to paper.

It’s not just unfounded fears, perfectionism, or shame that keep stories trapped, but women writers are also hindered by their inherited history of silence. It’s in women’s DNA because history was written by men about men, but that doesn’t mean it’s immutable.

This book provides powerful tools to help women understand, reframe, and release their creative potential despite doubts, insecurities, and fears. It encourages aspiring women writers to face and reframe their fears and insecurities and to manage expectations by focusing on their talents rather than their insecurities, which can hinder their creativity.

Melcher aptly explains how constant self-sabotage undermines the written page and often fuels the relentless pursuit of perfection, which can only be overcome by embracing imperfection and putting words to the page because the beauty lies in the creation itself,

“The art is the doing; it is the journey, which is an imperfect process.”

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Other Recommended Books from Clients and Subscribers (add yours)

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INDIVIDUAL RECOVERY. The symptoms of social anxiety make it challenging for some to participate in a collective workshop. Dr. Mullen works one-on-one with a select group of individuals uneasy in a group setting. ReChanneling offers scholarships to accommodate the costs. What is absent in group activities is provided in our monthly Graduate Recovery Group. In this supportive community, graduates interact with others who have completed the program.  Contact ‘rmullenphd@gmail.com’.