From Dualism to Oneness in Psychoanalysis

A Zen Perspective on the Mind-Body Question

Yorai Sella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351262668
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From Dualism to Oneness in Psychoanalysis: A Zen Perspective on the Mind-Body Question focuses on the shift in psychoanalytic thought, from a view of mind-body dualism to a contemporary non-dualistic perspective. Exploring this paradigm shift, Yorai Sella examines the impact of the work of psychoanalysts and researchers, such as Winnicott, Bion, Daniel Stern and Kohut, and delineates the contributions of three major schools of psychoanalytic thought in which the non-dualistic view is exemplified: (1) intersubjective; (2) neuro-psychoanalytic; and (3) mystically inclined psychoanalysis.

Reaching beyond the constraints of dualism, Sella delineates the interdisciplinary approaches leading to psychoanalysis's paradigm shift. Focusing on the unique contribution of Zen-Buddhism, the book draws on Ehei D?gen's philosophy to substantiate the non-duality of subject and object, body and mind - ultimately leading from alienation and duality to what Bion has termed "at one-ment". The way in which psychoanalytic theory and practice may develop further along these lines is demonstrated throughout the book in a variety of clinical vignettes.

This book will inform the practice of all psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, psychotherapists and clinicians interested in mind-body issues in psychotherapy, in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and in East-West dialogue.

Part I

The quest

Embodied minds and mindful bodies in psychoanalysis

Chapter 1

A mysterious leap

Introduction

It’s Monday morning. As the hours pass, they define themselves by 50-minute lots, by ten-minute slots for tidying up, opening the window, airing, noting the transference, the resonance, the ambience, the counter-transference, jotting down a few words, looking at messages, WhatsApps, emails, stretching, going to the toilet.

The first patient sits on the couch. He originally approached me regarding intimacy issues. He is forlorn, subdued. His monotonous drone numbs us both; he sinks and stoops as he goes on …

The second patient approached me years ago for unexplained dissociative episodes. She hides her chest and breasts by hunching her shoulders. As she lies down, her eyes close as if dreaming, blinking rapidly. She yawns and exhales heavily, frustrated at being unable to sob.

The third patient originally sought therapy in order to resolve a marital crisis. He comes in briskly, exuding a fresh odour which I identify with his overall Hassidic appearance. His throat is tight and at times – his jovial attitude notwithstanding – he seems to be literally choking. He had sought therapy fearing breakdown yet yearns for a “big bang” – a radical new beginning to his current life as an established family man living in hypocrisy.

It’s almost lunch time and I have a moment to take mental note – and some written notes – of what has transpired. I write: the first patient leaves the room holding his head differently, and there is more brusqueness in his gait; the second has some more softness in her chest and has stopped sighing. The third is speaking more openly and his voice is less tense.

They have all experienced some psyche-somatic change as an outcome of a psychoanalytic therapy hour.

Over the past century or so, the aims and scope of psychoanalysis have changed so radically that its initial imperative, the treatment of bodily symptomatology via the ‘talking cure’, is easily forgotten. The theoretical seeds underlying this imperative were sown by Freud. So were its theoretical shortcomings.

Freud spoke of an enigmatic leap from the psyche to the soma: in suggesting a “leap” Freud reaffirmed at once the existence of the psyche and the soma as two different entities, as well as the mysteriousness of the interaction between the two.

(Arieti, 1981, p. 181)

Although striving to discover the common ground the convergence of physical and mental disorder (Wallace, 1992), within the constraints of then-contemporary conceptualizations, Freud gradually resigned himself to the fact that the “leap” “can never be fully comprehensible to us” (Freud, 1909, p. 157).

Freud was a scientist and his puzzlement rested on scientific premises: given that body and mind are two distinct entities, how does one explain the fact that bodily symptomatology reflects mental-psychic issues? Moreover, Freudian theory represented another seeming paradox. Recapitulating the transfiguration of “the Word was made flesh” (John, 1:14), it relied on the transformative capacity of words: without conceptually spelling it out, Freud suggested that the mental contents of the psychoanalyst’s mind – verbally transmitted – could affect the body of the patient. He termed this transformative vehicle “interpretation”. The mysterious leap from the mind to the body represented an intra-personal enigma; the leap encapsulated in interpretation reflected an interpersonal mystery, a miraculous leap from one person’s ‘psyche’ to another person’s ‘soma’ within the dyadic matrix of psychoanalytic interactions. Both intrapsychic and interpersonal leaps have pervaded psychoanalytic thinking ever since, creating the blueprint for psychoanalytical world-views.

Contending with these paradoxical “leaps”, contemporary praxis and methodology have done much towards eliding the dualistic positioning of body and mind, subject and object, gradually embracing non-dualistic formulations (see Black, 2011; Stolorow, 2011). However, despite having reformulated clinical practice, it has taken little heed of the implications of these reformulations on orthodox, dualistically based, theory and meta-theory. Over and above all, it has all but overlooked its far-reaching impact on the reformation of the psychoanalytic world-view: as opposed to Freud’s (1933a) original one, which repudiated philosophical, religious and aesthetic contributions, the contemporary world-view cherishes philosophical and mystical inputs. It incorporates both Western phenomenological propositions and Eastern philosophies’ seemingly mystical contributions. Together they converge to present “new kinds of facts”, leading to what Kuhn (2012) terms a “paradigm shift”, reflected in non-dualistic attitudes to psyche-soma relations.

Freud eventually replaced his original energetic economic model with later topographical and structural models. The gradual decline of physiologically based theories went hand in hand with the elision in meta-theoretical statements based on the centrality of instincts, drives and energy. While acknowledging that the ego “is first and foremost a body ego” (Freud, 1923, p. 26), Freud made it clear that direct attention to physical attributes of experience was circumspect, was considered regressive, and was to be suspended during analysis. Over the years it has become more and more the narrated associations and thoughts – the representations of the body – and not the presence of ‘body qua body’ that are dealt with by the therapist, defining psychoanalysis “in terms that tend to disregard, minimize, ignore, or prescind from … bodily involvement” (Meissner, 2003b, p. 280). Having forsaken the physiologically based “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in 1895, Freud himself described the discipline he fathered as “characterized not by the material it treats but by the technique it uses” (Ammon, 1979, p. 15). As the body’s role in later theory declined, body-mind theory has converged – across psychoanalytic schools – around the following premises:

1 The developmental standpoint: the view of the body as the primitive aspect of selfhood, within an epigenetic model wherein the symbolical contents of the mind gradually supersede the bodily-based primary processes.

2 The evaluative standpoint: the view of the body as inferior and the psyche as the superior counterpart within the ‘psyche-soma’.

3 The categorical standpoint: the view of the body and mind as comprising substantially different contents and belonging to mutually exclusive categories, thereby substantiating the body-mind dualism.

On what conceptual, cultural and philosophical grounds do these presuppositions rest? What subsists them and how do the Freudian inexplicable “leaps” reflect them? In order to respond to these questions I would like to uncover some of the philosophical substrate from which psychoanalysis emerged.

The body-mind problem

Long anticipating Freud’s paradoxes, the body-mind problem has widely been held to be a – if not ‘the’ – central issue in Western philosophy of mind, regarded by some as insoluble. Consequently, the implications of sought-after resolutions to the mind-body question are seen by some thinkers to be sublimely significant: little wonder that Thomas Nagel – the renowned author of Mind and Cosmos– has suggested that “a solution to the mind-body problem will alter our conception of the universe as anything has, to date” (1986, p. 51).

Western classical philosophical heritage and the ‘body-mind’ question

What makes this question so essentially important and its resolution so paradoxical? Put in a nutshell, the inherent paradox – as viewed within the Western philosophical-cultural heritage – is as follows:

1 The human body is a material thing.

2 The human mind is a spiritual thing.

3 Mind and body interact.

4 Spirit and matter do not interact (Campbell, 1970, p. 14).

The Western history of philosophy ascribes the foundations of the bodymind debate to Plato’s dualism. Platonic depictions of the soul as “using the body”, “being available for the body”, “donning the body as a cloak in such a way that it may be shed”, as featured in the Phaedo (see Rist, 1970/1988), have been the blueprint for Western body-mind dualism. It is due to this depiction that “the truth of the idea that human beings consist of a material body and an immaterial soul or spirit” (Cooper, 1989, p. 36) is so deeply ingrained. The same configurations were later transposed onto metaphysical terms more applicable to early psychoanalytic theory or psychological research, such as ‘motive’ or ‘impulse’ (Klein, 1970) or onto the concept of the ‘mind’ itself.

The hold of Platonism was further reinforced via the influential thrust of “Christian Platonism” (Cooper, 1989) wherein “dualism of body and soul, matter and mind, god and the world was grafted on to Greek thought” (Zeller, 1955, p. 314). Accordingly, debate as to the role and function of the immaterial aspects of the ‘psyche-soma’ has been relegated to the realm of theology rather than philosophy. The soul’s sovereignty over the body was attributed to its transcendental origin; since it was universally accepted that “the human soul is immaterial and immortal, that it is the form of the body and that … it is directly created by god” (James, 2000, p. 112), alternative views were declared heresy, and accordingly, punishable.

Inherent within this position we find the seemingly indubitable prejudice that has accompanied Western conceptual traditions in various forms: since ‘Genesis creation’ was initiated by the “Word of God”, it carried within it the supremacy of a “word-divinity” duo. The value-laden prejudice of this duo suggests the intrinsic precedence of the immaterial over the material, manifest in the sanctity of the ‘word’ when transmuting the somatic ‘flesh’, denying the somatic faculty an equally essentialsubstantial status. Models of psychosomatic relations embedded within the Platonic-Christian philosophical tradition therefore carry the seeds of both a developmental and an evaluative bias, favouring the immaterial over the material-phenomenal.

Aristotle

Platonic and Aristotelian views converge in equating the uniqueness of human subjectivity with immateriality.¹ However, for Aristotle, the mind’s independent function, as a reflective apparatus, defines human personhood, in contradistinction to the animation of all living beings by a ‘soul’. Implicit within this proposition we find the claim that “the greatest happiness and the greatest good for man [are] … realized … in the contemplative life” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, x, 7, quoted in Armstrong, 1999, p. 12). Aristotelian theory thus anticipates the European Enlightenment in stressing the intellectual component of the immaterial aspect of human personhood, it – and not the ‘soul’ as such – is described as immortal.

Equally relevant is Aristotle’s emphasis on logical reasoning as the superior form of rhetoric: ‘logos’ shares its Greek etymology with ‘the spoken word’, on the one hand, and, significantly, is equated with the divinity of Christ incarnate, on the other. This suggests a triune welding of rationality, divinity and verbal communication. Thus, it has become culturally embedded within Western culture that a higher self-postulate (the rational part) “must seek to control the lower self (body, desire, emotion) [and] … that each of us has an inner core (… true self or a ‘soul’) that transcends our bodily, situated self ” (Johnson, 1993, p. 2). Hanna and Maiese (2009) argue that psychoanalysis’s long-standing formulation of the drive-instinct-based unconscious, as the locus wherein “according to the ‘reason versus emotions’ dichotomy, emotions are taken to be inherently disruptive and overwhelming, psychic compulsions, or forces not under our direct control” (p. 239) reflects this.

Referring to Freud’s allusions to Burckhardt’s (1999 reprint) The Greeks and Greek Civilization, Klein (1970) notes finding some unexpected parallels between the classicists’ and Freud’s thinking. Freud’s structural model – for one – is highly reminiscent of Plato’s allusions to the soul as a tripartite formation comprising a human charioteer driving two steeds (Babakin, 1978, p. 52). Similarly, Freud’s diagnosis of Hans’s phobia, wherein “horses” metonymically parade as “instincts” (Frank, 1983), and Freud’s allusions to a “master” of the “ship” seem to echo both Plato’s and Aristotle’s metaphors for ‘soul’ and ‘reason’ versus ‘body’ and ‘instincts’ (Kirsner, 1986). Thus, Freud’s original theory – suggesting a hierarchy of brain functions – resonates with Greek philosophy: the highest brain function is attributed to the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for voluntary – i.e. conscious – control (Meissner, 2003a). Implicit is the prejudiced position, favouring conscious (cortically determined) volition.

In the modern era, Cartesian dualism has carried this line of philosophical thinking forward, seeking to “prov[e] the real difference between man’s body and soul ” (Descartes, 1641/1989, the subtitle of Descartes’s sixth Meditation): Cartesian dualism features in more psychoanalytical papers than any other philosophical approach,² and a direct line connects it with Greek classical philosophy (Broadie, 2007). Due to Cartesianism, “mind body dualism … is so deeply embedded in our philosophical and religious traditions, … conceptual systems and … language, that it can be seen to be an inescapable fact of our human nature” (Johnson, 1993, p. 2, my italics); it is due to Cartesianism that the hypothesis that “man is made up of mind and body” (Basch, 1976, pp. 387–388), is “so self-evident that [it] … is not considered a hypothesis linked to a particular philosophical model at all, but an indisputable fact of nature” (ibid., my italics); and, largely due to the pervasive influence of Cartesianism, the modern human subject has, for centuries, been identified with the reflecting cogito – the ‘res cogitans’ – and not with the corporeality of the bodily ‘res extensa’.

It is Cartesian dualism – with its scientific aspirations – which thus subverts the issue of body-mind relations, reframing it as the body-mind ‘problem’, a conceptual blind spot or lacuna. This blind spot is then grafted onto Western therapeutic theories: as Voss (2002) pointedly phrases it when discussing Descartes’s contributions to medicine: “we [would] have to [radically] transform Descartes’s conception of heart and soul in order to fill the lacunae he bequeaths to the physicians who are his heirs” (p. 196). The question then arises: having been bequeathed this heritage, how far – and in what alternative intellectual domain – need we conceptually wander in order to escape its constraints and encounter the nemesis of Cartesian dualism: the possibility of an “embodied mind” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999)?

Some years ago I was invited to lecture on Eastern mind-body medicine in a national mental health clinic in the city of Ramat-Gan. The lecture hall was somewhat of an improvised affair and, as such, seemed to reflect the – not unusual – professional stratification: psychiatrists and head clinical psychologists occupying the front benches, interns and various therapists further back, nurses and auxiliary staff at the very back. I lectured on the idea of non-duality in Eastern medical models and noticed some of the younger interns and the more experienced psychotherapists attentive and engaged. Some of the people occupying the front seats, however, were shifting uneasily in their seats.

After a while, one of them, a senior psychiatrist – engaged and inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The quest: embodied minds and mindful bodies in psychoanalysis
• PART II ‘Body-mind-one’: the psychoanalytic riddle and the Zen response
• References
• Index