Zen and Psychotherapy

Partners in Liberation

Joseph Bobrow

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781614296812
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Buddismo

A new take on the interplay of emotional and spiritual development. "Please read this book. Joseph Bobrow is a true meditation teacher who walks his talk and enjoys his practice."—Thich Nhat Hanh This book is an intimate dialogue that examines the interplay of emotional and spiritual development through the lens of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy. Zen and Psychotherapy artfully illuminates the intrinsic connections between the two practices, and demonstrates how the traditions can be complementary in helping to live a truly fulfilled and contented life.Zen teacher and psychologist Joseph Bobrow deftly shows how the major themes of trauma, attachment, emotional communication, and emotional regulation play out in the context of Zen and of psychotherapeutic practice, and how, in concert, both provide a comprehensive, interactive model of fully functioning human life.

CHAPTER 1

Coming to Life

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

— T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets

Introduction

Religion and psychotherapy, with some exceptions, have been traditionally suspicious of one another, each tending to view the other as a purveyor of illusion. Psychotherapists’ discomfort with religious or spiritual experience seems to have roots in a few key concerns: It can be an escape from unpleasant experience, a soothing balm that postpones coming to grips with reality, or worse, a self-deception. It kindles fears of a possible return to magic, to superstition. In turn, spiritual practitioners’ discomfort with psychotherapy is that it fosters self-centeredness. In this chapter, I contrast and compare Zen and psychotherapy and explore the themes of awakening and aliveness. Using the dimensions of coming forth and letting go, I examine the overlap and differences between their practices, aims, and principles.

Freud sees in religion a desperate turning to a powerful illusory authority as an antidote to human helplessness and a socially acceptable form of obsessive neurosis:

One might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart to the formation of religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal neurosis [italics added].

This view speaks to a narrowing of the range of experience and a diminution of personal awareness, discrimination, and agency. It reflects confinement within rigid rituals and prescriptions for what and how to think and be. So, it is both confinement and escape, not to mention the specter of sin that may be conjured up. The God one fears is just beneath the surface, a God who punishes for transgressions from the party line.

Religious objections to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have been many and varied, but a central concern is that they build up or ignore the tendency toward self-centeredness rather than encourage its dissolution. This view sees psychological work as detrimental to the capacity to be in contact with and have concern for one’s fellow humans and to know God.

Countering this polarization, Fromm and Symington describe a religious motivation characterized less by primitive psychological mechanisms than the search for fundamental self-knowledge, integrity, and core human values. Such a religious path views human beings as capable of responsibility, intention, and choice. Meditative practice can be part of such a path and, instead of imprisoning one in a rigid system of beliefs, can liberate rather than confine, reveal rather than obscure, and foster openness, resilience, the kind of loosening up that psychotherapists also look for. (Of course, meditation can also be put to other uses; it can have multiple functions.)

In fact, genuine meditative experience is quite subversive. It is subversive to the core of our beliefs about ourselves, our relations with others, and the very nature of reality and human existence. It challenges our most profound and unconscious assumptions about “the way it is” and “the way it’s supposed to be” — the most cherished organizing concepts that give shape to who we take ourselves to be. Among these are our notions about the nature of mind, meaning, identity, and self. In so doing, meditative experience can facilitate a qualitatively different kind of exploration and deepen these dimensions of our lives.

In a spirit of respect for the distinctiveness of both psychotherapeutic and meditative traditions, I examine some of their similarities and differences with a view toward mutual enrichment. After all, both speak to the relief of suffering, emancipation from mental and emotional constraints, and the freeing of human potential to love and learn through self-knowledge. I suggest a way to think about their interaction and place it in the context of work by Mitchell, Ogden, Loewald, Erikson, Fromm, Symington, and Engler.

I suggest that two dimensions of human experience — which I call letting go and coming forth, or relinquishing and emerging — are common to both psychoanalysis and Zen, although each is privileged differently in the respective disciplines. These dimensions, which infuse our experience and development, are not simply sequentially related but are intrinsically synchronous. A vital human life — a coming to life — involves the capacity to both fall away and gather together, to be somebody and to be nothing at all, to know and to not know. It involves the ability to move between relinquishing and emerging, realizing moments when each activity is distinct, moments when they interpenetrate, and moments when (by virtue of being heuristic and fundamentally illusory organizing concepts) each falls away in direct, liberating, unmediated experience. I include a clinical vignette and discuss the notions of meaning, identity, self, and mind. I then explore the dynamic relation between psychotherapy and meditation and suggest a way to think about their interaction.

Zen

Zen Buddhism is not a religion in the traditional sense. The practice of Zen is not worship as it is commonly considered. There is no deity in the ordinary meaning of the word — no otherworldly, supranatural entity. Zen does not posit a soul, traditionally construed as an everlasting personal essence that changes form over time and space. Rather, through the practice of sitting meditation, or zazen, usually in the context of a mutually supportive community, or sangha, and usually through a relationship with a teacher, each person is capable, like the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, of coming to know (gnosis) for him- or herself the intersection of the sacred and the personal, the universal and the particular, through mindful awareness of one’s own experience in the many moments of one’s daily life.

Zen practice offers a path for addressing perennial human questions of identity, origin, meaning, and ethics: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of my life? Why is there such suffering? What is it to live a good, wise life? The practice of Zen can productively help to engage what Mitchell called “the struggle of people at the end of the twentieth century for personal meaning and interpersonal connection.” It offers an avenue for resolving what Loewald said is the “compulsive separation between self and other, inside and outside, on different levels of organization” (cited in Mitchell).

Complementary Paths

The intention of each path is, in a sense, quite different. Psychotherapy facilitates integration of the personality, a gathering together, particularly the integration of that which is unconscious — that which has been split off, dissociated, repressed, or otherwise excluded from awareness. Zen, on the other hand, offers the opportunity for fundamental ontological insight: What is the essential nature of the one who is born, lives and dies, loves and hates, laughs and weeps? Who is the subject? From this vantage point, humans exclude from awareness not only split-off affects, wishes, perceptions, memories, conflicts, parts of ourselves, and conflicting self-organizations, we also keep unconscious our fundamental insubstantiality, interdependence, and, consequently, our own sacredness and that of our fellow beings — human and otherwise.

The purposes of the two disciplines are not mutually exclusive or ultimately divergent. Rather, they are complementary and potentiating. In fact, psychoanalysis and Zen practice share various features. Each is a journey and a way of discovery — a process of inquiry, self-knowledge, and transformation. Each encourages the use, expansion, and ultimately the liberation of attention. Each recognizes the tendency toward self-deception and values truth, awareness, the depth dimension. Each acknowledges that things are not always what they seem, that indeed we ourselves and our fellows are not what we seem. What is not readily apparent does not lose value thereby; what does not make sense can be important and valuable. Ambiguity and uncertainty are not to be shied away from but can be a gateway. In each, knowing — understanding that is not discrepant from experience — leads to a kind of transformation. Each presumes that direct experiential understanding is not synonymous with being smart, that unlearning is important. So, each implies the activity of unknowing as well as deeper knowing. Curiosity activates, deepens, and energizes both processes, resulting in a richer understanding that leads to greater acceptance of oneself and one’s experience, and to what might be called “a certain wisdom.” This acceptance is contemporaneous with openness to others and the world, to activity for the good. Wisdom, compassion, and virtue go hand in hand. Each path leads to an expanded sense of meaning and aliveness and in so doing places value in this. Individual development and freedom (arising from expanded perspectives, from seeing oneself and one’s activity as one actually experiences and constructs it) is not alien to deepening feelings of connection and responsibility. Each values a process of tolerating paradox, holding discrepant experiences, and letting things emerge, unravel, take shape, and give up their meanings.

Each situates its inquiry in, and values the cultivation of, the rich field of ordinary daily experience in its multifaceted dimensions. The lotus blooms in the mud; insight arises in the very field of pain, conflict, and confusion. It is from unhurried, gradually freed-up, skillful attention to what is so that understanding and growth emerge, not from chasing elsewhere, seeking to escape one’s experiential and emotional field, or using willpower alone to forcefully make it other than it is. Another word for buddha, which means “awakened one” or “awakening,” is tathagata, which means “thus come,” the “one who thus appears,” or “intimacy with that which arises.” Nyogen Senzaki, an early Zen pioneer in America, left this message to his students:

Trust your own head. Do not put on any false heads above your own. Then, moment after moment, watch your steps closely. These are my last words to you.

Each setting involves stepping out of ordinary social norms of interaction. Fromm notes that people in our culture rarely speak truthfully and frankly to each other. Mitchell referred to “the protection and timelessness of the analytic situation” and how these conditions make “learning about and connecting with multiple self-configurations possible without having to account for oneself in the way one has to in ordinary life.” Bion and others find the freedom to engage in reverie a central capacity of both patient and analyst in the unfolding of a deep, genuine psychoanalytic process, as it is in the mother–child relationship. At the outset of every Zen retreat or sesshin, participants are encouraged to leave behind social graces and habitual modes of interaction and let themselves settle deeply.

Each path, each discipline involves an intimate relationship over time with another person. The dyads of the analysand and the analyst on the one hand and the Zen student and Zen teacher on the other each struggle with and find some measure of experiential resolution to two key and apparently paradoxical dimensions of human existence — letting go and forgetting the self in direct engagement with one’s experience, and bringing forth, maintaining, and affirming a sense of self, of personal agency, and of self-continuity. In one mode or dimension, self is multiple, relational, discontinuous, and ultimately nonexistent; in the other, self appears as singular, private, and continuous.

Letting Go and Coming Forth

Letting go and coming forth constitute a fundamental rhythm of life and may be useful metaphors for organizing our inquiry. As we shall see, they are neither entirely discrete nor simply sequentially related; rather, they are intrinsically synchronous.

I use the term letting go in a rather broad way, attempting to bring together various psychical activities. I relate it to the falling away of outmoded understandings and the opening to new experience and understandings. It originates as the encounter with difference, discrepancy, and dissatisfaction; with illness, death, loss, and mourning; and with aging and impermanence. Things don’t go our way. Who among us, patient or analyst, has not been touched by suffering, duhkha, the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? Who has not been exposed to sickness, old age, and death, to helplessness and loss in some form? Sickness, old age, and death are three of the four “signs” (the fourth was seeing a monk, a seeker for the way) that led the historical Buddha Shakyamuni to search for resolution to the question of why there was such suffering. Ultimately, after many struggles, seated with firm resolve beneath the bodhi tree, he came to his understanding of suffering, his experience of liberation, and a long career of teaching others. The awareness of our mortality and of not living as fully as we might impels us. Each evening during Zen retreats, at the end of a long day of meditation and before retiring, the participants hear the following message:

I beg to urge you everyone. Life and death is a grave matter. All things pass quickly away. Each of you must be completely alert, never neglectful, never indulgent.

Letting go is facilitated by what in Zen is metaphorically called “the sword that kills,” an aspect of wise action that cuts away delusive understanding and protective conceptual structures that prevent us from encountering our circumstances directly. Life itself functions in exactly this way if we can learn from it. None of us has escaped unscathed over the course of our experience. This experiential current relates to unpacking, destruction, to unintegration, and finally to the encounter with that which cannot be measured — and then letting go of the idea of the immeasurable and simply being awake, in direct, moment-to-moment experience.

Bodhidharma, a Zen master who helped bring Zen from India to China, was asked upon his arrival by the emperor: “What is the first principle of Buddhism?” Bodhidharma replied: “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” The emperor was unsettled, to say the least. Dogen, the teacher primarily responsible for Zen taking root in Japan, sheds light on the path to self-knowledge in Zen:

To study the Way is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe.

Compare this with the view of a contemporary psychoanalyst (Mitchell):

The basic mode within the object relations approach to the analytic process is the facilitation of a kind of unraveling. The protection and timelessness of the analytic situation, the permission to free associate, to disorganize, allows the sometimes smooth but thin casting around the self to dissolve and the individual strands that make up experience to separate themselves from each other and become defined and articulated.

One can see here both the parallels in approach and the differences in intention of the two paths. Traditionally, in Zen it has not been of particular importance that “the individual strands of our inner experience become defined and articulated.” Rather, the approach has encouraged getting to the bottom of things, directly experiencing our essential nature. We do become aware of thoughts, feelings, images, and bodily sensations as they arise, although we do not necessarily examine in detail their patterning or personal meanings, conscious or unconscious, but instead focus our attention at a more fundamental level.

As with “letting go,” I use the idea of “coming forth” to refer to a group of activities related to both emergence and gathering together. This is the aspect of cohering and coalescing, of creating personal agency, structure, stability, survival, and continuity. It is the realm of things appearing, of new schemata taking shape, and of symbol formation and self-formation. This coming forth and its significance in a life is captured in the Gnostic Gospels:

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

This can be seen as what in Zen is metaphorically called “the sword that gives life,” a bringing to life that makes us truly human. Desire, intentionality, meaning, even subjectivity itself — these relate to form, to coherence, to agency, to actualization, to the personal subject, and to time. In this mode, we are and are becoming something, somebody. We have a point of view, perceptions, desires. This relates to knowing. It may not always be clear or pleasant, it may involve ambiguity or conflict, but there is a sense of some self-structure, someone knowing that which is known. Mitchell writes:

People often experience themselves at any given moment, as containing or being a self that is complete in the present; a sense of self often comes with a feeling of substantiality, presence, integrity, and fullness.

In letting go, letting be, there is nothing to become or attain and nothing left undone, nowhere to rush. This relates to the timeless, to not knowing and to unknowing, a negating of sorts. The field is open, spacious, and clear.

Emptiness

Shunyata, the shining void, often translated as ...