Psychoanalysis and Buddhism

An Unfolding Dialogue

Jeremy D. Safran

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780861713424
• eBook ISBN: 9780861717507
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

"What a wonderful book! Jeremy Safran has assembled an absolutely stellar group of writers and has himself contributed an illuminating introduction. The essays are riveting and the book is the rare edited collection with real thematic unity. If you think you might have an interest in the intersection of psychoanalysis and Buddhism, this is the place to start. If you already know you're interested, once you look at the table of contents you'll find (at least I did) that you want to let Psychoanalysis and Buddhism displace whatever you were going to read next."--Donnel B. Stern, PhD, author of Unformulated Experience and editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

CHAPTER 1

Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Reexamination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism

JACK ENGLER

“You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” I wrote this nearly twenty years ago in an attempt to summarize my first effort at integrating two perspectives that appeared irreconcilable at the time: Buddhist teaching about no-self and newer psychodynamic thinking about the importance of self-development in object relations theory and self psychology. Originally this notion of needing to be somebody before trying to be nobody seemed to strike a chord with Western practitioners who were struggling to integrate newly discovered disciplines of liberation like Buddhism into their personal and professional lives, and were finding, sadly, with a lot of heartache and confusion, that progress was slow and that spiritual practice alone was not enough to manage problems in day-to-day living or provide direction in love and work. More recently, however, the epigram has attracted a fair amount of notoriety and criticism from friends and colleagues for its developmentalist position (Kornfield 1993; Suler 1993; Epstein 1995; Rubin 1997). I am invariably confronted at conferences and workshops, even at meditation retreats, and asked whether I still hold “that position.” “That position” has become a bit of a straw man, a convenient foil/fossil against which to mount an argument. So when I was invited to write a chapter for this volume, I saw it as an opportunity, probably long overdue, to revisit the issue and the controversy it generated. The first part of my essay accepts the main point of the criticism, but still argues the importance of being “somebody”—that is, facing crucial developmental or life tasks head on instead of attempting to avoid them in the name of spirituality or enlightenment. The second part makes the case for the importance of being “nobody”—recognizing that the integration or enhancement of the self is at best a resting place, not the goal, that the experience of being or having a self is a case of mistaken identity, a misrepresentation born of anxiety and conflict about who I am.

On Being Somebody

The first point I wanted to make in that epigram was that it takes certain ego capacities just to practice meditation or any spiritual practice. This is especially true of vipassana (insight) meditation and other forms of mindfulness meditation that, like most therapies, are based on observing moment-to-moment experience—the desires, excitements, pleasures, satisfactions, anxieties, fears, humiliations, frustrations, rages, disappointments, self-doubt, and even ecstasies that self-discovery entails. Psychologically, this kind of practice strengthens fundamental ego capacities, particularly the capacities for self-observation and affect tolerance. It also increases the synthetic capacity of the ego by allowing for potentially destabilizing insights and experiences that conflict with normative representations of self and others. “Transcending the ego,” which is often proposed to students as a goal in spiritual practice, has no meaning to a psychodynamically oriented therapist for whom “ego” is a collective term designating the regulatory and integrative functions. To “transcend the ego” in this frame of reference would mean to surrender the very faculties that make us human—the capacity to think, plan, remember, anticipate, organize, self-reflect, distinguish reality from fantasy, exercise voluntary control over impulses and behavior, and love.

The other point I wanted to make was that spiritual practice doesn’t exempt us from normal developmental tasks. This would not be an issue in traditional Buddhist cultures. But part of Buddhism’s attraction to Westerners is that it can seem to offer a way to circumvent the developmental tasks and challenges of identity formation that are inherent in certain stages of the life cycle, especially young adulthood and the mid-life transition (Levinson 1978). The Buddhist teaching that one has no enduring self (“emptiness,” “no-self”) is open to a fateful misinterpretation in our Western context, namely, that I do not need to struggle to find out who I am, what my desires and aspirations are, what my needs are, what my capabilities and responsibilities are, how I am relating to others, and what I could or should do with my life. The no-self doctrine seems to relieve me of the burden of these tasks and to justify their premature abandonment: if I am (spiritually) nobody, then I don’t need to become (psychologically) somebody.

At times, these vulnerabilities and disturbances in personal identity may reflect disturbances in the subjective sense of self. Here the Buddhist anatta teaching can unwittingly serve a different purpose: it can explain and rationalize, if not actually legitimate, a felt lack of integration, feelings of inner emptiness, feelings of not being real, of not having a cohesive self. “No-self” in this (non-Buddhist) sense seems an apt term for what a number of practitioners actually feel. Ontological “emptiness” becomes confused with psychological emptiness. Subjective feelings of inner emptiness are mistaken for the experience of shunyata, or the absence of inherent existence; and the experience of not feeling inwardly integrated for anatta, or selflessness. Epstein (1989), for instance, describes seven states of subjectively felt “emptiness” that are actually pathological. Intrapsychically, each reflects a debilitating loss of self, either through grandiose autonomy or symbiotic merger. The teaching of nonattachment can also be heard as rationalizing an inability to form stable, lasting, satisfying relationships.

The enlightenment ideal itself can be cathected narcissistically as a version—the mother of all versions!—of the grandiose self: as the acme of personal perfection, with all mental defilements (kilesas) and fetters (samyojanas) eradicated—the achievement of a purified state of complete self-sufficiency and personal purity from which all badness has been removed, which will be admired by others, and which will be invulnerable to further injury or disappointment. “Perfection” unconsciously comes to mean freedom from symptoms so one’s self will be superior to everyone else’s, the object of their admiration if not envy.

Spiritual practice also offers the possibility of establishing a mirroring or idealizing type of selfobject transference with teachers that remains impermeable to reality-testing for far too long, especially in the case of Asian teachers who are often perceived as powerful beings of special aura, status, and worth. In their unique presence one can feel special oneself, thereby masking actual self-feelings of inferiority, unworthiness, and shame or, even worse, feelings of being defective or flawed at the core.

It is more clear now than when I first made these observations that narcissistic vulnerabilities aren’t unique to a specific character disorder or to the character-disordered range generally. They exist across the developmental and diagnostic spectrum. They can coexist with reasonably normal functioning in otherwise relatively integrated ego structures. If anything, narcissistic dynamics are probably far more intertwined with everyone’s spiritual practice than I originally thought.

The fact is that there is no way to practice meditation that is immune from the anxieties, needs, cognitive-emotional styles, and dynamics of our own character structure. Spiritual practice, like psychotherapy itself, can serve defensive aims. This makes it even more imperative to understand that the no-self teaching does not mean we do not need to work with our own psychological self, our own character, or our relationships with others, either as a next step in our own development or as unfinished business from the past that continues to get in the way.

CHANGE IN SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: GRADUAL OR SUDDEN?
PARTIAL OR COMPLETE?

Philip Kapleau Roshi relates a telling exchange with a student during a question-and-answer session in a Zen workshop that directly addresses this issue (Kapleau 1979: 31):

QUESTIONER: But doesn’t enlightenment clear away imperfections and personality flaws?

ROSHI: No, it shows them up! Before awakening, one can easily ignore or rationalize his shortcomings, but after enlightenment this is no longer possible. One’s failings are painfully evident. Yet at the same time a strong determination develops to rid oneself of them. Even opening the Mind’s eye fully does not at one fell swoop purify the emotions. Continuous training after enlightenment is required to purify the emotions so that our behavior accords with our understanding. This vital point must be understood.

This is not what the student wanted to hear. You can palpably sense his desperate hope that becoming enlightened, experiencing kensho, will solve all his personal problems and doubts.

The enlightenment traditions often seem to promise this. In an interview for an issue of his journal devoted to the question “What is Ego?” Andrew Cohen (2000) asked me whether I didn’t agree that if one’s enlightenment is deep enough, the fixation on the personal self and all the suffering associated with it will disappear because one’s perspective will shift completely, from seeing oneself as the one who was wounded to recognizing oneself as that which was never wounded by anything. Won’t realization of the emptiness and ultimate insubstantiality of the personal self and its suffering completely change one’s relationship to personal experience? My reply was that this is an idealized view. In practice, it just doesn’t seem to work that way.

First of all, this happens only if one has truly gone to the end of the path. It is true that each moment of mindfulness shifts our normal relationship to experience in that moment. If a painful experience can be held without reactivity—without judgment, censorship, condemnation, or the wish to extrude—with clarity, openness, and compassion—the pain will not produce avoidance or aversion. Pleasurable experience will not produce attraction and clinging. Pain will simply remain pain, pleasure simply remain pleasure, without the reactive approach-avoidance response that much of psychoanalytic affect theory, by contrast, tends to consider innate and views as leading to the constellation of enduring drive or motivational states (Kernberg 1976; cf. also Engler 1986; Brown 1993). “Leave the arising (what arises) in the arising,” a Tibetan teaching says, and the mind’s natural clarity and ease will remain undisturbed. But the question is what it takes to shift one’s relationship to experience so completely that every moment is held in this fashion. All enlightenment traditions agree that at the end of the spiritual path all forms of self-generated suffering end. But this is a huge “if.” I know no one who claims it. Short of that, the reality is much more complex.

In the Theravada tradition, for instance, and in Buddhist traditions generally, freedom from self-generated suffering doesn’t happen all at once—a position I’ve always found more credible. Both the classical and the contemporary commentarial traditions (Buddhaghosa 1975; Mahasi Sayadaw 1965) describe it as a process occurring by stages or increments, much as change occurs in psychotherapy. This was supported by the self-reports of the Buddhist practitioners I studied in India (Engler 1983a), all of whom had experienced at least the first of the four enlightenment experiences that are said to occur in Theravada practice.

Self-generated suffering is said to end in this tradition through a progressive and irreversible “extinction” (niroda) of the unwholesome mental factors (samyojanas) that cause it. These pathogenic mental factors are said to be extinguished in a specific and invariant sequence of four enlightenment experiences or “path-moments” (magga). On each occasion, a specific group of pathogenic mental factors are eliminated from the mind once and for all and the practitioner will never again act in these conflictual ways. In Theravada teaching, this is the real significance of the moment of “enlightenment”: not the subjective experience, which Western psychology tends to emphasize in its preoccupation with individual subjectivity, but the extinction of these unwholesome mental factors leading to the progressive end of suffering and freeing the mind’s natural joy, ease, equanimity, and unbounded compassion and care for others.

The group of factors said to be extinguished at first enlightenment (sotapatti) comprises core beliefs about the self—“maladaptive cognitions” or “core assumptions” in the language of cognitive psychology—pathogenic beliefs about who we are and how we become free. The most important of these is the representation of self as singular, separate, independent, and self-identical. This is now recognized as illusory, a construct or representation only. But insight in meditation doesn’t immediately change behavior any more than insight does in psychotherapy. Modification or abandonment of this basic self-belief doesn’t automatically shift the underlying reactive states—conditioned motivations, affects, and impulses—that can still influence the practitioner to act in unwholesome, selfish, and uncompassionate ways.

These core motivational states comprise the second set of “fetters,” in particular the two basic motivational states of classic psychoanalytic theory, libido and aggression—in Buddhist terms, kama-tanha, literally “desire for sense pleasure” or behavior governed by the Pleasure Principle, and vyapada, literally “ill-will” or aggression toward others in its various forms. These motivational states are experienced as much more deeply conditioned and much more difficult to modify or extinguish than core cognitions. Accordingly they are said to be only “weakened”—“modified” in the language of behavior therapy—at the second stage of enlightenment (sakadagami) and not extinguished until the third (anagami). But unlike psychoanalytic theory, they are viewed as conditioned behaviors, not instinctually based drives and not inherent in personality.

The final group of fetters clusters around the mental factor of mana, the “conceit” that “I am” and the remaining residual tendency to compare self with others. This is the root of all narcissistic striving and is said not to be extinguished until the fourth and final stage of enlightenment (arahatta).

Note how similar this progression is to change processes in therapy: cognitions, beliefs, perspectives are more amenable to modification. Core motivational and drive states and their bases in affective reactivity are much more resistant to intervention. Hardest of all to change are narcissistic investments in the core sense of being a separate self. This is exactly what we would expect: cognitive change first; affective change next; change in core sense of selfhood last.

Zen tradition makes a similar point in distinguishing between little kensho and great kensho. The realization of emptiness can be small or large, but it’s still just a first glimpse of enlightenment. My teacher, Anagarika Munindra, used to call it “a little bit of enlightenment,” holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. That first glimpse by its nature is not complete and does not shift everything—as we know all too well from the misconduct of so many spiritual teachers in all traditions, East and West.

Teacher misconduct actually contains an important teaching. Misconduct certainly occurs in Buddhist Asia, but my experience in India and Burma was that cultural norms and expectations as well as centuries-old social role requirements impose constraints on behavior that is often mistaken—by teachers themselves—for spiritual attainment, even the “extinction” of samyojanas. In Western settings, when these constraints are removed and Asian teachers by necessity are thrown more onto their own resources and have to be much more self-determining, particularly around issues involving money, sex, power, and the idealized projections of admiring students, none of which they have been trained to handle except in the most cursory way, my impression is that they themselves—not to mention their students—are surprised by what they find themselves doing. It is important to understand that certain misconduct, by itself, does not mean they do not have deep understanding about the nature of reality. It doesn’t mean they haven’t experienced enlightenment. It means that freedom from the maladaptive beliefs, the identifications, the inner conflicts, and the narcissistic investments that create suffering for ourselves and others aren’t extinguished—even granting you accept that notion—al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Buddhism As Cultural Institutions
• Chapter 1. Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Reexamination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism
• Chapter 2. Tibetan Buddhism and a Mystical Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 3. The Dissolving of Dissolving Itself
• Chapter 4. An Analyst’s Surrender
• Chapter 5. Moments of Truth—Truths of Moment
• Chapter 6. Your Ordinary Mind
• Chapter 7. Transference and Transformation in Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 8. The Finger Pointing at the Moon: Zen Practice and the Practice of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 9. A Well-Lived Life: Psychoanalytic and Buddhist Contributions
• List of Contributors
• Index