ComparisonsBuddhism and psychoanalysis have been called “Two of the most powerful and

defining Weltanschauungen that our history has generated,” (Molino, 1999). “Each is a journey—a process of inquiry, self-knowledge, and transformation,” (Bobrow, 2010, p. 5). Both wisdom traditions seek to cultivate understanding into the nature of health and illness, and both are concerned with the cause and alleviation of human suffering. “Both seek to overcome a sense of alienation and to recover an original vitality that has got lost or has been buried under social conditioning and nonfacilitating environments,” (Gunn, 2010, p. 19). Both share a common compassion for the human condition, and aim to help us live with greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, openness, care, freedom, and inner peace. Both explore subjectivity with great precision and offer sophisticated models of the mind. Both place great attention and authority upon the immediate reality of experience. Both can be pursued “within the crucible of an emotionally intimate relationship,” (Rubin, 2006, p. ). Both emphasize similar experiential processes for learning about the nature of one’s own mind (free association and meditation), with the assumption that understanding rooted in experience can spur growth and change. Both use awareness and curiosity as therapeutic tools, and “each encourages the use, expansion, and ultimately the liberation of attention,” (Bobrow, 2010, p. 5). Both encourage reclamation of split-off parts of the self and increase tolerance for conflict, paradox, and affective experience. Both hold the promise for radical change, and “both acknowledge that their processes can be used or misused to open or occlude experiencing,” (Cooper, 2010, p. 11). Both recognize that obstacles impede change (resistance, defenses in psychoanalysis; hindrances, fetters, and impediments in Buddhism). Both honor ambiguity and uncertainty and the use of intuition. Both acknowledge that things are not always what they seem, and advocate deconstruction of unconsciously held beliefs and expectations. Both offer critiques of humans as they typically are, and posit more ideal modes of being. Both share the two fundamental objectives to “gain of a perspective and skill that alleviate personal suffering in everyday life, and an increase of compassion for self and others,” (Young-Eisendrath, 2002, p. ). And both offer hope in the face of humanity’s present-day struggle “for personal meaning and interpersonal connection,” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 122).

Rubin (1996) writes that neither Buddhism or psychoanalysis offer a complete picture of human nature. Buddhism tends to evade the subject, sometimes to a fault, while psychoanalysis tries to fix the subject, often to the effect of cutting off some of its life through definition and reification. Gunn (2009) has pointed out that Buddhism is more grounded in the absolute basis of reality, while psychotherapy is more focused on the realm of the relative. Rubin (1996) has also pointed to areas where psychoanalysis may fill in for Buddhism’s blind spots, and vice versa. Psychoanalysis can enhance the patient’s capacity to understand the effect of past on present, and unconscious allegiances to confining modes of being that compromise freedom and create unconscious obstacles in spiritual practice. Psychoanalysis can warn against Buddhism’s underprivileging of the unconscious mind, and help bring to light unconscious assumptions or motivations leading to unhealthy use of Buddhist practice: strivings for transcendence motivated by a wish to eliminate or avoid certain experiences or emotions; the use of meditation to “keep from awareness residues of traumatic experience,” (Bobrow, 2010, p. 36) or repress certain aspects of the self; or strivings borne out of the assumption that suffering is

inherently bad or lower, and that certain states of being are better, higher, or more advanced. With its focus on interpersonal relating, psychoanalysis can identify and repair problems of self-in-relation that the solitary meditation practice may leave unaddressed. It could also warn Buddhism against the danger of self-deconstructivist viewpoints leading to the neglect of human agency, and against the potentially alienating effects of self-renunciation and self-purification. Buddhism could teach psychoanalysis that there are levels of emotional well-being that far exceed psychoanalytic models, or Freud’s “common unhappiness.” Buddhism could help psychoanalysis come to a deeper understanding of dereified, decommodified, and non-self-centric subjectivity. Meditation can deepen and refine the ability of therapists to listen with clarity and empathy to their patients and themselves in responding to their patients, through the lessening of restrictive unconscious attachments and increased mental spaciousness.

“Psychotherapy has traditionally tended to privilege the side of structure, stability, adaptation, the development of personal agency, insight into the unconscious, and integration. Zen practice has tended to privilege the side of empty infinity, seeing into the nature of the self-structure and the identity of the experiencer himself or herself, (Bobrow, 2010, p. 33). Atwood and Stolorow (1984) and Rizutto (1994) have demonstrated the ability of effective psychoanalysis to promote self-integration and self-enhancement, leading to a greater ability to tolerate different parts of the self and different kinds of experience, so that the subject is more able to know, accept, include, and engage with the world, thus growing more compassionate and less egocentric. Bobrow (2010) writes that psychotherapy can help integrate the personality, gather together that which has been split off or kept in the unconscious: affects, wishes, perceptions, memories, conflicts, parts of ourselves, conflicting self-organizations. He goes on to point out that Buddhism can further the integration process by showing how we also keep hidden in the unconscious the awareness of our “fundamental insubstantiality, interdependence, and, consequently, our own sacredness and that of our fellow beings—human and otherwise” (p. 5).

Rubin (1998) takes the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist and psychoanalytic views of self head-on, pointing out that each examine subjectivity in different contexts and from different points of view. Psychoanalysis takes the telescopic/wide-angle/farsighted viewpoint from which a substantial enduring subject can be seen. In general there is less attention given to the here-and-now, (exceptions being relational, interpersonal and gestalt). Buddhism, with its perceptual-level bias, takes a macroscopic/atomistic/nearsighted viewpoint, the viewpoint taken by Hume, and later William James (1890), who have written about how when subjectivity is examined, no self is found, only the contents of experience. Rubin points out other differences in stance: Buddhism tends to look for short-term causes for suffering, while psychoanalysis tends to look for long-term causes. Buddhism examines mental states and mental events, while psychoanalysis places more emphasis on dispositions. Bringing these together, Rubin advocates bifocal conception of subjectivity.

Buddhism has tended to neglect psychoanalysis due to reductionist characterizations of Freudian drive theory (Rubin, 1998), failing to recognize the greater potential for integration found in its offshoots including Jungian psychology, object relations, interpersonal, self psychology, relational (outside psychoanalysis more obvious cross-pollination has occurred in humanistic/human potential movement, existential,

Gestalt, and transpersonal psychology, and recent CBT branches). Psychoanalysis has tended to neglect Buddhism because of Freud’s narrow understanding of meditation. But as Epstein has pointed out, there is an important distinction to be made between mindfulness meditation and concentration (one-pointed) or absorption meditation, the latter being closer to Freud’s understanding of the meditative state. Mindfulness meditation is not as Freud understood it to be a return to primary narcissism, but an attempt to liberate from the vestiges of that narcissism (Epstein, 1996). It is not about dissolving ego boundaries, rather, as it is taught in vipassana centers in the West, it can be seen actually as fostering development within the ego itself through relentless scrutiny of each moment of consciousness, allowing the ego to integrate and synthesize more and more of experiential reality. Focus is not on the unconscious content that arises, but on the process of thought, and seeing the ways we identify with being the thinker and with the content of our representations. Goal is to see (Rothstein, 1981) “self-representation as agent…existing actively to pursue and insure its well-being and survival” but seeing it as just a representation with no inherent existence. To see the ego-ideal: the narcissistic core of the representation as agent. Epstein cites Hanly’s (1984) writing on the tendency to experience the ideal ego (self-image) as more real than the ego itself (Lacan’s “specular I”). Goal is to realize how self-concept has been constructed out of internalized images of self and other (Jacobson, 1964). This is different than the one-pointedness that leads to satisfying fusion; mindfulness is much more likely to be terrifying than oceanic (Epstein 1986).

Engler (1983): “Like free association and evenly suspended attention, the mindfulness practices foster a therapeutic split in the ego, encouraging the ego to take itself as object, strengthening the observing ego’s capacity to attend to moment-to-moment changes. The development of mindfulness corresponds to the development of the “synthetic capacity of the ego” (Loewald, 1951, p. 14) maintaining cohesion “on more and more complex levels of differentiation and objectivation of reality.” In meditation or in an unintegrated state, thanks to the use of (Loewald’s 1951) “synthetic function of the ego,” we learn to constantly re-establish contact with the object of awareness. Bobrow, p. 13- Practically speaking, the ability to split the ego and self-observe, although a crucial developmental achievement in psychotherapy and meditation, may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for emancipation. – Zen calls for the fading away of the distinction between subject and the object of its attention.

Psychoanalysis in Freud’s time was obsessed with being seen as scientific. Now the profession has increasingly come to see its role philosophically and hermeneutically (Magid, 2007). This gives psychoanalysis in particular an advantage for building conceptual bridges with Buddhist practices, Zen in particular (Magid, 2007). Both acknowledge the impossibility of objectivity and neutrality. A number of authors have commented on how the idea of intersubjectivity fits so well with the Buddhist principles of dependent origination and interbeing. Kurtz (1989), speaks for Buber (1923), Merleau-Ponty (1945), and Winnicott (1971), when writing that:

Meaning never resides in an independent object of the world in-itself (as the materialist argument goes); nor is meaning totally given to objects by acts of consciousness (as idealism would have it). Instead, meaning comes into being through the simultaneously reciprocal, interformative relational process between self and world. Experience is always grounded in the indissoluble, intentional communion of self and world; percepts are always coconstituted by an interrelationship of self and world; and the world always appears for one in accordance with who one is along with the nature of

one's present concerns. This means that our preexisting identity, projects, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, history, culture, and language, thoroughly influence our every perception, and do so primarily outside of our awareness. For this very reason, phenomenology developed an attitude and method that foster, as much as possible, an open experience of the world as it is, the world in its suchness, the world beneath or beyond our individual, cultural, and theoretical preconceptions.

Winnicott’s major break from Freudian psychology is found in his persistent assertion that the self cannot be considered apart from its human environment. This truth, increasingly central to relational psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity theory (see also Stolorow’s Heidegger-inspired “phenomenological-contextualist” analytic perspective) fits well with Buddhism’s dependent origination/interconnectedness/interbeing, and a number of contemporary authors have made this link to Buddhism when speaking of the move in the field from a one-person to a two-person psychology. Young-Eisendrath points out that Zen master “Dogen maintains that self and other are ultimately interdependent; the self does not exist prior to, or outside of, the other; we only have the possibility of experiencing self or other through relationship” (2002, p. 75).

SelfRubin (1998) writes that when Buddhism arose in India, it may have been a time

of widespread suffering and narcissism. Hinduism, the predominant philosophical and religious perspective, carried with it the belief in Atman, or an unchanging self. Buddhism was in many respects and outcry against Hinduism’s primacy of the self. Buddha speaks out against teachers upholding Eternalism and Annihilationism (Roccasalvo 1982). There was no escape from one’s condition in life (caste system).

When psychoanalysis arose, individualism and the psychological subject was predominant character ideal and held as sacred. “In the age of psychological man, the self is the only god term (Rieff, 1963 p. 23). The focus on narcissism in psychoanalytic theory suggests that the suffering targeted by the Buddha is alive and well today. Epstein (2006) writes that “in the Buddhist view, all notions of self are held to be potentially imprisoning because of our inherent tendency to cling unproductively to whatever gives a sense of security. This clinging to the self may be thought of as a form of narcissism.” Epstein has reinterpreted the 3rd Noble Truth, the path leading to the end of suffering, as a process of unrelenting excavation of narcissistic identifications. In a 1996 paper, Epstein wrote that “the spiritual path is ultimately about confronting one’s own inherent narcissism, after all is said and done.” The Buddha might say narcissism is the disease of mistaking the ego for the self.

“Buddhism teaches that our suffering arises from the illusion that the individual self is enduring and needs to be protected” (Young-Eisendrath, 2002, p. __). “When Buddhists say: ‘We do not exist’ or that ‘there is no self,’ this means that there is no ultimate, independent, eternal, permanent self or essence. In other words, there is no self that can be experienced and identified separately from the many interacting factors such as our body, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and relations to others” (Cooper, 2005, p. 23). Adam Phillips talks about the value of the incompleteness and openness of the self. “What we aim for is not a permanent, unchanging self, but a ‘cohesive’ self that is in fact able to change, to adapt to changing conditions appropriately with an internal consistency” (Gunn, 2010, p. 20). Atwood and Stolorow (1984) view permeability of self-structure as a sign of a healthy self, provided one also is experiencing self-stability

In 1984 Jack Engler wrote about how the view of the self in psychoanalysis and the view of the self in Buddhism appear diametrically opposed: the major psychopathologies described in analytic theory entail a lack of a cohesive sense of self, while the biggest pathology in Buddhism is the clinging to personal existence. Rubin (1998) quotes Meyers’ (1989, p. 139) summary of the implicit view of “self” in psychoanalysis: “that there is something correct to call ‘me;’ something that has its own body, feelings, etc….this is a taken-for-granted reality by most psychoanalysts with the exception of the Lacanians.” It is a conceptualization that views self as “center of initiative and identity…the source of needs and desires, the one who feels and thinks and acts, the defender and executor.” Jack Engler was also one of the first in the literature to make explicit the claim that a cohesive and integrated self is a precondition for the subsequent developmental task of disidentifying from restrictive self-representations. “It is developmentally necessary to acquire a cohesive and integrated self first, one that is differentiated from others and has a degree of autonomy” (Engler, 1984, p. 43). Rubin (1998), and later Bobrow (2010) have both started to question this commonly held “developmental” model, warning against viewing non-self-centeredness as a “higher” stage, preferring to view the two modes of experience as interpenetrating, the way of Ogden’s “positions.” Rather than occurring in diachronic sequence, Bobrow sees each position as synchronically related, each fluidly creating (making possible), maintaining, and dialectically negating the other in a continual process of “letting go and coming forth;” letting go being the falling away of self, and coming forth being the emerging of new self-experience (p. 31). Meditation, the sangha, and the analytic frame each create a holding environment for the falling away and emerging to unfold (or, as Winnicott might say, for unintegration to occur…more on this later). Miller (2002), (who, along with Grotstein, Eigen, and Bobrow, has written about similarities between Bion’s O and Buddhist sunyata/emptiness, a topic I’ve come to more recently and am interested in exploring further), has suggested that the neutrality of environment/container combined with the safety of a secure therapeutic relationship allows for an experience of emptiness akin to sunyata. Mitchell (1993) writes how the analytic situation makes “learning about and connecting with multiple self-configurations possible without having to account for oneself in the way one has to in ordinary life” (p. 115). Bion’s value placed on the freedom to engage in reverie has the same goal of allowing for the unfolding of a deep and genuine process.

Self orientation in psychotherapy“Articulation of the self is the fulfillment of one’s destiny. When important

potential components of the self remain unrealized, the path of life is not one’s destiny, but fate, an imposition from without…We might say that the unconscious as potential consists of unrealized destiny.” (Summers, in Young-Eisendrath, 2009 p. 31). This is one way of framing the self-orientation approach central to the psychology of many influential theorists, including Jung (individuation through integration of hidden or opposing parts of Self), Winnicott (true self revealed when false self deconstructed), Bollas (human psyche seeks objects to release/express our distinctive personal/aesthetic idiom which predates environmental influence), Kohut (resolution of the selfobject transferences will release the nuclear program of the self) and Modell (aim of treatment is facilitating a reconnection with inner core of the private self), among others. It can also

be seen in the human potential movement of the 60s and Maslow’s idea of “self-actualization,” or, as he has reworded it, “the desire to become more and more what one is.” (Fritz Perls, familiar with Buddhism as was Maslow, has pointed out the risk of confusing “self-actualizing and self-image actualizing). These theorists have conceptualized psychopathology as arrested development of the self. “The unconscious is assumed, then, to include some kind of blueprint for the future, as well as complexes linking it to the past. In this approach, a central goal of treatment is to unblock, uncover, or recover the self or the true self, which restores creativity and vibrance” (Young-Eisendrath, 2009). Young-Eisendrath, a Jungian, contrasts this self-orientation approach to the no-self approach, which embraces nothing like a blueprint of the true self. Instead, the analytic dyad observe no-self occurrences, which open up profound appreciation for interdependence and a confidence rooted in something other than the ego. No-self moments in psychotherapy if used effectively produce a transformative awareness that the ‘other’ is not an ‘object’ against which the ‘self’ is constituted, but is rather a partner in mutual discovery.

Karen Horney, early psychoanalytic writer deeply influenced by her encounter with Zen and the writings of D. T. Suzuki, developed her concept of ‘self-realization’ as the goal for psychological growth, and the notion of the ‘real self’ as the “central inner force common to all beings and yet unique in each, which is the deep source of growth.” Horney’s ‘real self’ was also influenced by William James’ (1950) “spiritual self” which he describes as the feeling of the central active self within one’s subjectivity that “is the home of interest,” which seems to “go out and meet” the qualities and contents of consciousness, “whilst they seem to come in to be received by it.” Horney writes that the “real self, when strong and active, enables us to make decisions and assume responsibility for them. It therefore leads to genuine integration and a sound sense of wholeness, oneness” (1950, p. 157). She contrasts this to the defensive function of the “idealized self,” developed in response to inadequate caretaking, for example, a parent “treating a child as a narcissistic extension of the parent's own idealized self” (Westcott, 1998, p. 291). Kierkegaard wrote that the greatest danger is to lose one’s self, and the greatest despair is not being one’s self. This is the same ‘self’ that Horney refers to, alienation from which is experienced as “a silent and invisible—a spiritual—death, (Westcott, 1998, p. 292).

Horney’s “real self” and “idealized self” are remarkably similar to Winnicott’s true self and false self. In both, environmental failings result in a defensive false-self structure, and in both, the true self refers “to the center of uniqueness and spontaneity in each of us” (Lerner, 1984, p. 117). D. T. Suzuki’s descriptions of Zen experience describe a spontaneity, a freedom, and an authenticity that sounds a lot like Winnicott’s true self. “All techniques of Zen” he writes, “are intended to bring the student back into contact with an original state of freedom.” In his 1960 publication with Fromm and DeMartino, Suzuki writes, “To such a person his life reflects every image he creates out of his inexhaustive source of the unconscious. To such, his every deed expresses originality, creativity, his living personality. There is in it no conventionality, no conformity, no inhibitory motivation. He moves as he pleases. His behavior is like the wind which bloweth as it listeth.”

A number of theories attribute great wisdom to the unconscious (or non-conscious) mind. Jung’s psychology and the transcendent function is a clear example.

Control Mastery theory does as well, with the notion of “unconscious plans” that are of the patient’s best interest. If Winnicott’s true self is seen as lying dormant outside of consciousness, this would be another example. Cooper (2010) writes that “to be back in the unconscious is to attain Buddhahood…the Zen practitioner relies on intuited experiential wisdom, not empirical consciousness or the six senses” (p. 187). Links are easily drawn here to the idea ubiquitous to all branches of Mahayana Buddhism of finding one’s own “Buddha nature” (in Zen, see Nirvana Sutra. Also, in the Vimalakirti: “when a man is instantly awakened, he comes back to his original mind. Also, in the Bodhisattva-sila: “My own original self-nature is pure and non-defiled.”) Suzuki (1949) seems to be pointing to Buddha nature when he writes, “We are in possession of all the faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All struggles come from ignorance of this…Lifting this ignorance, we are free to see the nature of our own being. We can see its value, feel infinitely blessed, remain quite contented.” Finding our Buddha nature does not mean changing who we are, but learning to be who we are as we are. Magid (2007) asserts that while ‘psychotherapy’ tends to take a more problem solving approach, psychoanalysis is more interested in exploring subjective reality: Zen and psychoanalysis share a common non-directedness, a common indifference to structural change, and a lack of goal orientation. We are fine the way we are. In his book Studies in Zen, D. T. Suzuki writes “Buddhism teaches that all is well where it is; but as soon as a man steps out to see if he is all right or not, an error is committed which leads to an infinite series of negations and affirmations, and he has to make peace within.”

What Horney admired in the way of Zen was the capacity to have “the highest presence and the highest absence,” to un-self-consciously and effortlessly be, forgetting the self while still being “there with all your feelings.” Rubin (1996) feels that “non-self-centered” experience is undervalued in psychoanalysis. These are states where there is not conscious awareness of time or self per se, but one is vividly aware and engaged. Csikszentmihalyi has conducted extensive research on “flow experience,” which refers to the same kind of state, where the self is lost in activity, as in play, sports or music. The self experience in these states is not marked by the subject-object split.

When Horney deepened her understanding of Zen, she did not find contradiction between her concept of the “real self” and the Buddhist assertion that no such thing exists. (D. T. Suzuki, in fact, often refers to the “real self” that emerges in Zen. Ando (2009) writes that the “goal of Zen is recognition of true self – seeing into our true nature, experiencing it, knowing it (p. 15).” Dogen: “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”) As her appreciation of Zen deepened, her concept of “real self” did change from a structural, reified definition to a more temporal concept of self-as-process (Westcott, 1998). In this shift, she actually moves closer to James’ more fluid notion of the spiritual self (James was also said to have been influenced by Buddhism), and her therapeutic stance shifts from interest in the content of the patient’s concerns to interest in the patient’s relationship to their feelings (Westcott, 1998).

Joseph Bobrow, SF-based Zen analyst, writes that “dealing only with the content of the psyche has been compared to redecorating one’s jail cell or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Focusing attention towards the relationship to one’s feelings rather than the feelings themselves is something of a revolutionary paradigm shift in the world of psychotherapy. One of the places it is outlined most explicitly is in ACT (Acceptance

and Commitment Therapy), which places great emphasis on cognitive de-fusion: realizing that thoughts and feelings are information-carrying sensations like any other, and are not to be identified with as “self.” (Buddhism also views mental contents no differently than sensory perceptions). ACT distinguishes the ‘conceptualized’ or ‘reified self’ (fixed or absolute ideas about the self), from ‘self as process of knowing’ (developed through object use a la Winnicott), and from ‘self as context’/‘transcendent self,’ which is pure awareness itself, unchanging and constant. Falkenstrom (2003) also outlines three different types of self: self as experience (phenomenological self/subjective experience through time), self as representation (internalized concept of who/what we are – amalgam of self-images), and self as system (structural self). Mitchell (1991) has separated out three different views of the self in psychoanalysis: the Freudian self (tripartite, structural), the object relations/interpersonal self (this being the multiple and discontinuous self, patterned differently in different contexts), and the self of self psychology (this being more of an integral and continuous self, enduring across time and context). Kohut’s (1984) view of self as the organizing center of the individual’s psychological universe might be more akin to ‘self as system’, while Shafer’s (1989) view of self as narrative construction—a collection of narratives one creates about oneself—is closer to self as representation. The self that is targeted for deconstruction by meditation (and by ACT and some dynamic/analytic therapies and especially Buddhist-informed psychotherapy) is self as representation: our beliefs about ourselves and what we allocate as “me” and “not me” are brought into awareness.

Steven Hayes, founder of ACT, takes from Buddhism the goal of removing the literalness of thoughts, and advocates for meditation as the process of building the mind-observing function that allows us to question thoughts and dis-identify from them. Meditation is used to deconstruct the constricting/constraining effects of ACT’s conceptualized self, and Falkenstrom’s self as representation. This same function of meditation has been described from a psychoanalytic perspective by Jack Engler as well as Mark Epstein. Epstein (2006) writes that images have relative reality: they appear in the mind and can be identified with, but they do not demand to be identified with, for they are only conceptual in nature. Meditation increases potential for disidentification from such concepts. The self does not become clearer, but the relative nature of the self-representations becomes obvious. The hold that such representations have over us is loosened as an appreciation is gained for an awareness that is vast, ungraspable, and simultaneously immediate and yet out of reach.

Engler (1986) writes that meditation forces you to let go of your object world, which is experienced as a loss and a reorganization. A decathecting of both the need for the internalized object and its internalized image occurs. Engler sees as the final step of separation-individuation a renunciation of self-object ties altogether. It sounds like Engler is attempting a psychoanalytic formulation of non-attachment, and his wording speaks of the overhaul described in the attainment of Nirvana or the realization of emptiness, but I’m not thrilled with the language. Rubin (1996) has taken to task certain notions of Nirvana for sounding quite emotionally depleted and psychically dead, and talks about how deconstructing the self can be self-alienating and harmful to relationships. Epstein (2005) writes that “there is a fullness to the Buddhist emptiness, a sense of spaciousness that both holds and suffuses the stuff of the world. Not to appreciate this fullness is the great stumbling block of the deconstruction of the self.” Digression: Gunn, in his (2000)

book on emptiness in Jung, Merton, Dogen, also writes of emptiness as experience of loss, or “dark night of the soul” out of which each of these great thinkers experienced a breakthrough. But Payne (2002) corrects him, writing that you can’t experience emptiness because it is absence which cannot be reified. More on emptiness later…

Pawle (2009) writes that in Zen, non-attachment means being attached fully in the moment without trying to maintain the form of this attachment. Buddhist non-attachment can be taken to mean non-attachment to outcomes, but also non-attachment to ideas, ways of being, internal objects and introjects. Cooper (2010) is alluding to this when talking about overcoming the effects of Melanie Klien’s “object pervasion.” Clearing out the effects of lingering object pervasion from damaging early relational experience creates space for self to emerge (another link to Winnicott).

Creating space out of which new appreciation for and connection with the vast and infinite ground of our collective being is how Young-Eisendrath might describe the use of the no-self orientation in psychotherapy. Suler, another prominent writer on the topic of Buddhism and psychotherapy, writes that “no-self is the formless context in which an experience occurs – a type of pre-psychological ‘space’ that enables the creation of the self-as-structure.” (1993, p. 51) Behaving out of this “space” one would act with “unselfconscious spontaneity…grounded in the everyday, yet also simultaneously in the infinite.” Bobrow (2010) connects Winnicott’s idea of “potential space” to emptiness/nothingness/sunyata/the fertile void. Christopher Bollas, in his book Cracking Up, explains that for Winnicott, self-coherence or self-narrative is a defense (false self developed to manage when mother is intrusive or abandons). When the nature of the false self is realized and the ego starts to crack up, the path to knowing the self is achieved only by forgetting this self. Epstein (2006 and elsewhere) makes extensive use of Winnicott’s concept of “unintegration,” that state where the child’s mind learns to “relax into itself, instead of being caught in psychic manifestations of selfhood.” When the mother is present but not interfering, the child takes for granted her ego-supportive function, and feels safe enough to allow for the relaxation of ego boundaries. What opens up is a felt sense of freedom to play, explore and create in a space where self experience feels “real” and the true self develops. “From the unintegrated state experiences are gathered that can be called personal and there is a tendency towards a sense of existing” (Epstein, 2006). Winnicott wrote about this unstructured space sometimes as a place of madness, sometimes as the sacred incommunicado center (Winnicott, 1963). The title of one of Epstein’s books Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart is a direct reference to Winnicott.

The capacity to play, and the capacity to just be, without feeling the need to do, are both seen as requiring the ability to tolerate unintegration. Therapy allows space for this “non-purposive state” and both therapy and meditation provide a holding function for us to do freely and creatively what we will with our representations, thoughts and experiences. The intensity of personal experience is lacking when the thinking mind is always trying to maintain control, and the incommunicado element which carries “all sense of the real” gets locked away. “The more comfortable we become in permitting a state of unintegration, the more bits and pieces of self we become aware of. Awareness fulfills its holding function by becoming the swollen and empty container within which the entire process unfolds. Eventually, the still, silent center (incommunicado) begins to speak” (Epstein, 2006).

In his (1993) Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell explains: “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 casing around the self to dissolve and the individual strands that make up experience to separate themselves from each other and become defined and articulated” (p. 107). In loosening up our self boundary, we are loosening our adherence to what kinds of experience we are in the habit of automatically labeling as “me” or “not me.” As we learn to look objectively at our “not-me” experience, we move toward the Jungian notion of wholeness. Our capacity for experience broadens via or deconstruction of the idea of ownership:

Bobrow writes, “we experience ourselves through our narrations of and reactions to direct experience. We create running commentaries on our lives and then take them as real, as ‘me’” (2010, p. 27). This is the “me” that Buddhism asserts does not exist. For Winnicott, the mind cannot be localized in time and space: “the mind does not exist as an entity in the individual’s scheme of things provided the individual psyche-soma has come satisfactorily through the every early developmental stages; mind is then no more than a special case of the functioning of the psyche-soma. In the study of the developing individual, the mind will often be found to be developing a false entity and a false localization” (Winnicott, 1958 p. 244). In Zen, the mind is but a field of potentiality. Suzuki (1978) writes, “deeds exist, but no doer can be found.” Bion (1967) writes “thoughts exist without a thinker.”

The way that Winnicott’s false self blocks access to the “real” is similar to Zen’s assertion that the rational or language-based mind is not Zen, but removed from the real, and thoughts and words “have no direct connection with life, except being a faint image or echo of something that is no longer there” (Suzuki, 1949). Pawle writes that “while Western psychology has commonly held that mind without ego results in some kind of mental pathology, Buddhism and Zen have held the opposite – that ego consciousness can be transcended and this transcendent consciousness is actually a clearer and more functional consciousness than ego consciousness” (2009, p. 45-46). In writing about Zen, Suzuki states that “the whole emphasis of its discipline is placed on the intuitive grasping of the inner truth deeply hidden in our consciousness. And this truth thus revealed or awakened within oneself defies intellectual manipulation, or at least cannot be imparted to others through any of dialectical formulas. It must come out of oneself, grow within oneself, and become one with one’s own being.” In philosopher William Barrett’s introduction to D. T. Suzuki’s 1949 Zen Buddhism, he reminds us that Heidegger has basically called all of Western philosophy an error: “The result of the dichotomizing intellect that has cut man off from unity with Being itself and from his own Being. Error which ‘begins with locating truth in the intellect; the world of nature thereby becomes a realm of objects set over and against the mind.’” Barrett also finds the same indictment of the intellect in the writings of Henri Bergson (who viewed immediate experience and intuition as better truer ways of understanding reality) and D. H. Lawrence (who wrote about how self-conscious intellect cuts man off from contact with nature and sexual union).

In a paper titled Non-Interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The ‘Something More’ Than Interpretation, Stern et al (1998) question the primacy of

intellectual interpretation as therapeutic agent of change, which is limited to the realm of declarative knowledge. Drawing upon infant research they pose a more relationally oriented mutative factor in therapy that acts upon procedural knowledge of relationships, and which occurs in spontaneous “moments of meeting” between patient and therapist, where suddenly there is no script for how to act on either person’s behalf, creating an open space where the infant/patient is alone in the presence of the other and free to create anew, forever altering the intersubjective context and reassembling the system and changing the “implicit relational knowing” about the dyadic relationship. From a Buddhist perspective, I wonder if these therapeutic moments could be seen as encounters with the ‘pregnant void’ of emptiness, or encounters with ‘no-self.’

Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1973) beautifully explains how knowledge and preconceived notions have a way of occluding experience and blinding us to the newness and uniqueness of each moment. Michael Eigen (1993) writes, “it is difficult to overestimate the role unconscious omniscience plays in deadening the capacity to experience. If one knows what is going to happen ahead of time, one does not have to experience it” (p. 245). It is for this very reason that Bion calls for “the suspension of memory, desire, understanding” in the analyst’s approach to each session. In recommending the eschewing of memory and desire, he is calling for beginner’s mind and non-attachment, no agenda. In calling for the suspension of understanding, and the need to understand, he is acknowledging the Zen principle that contacting Truth, or Ultimate reality, is not always accessed through rational thought as we know it. Here Bion is building on Freud’s original recommendation for suspending the critical faculty of the thinking mind, allowing the patient to free associate, and allowing the analyst to listen with evenly hovering attention. Many writers on the subject have shown the similarities between Buddhist mindfulness and these states of mind suggested by Freud (Horney, Coltart, Epstein, Rubin, Gunn, to name a few). Bion’s recommendations sound very Zen – to relate to patients non-cognitively. According to Epstein (1996), he is not saying turn off cognitive processing – he’s saying that nonverbal and rational/intellectual thought can both be encompassed, it will never be turned off, it happens naturally, but often intellectual activity is used as a “defense against experiencing the patient’s being, a refusal to enter the jointly experienced not-knowing that makes discovery a real possibility.” Epstein also suggests that it is only this empty kind of mind-state of the therapist that is not experienced as an intrusion by the patient. “The therapist’s expectations and desires, however subtle, create a pressure against which the patient is compelled to react” or comply to. Optimal state of mind: 1) absence of reason or deliberate attempts to select, concentrate, or understand. 2) even, equal, and impartial attention to all that occurs in the field of awareness.

OBion felt that understanding is overrated and the quest for certainty must be

abandoned. As in the teachings of Zen, for Bion, Truth, O, Ultimate Reality, is unknowable and inaccessible through the senses and dualistic thinking. It cannot be known directly but must be embodied or “been.” For Zen master Hui-neng being is knowing. Sense-making creates its own resistances to experience by attempting to foreclose the infinite. Bion’s state of “at-one-ment” is not buffered by sense, since sense maintains the subject-object dichotomy that is not characteristic of O. Similar to Suzuki’s

“being-in-itself.” Zen analyst Paul Cooper (2001) writes, “For Bion, O represents the ultimate truth that is and at once transcends both the definite and the infinite. Bion uses “the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself.”

Grotstein (2000, 2007) has written a fair amount on Bion’s O and it’s conceptual overlaps with Buddhism’s sunyata. Joseph Bobrow, Zen analyst, (2010) writes in Zen and Psychotherapy: “O and K, being and knowing, sacred and human, universal and particular – are neither rigidly apart or collapsed.” Unless transduced and metabolized, O will be experienced as nameless dread, disorganizing chaos. O can only be known through its transformations or transductions, via intuition or K, a knowledge link: “selected fact” which “floats up” from the empty space of not-being. Eigen, (1998) writes poetically of Bion’s “O” as “null state, void, nothingness, analytic openness with pregnant emptiness, creative darkness, the power of non-existence, the goodness of absolute vacuity, the matrix of the sense of self, the divine ground of one’s being, the experience of breathing, the orgasmic element that permeates, charges, and sustains experiencing. O is for One, one God, one cosmos, whose streamings we are…a geometrical representation of the constructive-containing mind that pulsations explode, the Opening of the O.” O represents “psychic reality” – that which is psychically real: “one wants and fears nothing more than what is real” (Bion, 1965, p. 147). Eigen (1998) explains how Bion’s O pays homage to O as void in mysticism, but also as dynamic sunyata (Masao Abe, Japanese Buddhist philosopher, has written important papers on what he calls ‘dynamic sunyata’ which is also conceived of as ultimate reality that is unobjectifiable, unconceptualizable, and unattainable by reason or will, but which can also be thought of as the pure activity of absolute emptying.)

O is not simply met as peace, but as turbulence, even catastrophe. We are O, part of O, and can’t keep up with incessantly evolving O. Contact with O can be experienced as disintegration, and transformation felt as dread (Bion, 1970). O-like experience is always likely to be transformative – forcing the deconstruction of old defenses, old senses of self, while contributing to the momentum of transformation process. It can be experienced by Westerners as destabilizing, disintegrating, demoralizing, confusing, tormenting. Eigen (1999): To let go of usual nodes of being and knowing, and as an analyst to have “faith in O” which is required for the work, can be frightening, difficult. Miller (2009): With encounters with no-self experience, there is a simultaneous emptying of repressed memories and old traumas and old defenses. “letting go of…cathexis to an old sense of self, to ego attachments.” (Emmanuel Ghent – paper on surrendering to experience) “practiced openness to all inner experience.” P. 89. Rhode (1994): O “represents nothing and has a way of becoming everything.” Question: is dreaming direct proof that the void is pregnant empty space that will fill with transformations to fit the size of its container? (the size of the psychic container being vastly greater in dream-space).

Bion’s use of Heidegger is of significance in this discussion, particularly Heidegger’s concept of gelassenheit, which is sometimes translated as releasement. It seems Bion draws heavily on Heidegger in describing the basic anxiety or dread upon encounters with primordial truth, with O revealing itself, as self is annihilated (Heidegger used the word ‘Nothing’ to describe something similar to Bion’s O, a word choice that sounds Buddhist and in description sounds like Buddhism’s emptiness). Heidegger took

the word gelassenheit from Meister Eckhart (White, 2009). Eckhart described a state of detachment, where the self is empty of desire to be anything in particular, the soul is silent and empty - a state of inner vacuity that renders one receptive to God to enter and fill the empty space. The soul is released in God’s indwelling presence (White, 2009). Heidegger describes two types of thinking: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. Meditative thinking, or being, is a discipline, does not come naturally, and is kind of waiting without willing. This is gelassenheit: releasement from intension, where the temptation to explain being is resisted. It seems Bion was influenced by this line of thought, and sought the development of an analytic attitude characterized by without-thinking, as opposed to thinking (living in thought) or not-thinking (killing thought). The waiting, for Bion, is waiting for O to speak. Unlike with Eckhart, this often does not result in divine joyous union, but is terrifying and disintegrating, while transformative and invaluable. It requires a faith in O that something will arise that will be tolerable enough, and of some use, or at least reflect felt truth. It is a waiting and allowing for O to act upon the self as beta elements are dreamt into useable bits.

Developmental snippets:DeMartino, among others, has written about how the subject-object split that Zen

seeks to transcend occurs developmentally in the mind of the infant. Polly Young-Eisendrath (2009), a developmental Jungian, writes of the self as archetype. She regards “the human self as an action…not something we are, but something we do:” something that unifies our subjectivity in space and time, and separates ourselves out from the flow of experience…unconsciously…creating a sense impression that we are ‘in here’ while something else is ‘out there.’ This function we are not born with, but are born with it as inherent potential (archetype) that is developed in relation to others around 18 months. “me” “mine” “no.” p. 95. Lacan’s writings are very relevant here, particularly with regards to the “mirror stage.” Winnicott – infant creates transitional object as “not-me” so that it can be “mine” – to be played with in transitional space. Stern’s (1985) infant-caregiver developmental research – role of affectivity in infant’s development of core sense of self. Stolorow, Atwood, Brandchaft (1987) – sense of self crystalizes around recurrent affect states. Stolorow & Atwood 1990 – “self-delineating” self-object transference.