1 - A mindful self and beyond- sharing in the ongoing dialogue of Buddhism and psychoanalysi

Adeline van Waning

In: P. Young-Eisendrath, S. Muramoto (eds.) Awakening and Insight: Buddhism and Psychotherapy East and West, Brunner-Routledge, New York 2002, 93-105

'Psychoanalytical-mystical openness to the unknown overlap. Analytic workers, not religious in the literal sense, may be touched by intimations of something sacred in the work'
(Michael Eigen in `The Psychoanalytic Mystic’, 1998, p. 11)


Introduction

Buddhism is a spiritual approach, developed 2500 years ago and aimed at enlightenment; psychoanalysis is a general psychology and a form of therapy, having its roots in the 19th century, and aimed at understanding and remedying psychological problems. While many distinguishing aspects can be named, we can also be aware of similarities in Buddhist psychology and psychoanalysis.

Both psychoanalysis and Buddhism concern themselves with dissatisfaction, human suffering, and its alleviation; both offer a kind of ‘diagnosis’ and a ‘treatment plan’. They both take place within an important personal emotional relationship: the relationship of therapist-client, and the relationship of teacher-student. They emphasise the importance of comparable experiential processes: in analysis evenly hovering attention and free association, in Buddhism the method of meditation. The obstacles in these processes are recognised and have an important function in the transformation-process: defence and resistance in psychoanalysis and what are called `hindrances’ in Buddhism.

Both can be named `uncovering’ approaches, aimed at insight into our nature and way of thinking and feeling. There are some `technical’ aspects that are characteristic for psychoanalysis (and less for other psychotherapy approaches) that can be linked with Buddhism. We may say that both approaches seem to share a relatively `neutral’, though compassionate stance of the therapist and teacher, who are attentive and may be noticing and naming, but are not giving direct advice (this may be more true for psychoanalysis than for Buddhism). The client and meditator is expected to observe what is there, without censorship. There is a certain `abstinence’ in the way that the therapist or teacher is not intentionally gratifying, but functions as a guide or midwife in the person’s own process. We can also say that, in the beginning of the process, a certain benign `split in the ego’ is favored: one can experience in what way and what one experiences, while experiencing. The existential responsibility in this process is in the client and meditator, not the authority figure. 

But there are many differences and certainly misunderstandings too. Freud wrote about meditation in terms of ‘oceanic feelings’, an experience of unlimited unity with the universe, aimed at ‘the recovery of infinite narcissism’ and return to the breast or the womb (Freud, 1930). By making this erroneous judgment, a [negative] misunderstanding was created and continued for decades.

Still, psychotherapists in the West have always had an interest in Eastern psychology and spirituality; e.g. Maslow and Watts. Also depth-psychologists from the Jungian tradition showed an interest: for instance Jung himself (1964), Moacanin (1986), Meckel and Moore (1992) and Young-Eisendrath (1996). The same goes for psychoanalysts such as Fromm (1960), Horney (DeMartino, 1991), Epstein (1995, 1998), Coltart (1996) and Molino (1998).

In this paper I like to go into one aspect of profound difference between these two traditions, namely in the way that self and subjectivity are conceived and approached. A case example illustrates a way of integrating Buddhist insights into the `working through’ process in psychoanalytic treatment. I will also address two forms of Buddhist practice, mindfulness and koan practice. I hope to make clear that both fundamental approaches offer precious gifts to the client and the psychotherapist. 


Self and subjectivity

The 13th century Zen-master Dogen says: `To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others’ (Epstein, 1995, p. 20). The perception of this self is of great importance for both psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism both examine the concept and experiencing of subjectivity, and emphasise the necessity of transformation of the self in order to develop fully. However, psychoanalytic and Buddhist ways of conceiving the self and its development differ widely.

The following story gives us a sense of the Buddhist approach:

You are walking in the forest beside the old master, and come near a brook. He touches your shoulder, and you know he wants you to sit down. He shakes his head and points to a piece of cork which floats by. It is burned, half of it is black. “That is your personality”, the master says, “with everything that happens, every change of circumstance, every conflict, every defeat or victory, a small bit of it crumbles away”. You look at the cork. You see pieces of it come loose and disappear. “The cork is getting smaller and smaller”, you say, nervously. The calm voice of the master is very close: “until there is nothing left”. He looks at you with a kind smile. There is this fragile old man who wants to teach you something... You will lose your name, your body, your personality. Your fear lessens. If it has to happen, it will happen. Nothing will be left. And you will no longer be there (based on: Van de Wetering, 1975, pp. 21-22).

`Selflessness’ in this sense can be seen as an insight and a liberation of the burden of attachments to name, body and personality, leading to a freer way of being in the world. But the perception of this ‘selflessness’ in a Western sense is often frightening. We can think, for example, of experiences of therapy clients who indicate that they have ‘no self’, no personality or identity, who have the feeling that all they are is a reaction, a response to others. As a particular client said, about a cork as well: `I feel like a cork floating in the ocean, I’m only going with the waves and the stream, I have no individuality’.

In this way, I think of a client, Ella, who always describes herself in comparison with others; she does not know who she is. Yes, she’s `kind of nice’ and she gets on with her father better than her sister; and she is more shy than her brother, and she gets jealous quickly. Ella is beginning to recognise that the members of her family are never addressed as individual personalities. In conversations within the family they always talked, as it were, ‘through others’. `I would like to become a person of my own, a true me’, she states.

We might say that Ella experiences her suffering in terms of a missing function in her personality: the ability to sustain the experience of being an individual subject.  


A Buddhist and a psychoanalytic perspective

In the Buddhist perspective, major psychological problems result from our attachment to the image of the self as fixed and independent: fixed as opposed to transitory, impermanent, changeable; and independent, separate as opposed to connected and dependent on everybody and everything. We have no anchorage outside of this personal identity, which is always moving, always changing. Under these circumstances images about the past are ‘adapted’ to how we feel at the moment, and images of the future are inspired by present wishes and fears. As to the idea of being independent, in the west we speak of a developmental process of separation-individuation. In other cultures, among them those where Buddhism developed, one could better speak of separation-integration into the family or group. In a multicultural approach to subjectivity we recognize that personal identity always depends on a context. The multicultural society comments on the idea of a western separate self in a cultural sense; Buddhism does the same in a radical way in an existential, spiritual sense.

Connection and unity do not exclude the perception of subjectivity; subjectivity is not bound to separation-individuation. In Buddhism, for example, a form of non-selfcentered subjectivity is cultivated, which is characterised by clear, open attention, and tuning in to the other as well as to oneself.

The Buddha did not say: `You don’t exist’, but rather `You have no self’. His point was not to deny or reject the self, but to recognise the self-representation as representation, as a concept without existence of its own. The Zen-master helps the student to gain the invigorating and broadening experience of no-self. Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, explains it this way: the point of selflessness, of talking about no-self is not that something that existed in the past no longer exists, but that this kind of self never existed at all. It is necessary to recognise the non-existence of something that has never existed but was only imagined. This may lead to an experience which may, at first, be painful rather than oceanic.

In the psychoanalytical perspective, `self’ is seen, in general, as a central organiser in the psychological universe of every human being, from which our identity and its accompanying `otherness’ emerge. We talk about consistency, coherence and continuity in the experiencing of the self, about ‘true self’ and ‘false self’. In this view one suffers a great problem when lacking self-coherence or self-esteem. When viewing many serious afflictions (e.g. autism, psychoses, borderline and narcissistic problems) we speak of disorders, stagnation or regression in the shaping of a cohesive, integrated self-image, as in the case of Ella. In therapies now the emphasis is on the question of how to make people feel better about themselves, rather than how to deal with internal conflicts. We now talk about the ‘narcissistic dilemma’: the sense of estrangement, or ‘falseness’ in the sense of not being real, linked with either idealising or devaluing others or oneself, with self-exaltation or self-contempt as poles of this false self-image.

Self can be seen as the representation of a function of coherence, continuity, agency and relationship that allows us to perceive ourselves as a single, integrated, subjective embodiment.

In psychoanalysis, we use, one could say, ‘self’ as a help-construction in our endeavour to understand the person in being, suffering, enjoying, hoping, learning and development. Developmentally, we understand the self as a function which is grounded in embodiment and the experiences of self-reflexivity that are typical of humans.

The analyst Nina Coltart puts her cheerful comment on this in the form of a limerick (1996, p. 139):

A Buddhist once said: ‘To deny

That this I is an I is a lie;

For if it is not,

I should like to know what

Is the thing that says: ‘I am not I’

The problem is that, while we make a representation of an ever changing function, we imagine this representation as a fixed `thing’. We tend to create a fixed self in the same way we create objects. Varela et al. argue that `this grasping after an inner ground is itself a moment in a larger pattern of grasping that includes our clinging to an outer ground in the form of an idea of a pregiven and independent world. In other words, our grasping after a ground, whether inner or outer, is the deep source of frustration and anxiety’ (Varela et al., 1991, p. 143). 


Integration

How might a possible integration of Buddhist insights and approaches concerning ‘self-perception’ into psychotherapy be of help? Long ago, Buddhism developed a technique for healing the problems that go with the fact that human beings make an image of themselves and get attached to it, a technique for healing problems connected with the narcissistic attachment to a fixed self image of human beings. This is something Western psychology has only relatively recently started to focus on.

Before going further, I want to relate the following case example:

A client, John, relates an incident in which a friend, Rose, was very angry with him. She reproached him for not complying with her request that he go with her to a meeting which was important to her, saying that he had let her down terribly. Rose felt that this said something about him, that he was just not interested, and that he was no good. Her fierce reproaches gave John something of a shock. At first he winced at the thought that he really had been very thoughtless; and it also touched upon a sensitive spot: am I really like that? He then started to wonder whether he considered her reproaches justified under these circumstances - and then he became increasingly angry: he thought her reproaches were exaggerated and out of proportion. Actually he was furious: what did she think? He felt hurt, not only because of what she had said about the situation, but more about the way she made this into ‘that he was like this’. No, he was not like this! He felt hurt; and at the same time he didn’t want to be so touched by it; he didn’t want to take it seriously.

Her image of him and his self-image sound and felt fixed and stable. She says he is like this, and he thinks he is like that. Buddhists recommend `keeping anger in check’, which means to feel it and recognize it, but not to assume that the anger is a fact in itself. It was right that John had fully experienced his anger, and was able to stay with it. It was also right not to leave that feeling of fear that went with the hurt. Could it perhaps be true, what she had said about him? And then, true or not true, he felt the panic, for a short while: was he going to lose the friend? Naturally, John and I also looked at whether these feelings might possibly say something about the feelings that played a role in the therapeutic relationship, his transference to me. What did they mean to him, the feelings of abandonment, of anger that arose with Rose; might he feel that I didn’t accept him, was he angry with me, was he afraid I was angry with him or criticizing him? And what were my (counter)transferential feelings in this? 


Letting go of identification

‘Working through’ experiences in a Buddhist and psychoanalytic sense allows us to observe the workings of what is called the I. This goes beyond what we commonly name ‘insight’, and is focused both on content and on process, on the ways of working of the mind. In most therapies we will discuss with clients, in some ongoing way, the way they deal with themselves, with feelings of superiority and inferiority in relationships with other people. We will talk about dissatisfactions with life, about how to make life meaningful.

I will name some general points here where to my opinion a Buddhist approach can enrich the commonly understood `working through’ process, and I will try to make a connection to John’s experiences:

It is essential that, given the problems that the client presents, client and therapist look together at what the client is repeating, in such a way that he or she can really feel, experience it. We look at patterns of repetition in the resistance against fully being with it, which so often have to do with fears, linked to self-esteem: the feeling of having missed so much, of not being able to do without.

John knew of his sensitivity in many situations in actual life, and he made a connection to the reality of his mother’s illness when he was three years old, which meant that at times he had been left in the care of relatives, not knowing how long it would last. She died when he was five. Anxiety about abandonment (as he was young, interpreted by him in ways that this might be a punishment for things he had done wrong) and a reactive entitlement for attention made him vulnerable. His first reaction to the reproaches of his friend was one of guilty submission.

It is important that the client truly feels his demand for reparation, and the fear of the pain and hollowness which lie behind it (and are fended off), against which he may try to defend himself with all possible means. John’s feeling of entitlement confused his precise attention to what was going on at the very moment in the interaction with his friend. To tolerate his despair at not being seen as he thought he deserved was hard. Often, before, he had had an inclination to enact and act out, or to make a fight in comparable circumstances.

Can the client `live’ this hollowness intensely? Going through it can be very painful and frightening.

John now really tried to be with his despair with `bare attention’ and without judgement; he tried to contain and to tolerate his emotions, in a way that had aspects of intrapsychic `desensitisation’.

It is important that the client recognises the repetition (often, hurt self-esteem), the resistance (reactive self-importance or self-contempt) and that which is fended off (pain, emptiness, fear, depression) as something of himself, and that he feels how he identifies with these positions.

For John this meant being with his hurt feelings, with his anger and defensive feelings of grandiosity and with his anxiety for being insignificant, nobody, nowhere. Also it meant for him recognizing that his early biography, as sad as it was, served a function still now to continue feeling let down and feeling entitled to demand reparation; that in some, at first unconscious, way he cherished his early trauma.

It is fundamental that the client can then let go of this identification, to dis-identify. This will result in there being room for more openness, equanimity and energy. And for John this letting go brought an ability to better be and experience in here and now, aware of his feelings in the present situation instead of these feelings so much being colored by the past. In that way he needed no longer to live the extremes of self-contempt and self-importance as if he were just that; as if they formed his identity, as if he had a fixed identity. Instead, now he could more realistically explore the different aspects in his passing feelings, tolerate and accept the ambivalence and ambiguity in the situation.

It seems often more attractive to distract, to cover up and wait for better times than to go through pain and hollowness and survive. Often something else happens, namely that the client has to fend off this recognising something as being of himself, that he wants to externalize and project onto others. For John this might mean that he would just blame Rose. Often, letting go and dis-identifying will not be fulfilled, meaning that the client remains linked with his fixed identifications, unconsciously. John might continue to live the hurt, entitled child; and with every enacted conflict where he felt let down, his entitlement would grow and he might end up a bitter man.

Being with our acute, intense feelings seems very hard, often we avoid them in a phobic way.

Psychoanalytical (re)construction of the way something may have happened and has been experienced in the past can give meaning, and thus make it easier to let it go; but sometimes just such a construction, as a new piece of identity, can lead to holding on to it. It was right for John that he could feel all the emotions that have been described as his, and also see that they were temporary, passing by, and that he is more than his emotions. After John had cried in despair, while he recognized his identification with the angry let-down boy, his acceptance of the pain and anger freed the energy contained in them, which then he could use for constructive activities. It was also good for him to feel that his friend’s criticism (and possibly mine, and possible his to me) were passing and could not really touch him.

To be able to recognise all this, with non-judging attention, is similar to the perceptual abilities cultivated in `mindfulness’. In the following I will go into what has been called the special gift of Buddhism to the world: mindfulness meditation. 


Mindfulness

In all Buddhist approaches, attention is given to the right meditative concentration and to non-judging mindful awareness of what comes floating up. Often observance of the breathing is taken as the base from where to start and where gently to return, when being distracted. When concentration grows and gradually we get less easily distracted, we have more attention for the coming and going of the `objects of the mind’, like thoughts, memories, worries, wishes, physical sensations. Thus, we develop a refined inclusive, non-selective, non-judging awareness in the moment, a ‘such-ness’ not related to anything else. This leads to more penetrating insights into emotional and physical processes, into ‘self-awareness’ and reality and thus, to the development of empathy and commitment. Mindfulness helps to recognise fear and resistance and to mitigate unconscious and punitive self-criticism. The dynamics of this criticism are so well described by Kris (1990). Mindfulness also reduces the tendency to act on impulse and habit. Mindfulness illuminates, accepts and transforms.

Epstein (1990) tried to describe what happens in concentration and mindfulness meditation in psychoanalytical terms. The traditional psychoanalytical explanation of meditation as blending with an internalised image of a lost state of perfection, with ‘oceanic’ emotions, could be seen as the blending of the I and the I-ideal. In the beginning, when doing the concentration-exercise, a person may have such expansive or pleasant feelings.

But ‘mindfulness’ meditation is an attention-strategy which will lead to insights and experiences that can be totally different. At first, ‘mindfulness’ meditation means, just like free association and free-floating attention, a therapeutic splitting in the I, where the I observes itself. This results in the reinforcement of the ability of the observing I to notice changes from moment to moment. One could say that ‘mindfulness’ means the development of the synthetic ability of the I within the I: synthesis at still more complex levels of differentiation and ‘objectification’ of reality. Mindfulness can be seen as a developmental tool towards a mindful self and beyond. 


What does mindfulness meditation mean to the therapist, to me?

The importance of Freud’s recommendations about ‘equally hovering attention’ (1912) is widely recognised for verbal, expressive therapies. At the same time, it is remarkable that so little attention was given to the pragmatic question: ‘how can it be developed and cultivated?’. People have written mainly about what one had to avoid in order to make this kind of attention possible (e.g. censure, expectations beforehand, too much reflection); Bion (1970) commented upon the necessity for an analyst to leave behind ‘memory, desire and understanding’.

Precisely here, Buddhist psychology has a lot to offer: a systematic training of perception, attention and awareness. Freud suggested what we should do; the meditative tradition shows how non-selective and non-restrictive attention can be learned. One can probably only appreciate the value of this once one has experienced it. Concentration-meditation creates the conditions for listening with equally hovering attention, mindfulness meditation helps to implement, cultivate and refine this. Why not introduce the practice of mindfulness meditation in the training of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists? 


Helping clients develop an attitude of mindfulness can have very beneficial effects.

In the case of Ella this has meant that she has started to do formal mindfulness meditation in a group. Her words: `what for me is so important is that I always have it with me, it gives me a safe feeling. And it means that I have a choice, it gives some control because I can do something and I’m with it.’ Ella in fact states that she feels more a `person of her own’, a seemingly paradoxical effect, because it helps to disidentify with a fixed identity! She experiences this space for being her true self.

A client can be asked to investigate a symptom or complaint with mindfulness, as a seemingly paradoxical question, while in one way we `choose’ the symptom for expressing our suffering, and in another way we want to get rid of it. One can `sit’ every day with a question for example: Why do I drink alcohol? on every outbreath; an answer will come and often can be formulated as a new question. For instance, if the answer is `to protect against loneliness’ one can ask `What makes me so lonely?’ (Kief, 1999). The practice can help us to develop a steady motivation for deeper penetration into our questions and problems and support in desensitisation of concomittant anxieties.

Mindfulness supports living in the present, and sharpens perception and consciousness. The practice has been taken up as a universal approach, and been included in psychotherapy, and in stress and pain management programs with significant positive effects (see f.i. Kabat-Zinn, 1990, 1992). 


Beyond the separate self

Mindfulness can be seen as an attention strategy that can help us non-judgmentally to investigate our doings, thinking and feeling, in order to get better insight into the ways we represent our fluctuating selves, and can help us towards transformation beyond this self. Koan practice from Zen Buddhism takes us radically beyond this self. A koan, often presented as a story, sometimes a metaphor, is a question that may sound ‘non-rational’, even paradoxical to our ears. ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’. Koan practice thwarts the desire for meaning and demands a new kind of encounter with the problem or question. In formal practice, a Zen student must manifest, actualize or embody a response, not simply give a verbal answer. This kind of practice demands a new kind of attentive concentration and mindfulness. A koan is a strategy to break through the dualism of the mind, and pass by the self-other dichotomy that tends to keep us defensively fixed and identified with our separate self.

`Sitting with a koan’ in meditation can help to let go of ordinary thinking and to exercise a form of attention which for a therapist can be very helpful in the therapeutic relationship. Sometimes a psychoanalytical interpretation, developed from the intersubjective interaction between therapist and client, may have aspects of a liberating breakthrough for the client; suddenly there is an opening, exactly because the I was able to let go and give room to the creativity and intuition, of a non-conscious stream of thought, from which we can name a non-discriminative, non-discursive, ‘lateral’ thinking; a knowing which has been lifted to a wider form of consciousness and awareness. The solution to a koan may be seen as the lived manifestation of a transcendence beyond dualistic self where there is no need for discrepancies of experiencing an attached and an unattached self, because you are who you are, because it is the way it is.

Polly Young-Eisendrath gives an impressive example of her application of what is called the ‘fundamental koan’ in her treatments: “When it is impossible to do anything, what do you do?” This koan is about the value of tolerating insecurities, about room for ambiguity, open endedness, for potentially new things for both client and therapist, instead of the illusion that the therapist knows, in which solutions are sought, or support and advice are given (Young-Eisendrath, 1997).

To get back to John: he and Rose turned out to be good `teachers’ to one another, resulting in a closer and closer relationship, and eventually marriage. After one year they had a son, named John Jr., of which father John was extremely fond. At one time in our treatment John called me in the afternoon, crying and completely upset, to tell me of the tragedy that his two years old son had been hit in a traffic accident and died instantly. John came to see me immediately. There we sat, with his immense unspeakable grief. We both felt so powerless. What could I do except be with him, present and aware, mostly without words. Understanding his being the father, the husband, his self-reproach, his identification with being the little boy, himself the abandoned child – and not understanding.

Where pain and suffering of the client can be so profound, it is important that the therapist remains open-minded and knows that she or he doesn’t know; and when it is impossible to do anything, one must do something with that.

Brazier cites the title of Carl Rogers book `On becoming a person’ as a modern koan. One could say: if I am not a person, what am I? Can I become fully the person that I can be? Rogers wanted us to take this question up freshly as a means to help us become the most we can possibly be. The answer cannot be in words, it can just show, and be manifested. As Brazier states, solving a koan means changing our way of being, and this generally means giving up some ideas rather than producing new ones (Brazier, 1995). 


Conclusion

Within certain critical arenas as I have presented, psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology can provide each other with important insights and approaches. Psychoanalysis helps us to suffer less from unconscious conflicts, confusions and fixed attitudes; Buddhism helps us to be more awake and aware in the here and now, and to be open to the spiritual dimension which is present in everything. As therapists and clients who practice Buddhism we become more open to the `sacred’ in the psychoanalytic work, as phrased by Eigen, the sacred in the transformations that awareness can facilitate, transformations into the mindful self and beyond.

What might psychoanalysis have to offer to Buddhism and what can psychoanalysis learn from Buddhism? One of the things psychoanalysis may have to offer is an extensive development of theories about forms of defense and resistance, and of the therapeutic intersubjective interaction, of (counter)transference and enactment. With the example of John, in his letting go of fixed self-identifications, we got a glimpse of what Buddhist psychology can offer psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis can learn more about psychological health, maturation, and transformation.

The most direct, essential contribution of Buddhism to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists is, in my view, the attention, concentration, awareness in the challenge of being ‘awake’ and unprejudiced right ‘here’ for both the other and yourself. 

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