Freud and the Buddha

The Couch and the Cushion

Axel Hoffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429913969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book investigates what psychoanalysis and Buddhism can learn from each other, and offers chapters by a Buddhist scholar, a psychiatrist-author, and a number of leading psychoanalysts. It begins with a discussion of the basic understanding of both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, viewed not as a religion but as a psychology and a philosophy with ethical principles. The focus of the book rests on the commonality between the psychoanalyst's neutrality as he listens to his freely associating patient, and the Buddhist monk's non-judgmental attention to his mind. The psychoanalytic concepts of free association, the unconscious, transference and countertransference are compared to the implications of the Buddhist principles of impermanence, non-clinging (non-attachment), the hard-to-grasp concept of the "not-self", and the practice of meditation. The differences between the role of the analyst and that of the Buddhist teacher of meditation are explored, and the important difference between the analyst's emphasis on insight and thinking is compared to the Buddhist attention to awareness and experience.

CROSSCURRENTS

CHAPTER THREE

The practice of psychoanalysis and Buddhism^*

Nina Coltart

There is a long study yet to be written comparing and contrasting the practice of psychoanalysis and the practice of Buddhism. This is not it. This is a sketch for a more detailed exploration which I hope to make at some point in the future. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism are in many ways profoundly different, and indeed belong to different orders or categories, and yet on a simple, practical, and philosophical level, they have much in common.

The evolution towards Buddhism in my thinking, as with a number of people I have met, goes back to Christianity. I was a practicing Christian until a year or so before I went into analysis; so it was not the demon Freud who undermined my faith, it was a natural development. As it is said, “I lost my faith,” almost from one day to the next. I have come to think that this is rather an odd phrase because in a very real, but altered sense, faith was precisely the quality I retained; that is, faith in the ultimate and present value of the long, slow, often frustrating daily practice of both Buddhism and psychoanalysis. What I lost was belief in the existence of a personal, or any form of conceivable, God, and it has never returned. I missed this and the Christian practice a lot, and was in the wilderness for a long time, searching around for another path; and thus gradually moved toward and finally into Buddhism, in the Theravada tradition, about twenty years ago. The Theravada practice, as with all the main schools of Buddhism, centers on daily formal sitting meditation.

There has never been, from the earliest days, any sense of conflict about combining the practice of Buddhism with that of full-time psychoanalysis. Of course there are differences, which I will move on to now, and it is important to know what they are, and to maintain certain distinctions clearly in one’s mind. But there are many more extensive and subtle ways in which they flow in and out of each other, and are mutually reinforcing and clarifying. A short summary of the main features of Buddhist teaching will be described, and a view of how they can be seen to contain the essentials of psychoanalysis, as I understand it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the work of Freud is the root and stem of all development in psychological thinking in the twentieth century, however diverse and under whatever titles. Harold Bloom, writing in 1986, said that Freud’s “conceptions … have begun to merge with our culture, and indeed now form the only Western mythology that contemporary intellectuals have in common” (p. 26). To my mind it is a waste of time to use it up by niggling away at criticism of ideas which, like them or not, have their place in our history, and which have often served as springboards for further thought and theorizing. It also misses a larger point which is very relevant to this chapter, namely, that anyone who is engaged in the wide field of psychotherapy, whatever their “school” or training, is essentially interested in human nature, and keen to effect what reparation of ills they can with the tools available, and by now they are more or less agreed on two enormous main factors: first, that there is an area of the mind that is unconscious, and second, that human behavior has meaning and can be understood psychologically, and that this is in itself therapeutic.

Let us consider some important differences. Dynamic psychotherapy is nonreligious; it has evolved in the West from centuries of philosophic thought going back to the establishment of Cartesian rationalism. If there is one central question at the heart of the Western systems, out of which Freud himself grew, it is “Who am I?” Christianity has, by its basic doctrines, helped to perpetuate the cult of the individual, and we are deeply conditioned in the West to the necessity of establishing a strong and stable ego-identity; psychotherapy is geared to this end, and, though it may in effect have many other by-products, its aim is thus limited, unlike the aims of the Eastern spiritual tradition; theoretically psychotherapy can be said to have goals. With the rooted assumption prevailing in the West that a strong and resilient self can live in this world in a state of more or less happy adjustment, Freud’s great contribution was that an increase in self-knowledge, in the context of a faithful adherence to truth, can liberate the human spirit, his view as expressed in a wonderful late paper, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937c). His famous dictum, “Where id was, there shall ego be” expressed the goal—psychoanalysis is the means to it. In the Western view of psycho-structure, the ego is the mediator between the unruly passions and fantasies of man, and the external world, and the more self-knowledge leads to satisfactory internal adjustment between the two, the more successful the outcome of analytic psychotherapy is considered to be. I repeat, therefore, that psychotherapy is essentially a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Freud himself persistently maintained that he was not constructing a philosophy of life, that his investigation into the nature of the unconscious in relation to our whole sense of self was not intended to be an ethical system, and that his intention was, first and last, that human suffering could be healed or diminished by the growth of self-awareness. Attempts to bend his theory into a long-term philosophy of living, or world-view, whether this is seen to be morally positive or, as has so often been the case, amoral or even immoral, are a misinterpretation of his own thought on the matter. Psychotherapy in our tradition encourages deep reflection; this is quite different from the technique of meditation. By his phrase “liberation of the spirit,” Freud did not mean the same thing as is meant by “liberation” as an Eastern religious goal; he meant freedom from neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and anxiety. He never, in fact, used the word “identity” in the sense it has taken on in the post-Freudian era, but his intention was to strengthen our sense of individual identity. I would like here to quote a succinct passage from an essay called “Psychiatry and the Sacred” by Jacob Needleman; this essay appears in an excellent book of contributions from people who know something of the practice of both sorts of discipline, variations on the two we are now considering. The book is called On the Way to Self-Knowledge. Needleman writes:

In the great traditions (referring to the Eastern spiritual ones) the term self-knowledge has an extraordinary meaning. It is neither the acquisition of information about oneself, nor a deeply felt insight, nor moments of recognition against the ground of psychological theory. It is the principal means by which the evolving portion of mind can be nourished by an energy that is as real, or more so, as the energy delivered to the physical organism by the food we eat. Thus it is not a question of acquiring strength, independence, self-esteem, and security, “meaningful relationships,” or any of the other goods upon which the Western social order is based and which have been identified as the components of psychological health. It is solely a matter of digesting deep impressions of myself as I actually am from moment to moment, a disconnected, helpless collection of impulses and reactions, a being of disharmonized mind, feelings and instinct. (Needleman & Lewis, p. 18)

The temptation to go on quoting from this essay is considerable, but I think that passage says clearly something about differences, and something which even a little reflection will show to be quite mysterious to our Western minds.

Before proceeding to similarities, or overlap, I would like to say something about what might be called “meditation and muddles.” I refer to the ways in which the practice of meditation, the heart of the Buddhist tradition, can be misunderstood or misused by us in the West, and for our purposes here I refer most specifically to those of us who work in the field of therapy. Many practitioners will be familiar with the kinds of things I mean. Roughly speaking, however much we might disguise the stark nature of the fact from ourselves, I think it is true to say that people start on both these paths—therapy and meditation—with the wish for increased comfort and peace of mind; muddles can occur when aims are lost sight of, when there is inadequate teaching at the very beginning; and there is a danger peculiar to the West which I think cannot be overemphasized. For a Westerner to proceed healthily on the spiritual path which may lead to self-transcendence, and loss of “the fortress of I,” there needs must exist already a stable, strong sense of personal identity, albeit not necessarily a happy one. If this is lacking, then psychotherapeutic help may be needed to repair and stabilize the ego first, before embarking seriously on a meditation practice. Eastern teachings either take for granted that a person already has a healthy structure or they define this differently in a totally different culture. This kind of assumption is dangerous in the West. If a person has not developed the ability to make at least some strong and wholesome personal relationships, or is ignorant of, or unable to express, his or her feelings, or is plagued by anxieties, then psychotherapy may well be the first treatment of choice before turning to meditation. Psychotherapy helps people to understand themselves in ways that are essentially pragmatic. I quote from John Welwood in Awakening the Heart: “To attempt to skip over this area of our development in favour of some spiritual bliss beyond is asking for trouble” (1983, p. 82; my italics). And Robin Skynner, in an essay, “Psycho-therapy and Spiritual Traditions,” adds (and here I paraphrase for brevity’s sake): Some people following sacred traditions do indeed change a lot, and problems which might have taken them to a psychotherapist fade away imperceptibly; but they may inadvertently take from the spiritual movement that which actually keeps the ego strong; or some may, as a result of going into a spiritual system, become more closed, narrow, and intolerant. This group is the most intractable of all, for the knowledge derived from a religious tradition has been put to the service of perceptual advances, of complacency, of narcissistic self-satisfaction, of comfort and security (Needleman & Lewis, pp. 220–221). A note of clear warning is issued by many authors in these books, of which I select John Welwood again for one final thought—that: “… the psychologizing of Eastern contemplative disciplines could rob those disciplines of their spiritual substance. It could pervert them into a Western mental-health gimmick, and thereby prevent them from introducing the sharply alternative vision of life they are capable of bringing us.” To this I would only add here that one sees too often that such a spiritual practice in the West may be used as an escape from growth; spiritual growth may for a while be commensurate with psychological growth, the latter here being the road to self-mastery through knowledge, toward a more flexible, healthier adjustment to the world in which we find ourselves living out our existence; psychotherapy does not aim at “self-transcendence,” and there may be a sad confusion of concepts when, say, detachment leads to a kind of neurotic spiritual inflation, or a certain depth of awareness leads to a mistaken and crudely omnipotent notion that one is nearing enlightenment, or even has “it.”

Unfortunately, but I suppose predictably, a number of narcissistic personalities have flourished in the culture of the last thirty years, who manifest undoubted skills in crowd control, group-analytic techniques, hypnotic manipulation, and a cold, greedy love of power, who are reverentially followed by many unhappy people seeking comfort. They are capable of working a heavily controlled audience up to a point of exaltation during the course of a weekend, people who then reel out into the world, brainwashed to an alarming degree, and exuding a dreadful kind of smug vacuity, which they mistake for “it” or instant enlightenment. These modern gurus are deeply irresponsible, but inaccessible to the awareness needed to control themselves.

Psychological adjustment is not liberation. The path of spiritual growth cuts off at an angle to that of psychological growth, and to confuse the two may be to get stuck unawares, or with a sense of disillusionment. The intense disillusionment and bitter emptiness which follow upon the loss of the exalted experience just described are sad to see, and there is no doubt that for many of these gullible people, their last state is worse than their first. Why, even if they have not been hypnotically organized to a false state of manic exaltation (which always fades and leaves only desolation), do so many people drop away from a practice of meditation? Either because they begin to break down under its influence, having misjudged its power and really do then need psychological help; or more commonly because it genuinely does strengthen them, makes them more comfortable, reduces their anxiety, and then they are satisfied that they have reached a point which, properly speaking, is only a point on the same road which would have been followed by the pragmatic secular psychotherapist, and is nothing to do with a spiritual search.

I will now attempt to show how the practices of Buddhism and psychoanalysis interconnect and work, each to potentiate the other, by outlining the simple skeletal structure of Buddhist teaching as I understand it in the Theravada tradition, and then trying to see how well it relates to our analytic understanding and intentions.

The Buddha taught what are called the Four Noble Truths. These are:

1. That suffering exists

2. That suffering can be understood to arise (have a cause)

3. That suffering can be understood to cease (the cause can be removed)

4. That there is a reliable path leading to the cessation of suffering.

The arising and ceasing of suffering is based on the “law of dependent origination,” or what we would more familiarly call “cause and effect.” The Buddha taught that there are three inescapable signs of being, meaning truths about human existence; these are that all beings suffer, that all beings and states are impermanent, and that all things ultimately are without self. In Pali these are dukkha, anicca, and anatta. Dukkha, though translated usually as “suffering,” is a very compound word, referring also to disease, discomfort, anxiety, disappointment, longing; in fact, all shades and variations of psychic and physical states that are imperfect and discontented. I need hardly add here that it is the third, anatta, that boggles the Western mind, and absolutely, and only, belongs to the path where spiritual understanding has already left the path of psychological understanding: It is totally alien to the European philosophical cast of mind, as I hope I have already fully shown. We will not concern ourselves with it further, though I may add here that to reach a deep realization of its truth is one of the most liberating experiences there can be. It is not easily approached by intellectual ratiocination, though logical thought about all concepts was always encouraged by the Buddha, provided it does not exclude meditative contemplation. For about twelve years of daily meditation practice within the Theravada tradition, I had no idea what anatta “meant,” and it is particularly hard for those of us whose life-work is dedicated to exploring and strengthening the ego. I had simply left anatta alone. Then about twelve years ago, it suddenly dawned on me that it made absolute, inescapable, perfect sense, and I could not, from that moment on, imagine quite what it had been like not to have “real-ized” it. It was, continues to be, a liberation of the spirit to do so. It also opens the door to the appreciation of a great cosmic joke about our work, which I might now express as something like, “Of course one has to know one’s ego is strong and understood before there is a chance of seeing that it doesn’t exist.” As I have said elsewhere (“What does it mean: ‘Love is not enough’?”; this volume, Chapter Eight), our work is full of paradoxes, and this is the most radical and delightful of them all. But for the purposes of this chapter, we may now leave anatta alone again; it belongs to the realm to which I referred earlier, in which spiritual practice is simply of a different order of things to psychological practice, and there is nothing to be gained by forcing unfruitful connections.

The “path” referred to in the Fourth Noble Truth is called the Eightfold Noble Path, and I will spell it out: right view, right thinking; right speech, right action, right livelihood; and right effort, right concentration, and right wisdom. You will see that I have presented the path in three little groups of linked features, one of two, and two of three. Of course it is really a tightly knit circle—the first group of two, view and thought, is of necessity dependent upon a serious investment in developing the last group, effort, concentration, and wisdom. Equally, the middle group, speech, action, and livelihood, cannot exist in isolation without the others, and so on. It is this path which the Buddha also called the Middle Way. The Middle Way is not some dreary, safe, lowest common denominator; it is hard to define, but roughly it refers to a subtle, attentive, continuous striving after refined distillations of what is good in all the hundreds of various extremes in all dimensions of life.

At a meeting of Buddhists in our tradition we take what are called the Five Precepts. These do not say anything like “Thou shalt not”; they say “I will endeavor to refrain from destroying life, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and taking substances which alter the state of consciousness” (my italics). The Buddha also taught the eight kleshas, or hindrances, to development; these are hatred, greed, ignorance, lust, pride, envy, sloth, and doubt. And this is the sum total of the basic teaching, except for the most important activity—the heart of the teaching, round which the understanding, and working on all the foregoing, centers—of meditation, both as a formal practice and as a continuing attitude and way of being, where it is more appropriately called mindfulness.

Now for the linkups with psychoanalysis. First wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PREAMBLE
• CROSSCURRENTS
• CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
• INDEX