Highlights
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It is well known that Freud (1907) labeled religion the obsessional neurosis of humanity and that he was inclined to interpret spirituality as a defense against sexual and aggressive drives
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The many contradictions between spiritual practice and modern psychotherapy should not be reconciled, in my view, by appealing to a need to introduce explicit spiritual values, a moral order, or a search for meaning in life into the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
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spiritual practices such as petitionary prayer, contemplative prayer, and meditation also need to be differentiated. Zen meditation will be used as an example of meditation and authentic spiritual experience; it seems to be the spiritual practice most similar to the analytic attitude. Petitionary prayer is the spiritual practice that lies at the point of maximum conflict with the analytic and scientific attitude. The worshiper petitions a deity just like a child petitions a parent. Contemplative prayer falls somewhere in between petitionary prayer and meditation
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CHAPTER 1 Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Reexamination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism
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You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” I wrote this nearly twenty years ago in an attempt to summarize my first effort at integrating two perspectives that appeared irreconcilable at the time: Buddhist teaching about no-self and newer psychodynamic thinking about the importance of self-development in object relations theory and self psychology
On Being Somebody
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spiritual practice doesn’t exempt us from normal developmental tasks
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it takes certain ego capacities just to practice meditation or any spiritual practice.
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The Buddhist teaching that one has no enduring self (“emptiness,” “no-self”) is open to a fateful misinterpretation in our Western context, namely, that I do not need to struggle to find out who I am, what my desires and aspirations are, what my needs are, what my capabilities and responsibilities are, how I am relating to others, and what I could or should do with my life. The no-self doctrine seems to relieve me of the burden of these tasks and to justify their premature abandonment: if I am (spiritually) nobody, then I don’t need to become (psychologically) somebody
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Ontological “emptiness” becomes confused with psychological emptiness. Subjective feelings of inner emptiness are mistaken for the experience of shunyata, or the absence of inherent existence; and the experience of not feeling inwardly integrated for anatta, or selflessness
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The enlightenment ideal itself can be cathected narcissistically as a version—the mother of all versions!—of the grandiose self: as the acme of personal perfection, with all mental defilements (kilesas) and fetters (samyojanas) eradicated—the achievement of a purified state of complete self-sufficiency and personal purity from which all badness has been removed, which will be admired by others, and which will be invulnerable to further injury or disappointment. “Perfection” unconsciously comes to mean freedom from symptoms so one’s self will be superior to everyone else’s, the object of their admiration if not envy
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narcissistic dynamics are probably far more intertwined with everyone’s spiritual practice than I originally thought
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Spiritual practice, like psychotherapy itself, can serve defensive aims. This makes it even more imperative to understand that the no-self teaching does not mean we do not need to work with our own psychological self, our own character, or our relationships with others, either as a next step in our own development or as unfinished business from the past that continues to get in the way
CHANGE IN SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: GRADUAL OR SUDDEN?
PARTIAL OR COMPLETE?
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In the Theravada tradition, for instance, and in Buddhist traditions generally, freedom from self-generated suffering doesn’t happen all at once—a position I’ve always found more credible. Both the classical and the contemporary commentarial traditions (Buddhaghosa 1975; Mahasi Sayadaw 1965) describe it as a process occurring by stages or increments, much as change occurs in psychotherapy
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Self-generated suffering is said to end in this tradition through a progressive and irreversible “extinction” (niroda) of the unwholesome mental factors (samyojanas) that cause it. These pathogenic mental factors are said to be extinguished in a specific and invariant sequence of four enlightenment experiences or “path-moments” (magga). On each occasion, a specific group of pathogenic mental factors are eliminated from the mind once and for all and the practitioner will never again act in these conflictual ways. In Theravada teaching, this is the real significance of the moment of “enlightenment”: not the subjective experience, which Western psychology tends to emphasize in its preoccupation with individual subjectivity, but the extinction of these unwholesome mental factors leading to the progressive end of suffering and freeing the mind’s natural joy, ease, equanimity, and unbounded compassion and care for others.
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The final group of fetters clusters around the mental factor of mana, the “conceit” that “I am” and the remaining residual tendency to compare self with others. This is the root of all narcissistic striving and is said not to be extinguished until the fourth and final stage of enlightenment (arahatta). Note how
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Note how similar this progression is to change processes in therapy: cognitions, beliefs, perspectives are more amenable to modification. Core motivational and drive states and their bases in affective reactivity are much more resistant to intervention. Hardest of all to change are narcissistic investments in the core sense of being a separate self. This is exactly what we would expect: cognitive change first; affective change next; change in core sense of selfhood last
THE NEED FOR PERSONAL WORK
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Spiritual awareness, as Buddhism and other traditions define it, does not automatically yield psychological and emotional awareness in a Western sense. The profound need to defend against trauma and threats to bodily and psychic integrity, as well as our capacity for horizontal and vertical “splits” in personality (Kohut 1977), leave sequestered compartments where the memories of past injury and the anticipation of future hurt are deepest
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Because the psychological self seems to be much more a personal construct in the West than in Asia and much less embedded in a preexisting social and cultural matrix that defines it, practice also seems to unfold differently in the West in a way that makes the issue of being “somebody” unavoidable.
Incidencia de factores culturales en la naturaleza de la constitución subjetiva.
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like psychodynamic therapies, mindfulness meditation is an “uncovering” technique based on the same procedures that guide psychodynamic inquiry: removal of censorship on mental content and affect, suspension of judgment, abstinence, and the injunction to observe experience while experiencing it—Sterba’s “therapeutic split” in the ego (Sterba 1934; Engler 1986)
Muy en linea con mi pensamiento sobre la relación entre psicoanálisis y budismo.
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But uncovering in meditation doesn’t automatically facilitate insight in a psychodynamic sense
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The meditation traditions themselves discourage working with any mental content, at least when doing formal practice. Zen, for instance, dismisses most of these phenomena, particularly altered-state phenomena, as makyo, or manifestations of delusion. The student is encouraged to dismiss them as a distraction and to avoid getting caught up in them at all costs. But whether explicitly worked with or not, practice will often access some of this material
Y aquí está la diferencia fundamental dentro de las similitudes: mientras el psicoanálisis se zambuye en los complejos mentales, matándolos de aburrimiento, el budismo los considera simplemente ilusiones de las cuales no hay que ocuparse en lo absoluto.
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even advanced Western students find that periods of powerful practice and deep insight will often be succeeded by periods in which they re-encounter painful patterns, fears, and conflicts in other parts of their lives. Or they may come to some important understanding and balance in formal practice, but find that when they return home to the problems of day-to-day living, visit parents, fall in love, or change jobs, suddenly old neurotic and dysfunctional patterns of behavior are as strong as ever and have to be faced. If not, there is a strong likelihood that practice will be unconsciously used in part to avoid dealing with them. If that becomes too salient a motive, meditation itself will eventually become dry or sterile and feel increasingly unrewarding, like a therapy in which therapist and patient unconsciously collude to avoid the real issues or unwittingly collaborate only through the patient’s false self system (Winnicott 1960). Second, it appears that many of these
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Kornfield has further observed that even advanced Western students find that periods of powerful practice and deep insight will often be succeeded by periods in which they re-encounter painful patterns, fears, and conflicts in other parts of their lives. Or they may come to some important understanding and balance in formal practice, but find that when they return home to the problems of day-to-day living, visit parents, fall in love, or change jobs, suddenly old neurotic and dysfunctional patterns of behavior are as strong as ever and have to be faced. If not, there is a strong likelihood that practice will be unconsciously used in part to avoid dealing with them. If that becomes too salient a motive, meditation itself will eventually become dry or sterile and feel increasingly unrewarding, like a therapy in which therapist and patient unconsciously collude to avoid the real issues or unwittingly collaborate only through the patient’s false self system (Winnicott 1960).
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Problems in love and work, and issues around trust and intimacy in relationships in particular, can’t be resolved simply by watching the moment-to-moment flow of thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the mind
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When Burma’s most renowned scholar and meditation master, Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw, visited America in 1980, he held a meeting with Western vipassana teachers about teaching. I remember Jack Kornfield asking in his intrepid way, “What do you do when students bring psychological problems to you?” There was a hurried consultation with the other sayadaws (teachers) and some evident confusion. He turned back to Jack and asked, “What psychological problems?” At the end of his U.S. visit, the sayadaw remarked on how many Western students seemed to be suffering from a range of problems he wasn’t familiar with in Asia. A “new type of suffering,” he said—“psychological suffering”! As is now well known, the Dalai Lama, too, on his first visits to the West, expressed shock at the degree of low self-esteem and self-hatred he encountered in Western practitioners
Nuevamente, el efecto de dimensiones culturales en la constitución subjetiva.
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Mindfulness as a rule does not seem to facilitate uncovering in a psychological or psychodynamic sense in Asian students as it does in Western students
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The wish that spiritual practice could, by itself, prove a panacea for all mental suffering is widespread and certainly understandable. But it unfortunately prevents teachers and students from making use of other resources. And worse, students are sometimes led to believe by their teachers or their own superego that if they encounter difficulties, it’s because they haven’t practiced long enough or haven’t been practicing correctly or wholeheartedly. The message too often is that the problem is in the quality of the student’s practice rather than in the mistaken assumption that practice should cure all. This leads to needless self-accusation and guilt, compounding how bad they already feel
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Toynbee’s dictum applies in spiritual life as well: those who don’t remember history are compelled to repeat it.
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My original focus was on intensive practice and the transformations that occur in moments of enlightenment or “path.” I was trying to understand what inner psychological self-structure was required. Some minimum degree of structuralization is certainly required: the capacity for moment-to-moment observation of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations; the ability to gradually attend to experience without censorship or selection; the capacity to tolerate aversive affect; some capacity to tolerate primary process material; the ability to suspend or mitigate self-judgment and maintain a benign attitude toward one’s experience; the capacity for moral discrimination and evaluation of one’s own behavior; and the capacity to mourn
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Margaret Mahler’s (1975) earlier notion that psychological development pushes progressively toward higher and higher stages of separation and individuation—the premise I also accepted at the time—has largely been replaced by Heinz Kohut’s (1971, 1977) more accurate perception that the need for selfobject ties is normal and remains necessary throughout life.
Interesante referencia a dos autores clásicos para tener en cuenta. Kohut plantea que la mantención de vínculos emocionales sanos y nutritivos es una necesidad humana de la cuál uno no se emancipa a través de la maduración y el desarrollo.
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We are also much more aware today that the developmental lines for different psychological functions do not progress in tandem. There can be developmental lags in one line, precocious development in another (Blanck and Blanck 1974, 1979). The interactions and interweavings between all these different developmental lines at any one time is extraordinarily complex. Experience over the years has shown me that different levels and types of functioning can also coexist and interact in Buddhist practice. Deep spiritual insight and realization can (fortunately!) coexist with a certain degree of clinical psychopathology
Uno puede iluminarse y mantener dinámicas psicopatológicas.
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The most telling critique, however, is seldom mentioned: a developmental model implies that spirituality has its own developmental line, or is part of a developmental line—that the experience of no-self, for instance, is the culmination of the line of self-development. There is no basis for assuming this. Buddhist teaching views the state of no-self as altogether outside the realm of coming-to-be and passing-away. What is not born and never dies can have no “developmental line” in a psychological sense
El progreso espiritual no es evolutivo en el sentido del desarrollo del self, es algo que no está sujeto a la temporalidad yoica.
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There is a certain complementarity to Buddhist and psychodynamic psychologies, each investigating a range of functioning the other does not. Buddhism assumes a relatively intact ego and structured sense of self and does not investigate the type and range of functioning, particularly the self-disorders and narcissistic deficiencies, that we address in Western clinical practice. Psychodynamic psychology equates optimal functioning with the attainment of psychological selfhood and has no concept of the type and range of functioning and well-being that accompany the realization of the self’s constructed nature. Hence my originally calling the integration of these perspectives a “full-spectrum” model
Perspectivas psicodinámicas y budistas sobre el self son complementarias.
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According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1979, 59), the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. This “rather peculiar
el self occidental moderno es una invención reciente. escuché a alguien mencionar que se puede pensar desde Shakespeare, dado que es la primera obra en donde los personajes cambian sustancialmente en el transcurso de la obra
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It is crucial at the outset to understand just what kind of “self” Buddhist analysis is aimed at. Confusion over this has led to a basic category error and hence a misplaced argument with Buddhist teaching among a number of contemporary commentators, particularly those writing from a psychodynamic perspective.
Interesante diferencia entre el self psicológico (experiencia subjetiva de), versus el ontológico (realidad independiente de).
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In the cultures from which Buddhism has emigrated west, preeminently India and Japan, the sense of self is much more merged with others in a “we-sense” that is profoundly different from the separate, autonomous “I-self” of Western experience
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The Buddhist critique is aimed instead at what Aaronson calls the ontological self: the feeling or belief that there is an inherent, ontological core at the center of our experience that is separate, substantial, enduring, self-identical. The Pali Buddhist term for “self,” atta, is used in this ontological or metaphysical rather than psychological sense. Whether through philosophical investigation or through meditative observation of moment-to-moment mind states, the aim of Buddhist analysis is to show that this kind of self cannot be found in any of the constituents of experience as an autonomous, ontological core. The commentaries use the example of a chariot: a “chariot” does not exist as a findable entity or essence; it is a designation given to an assemblage of parts, not an “essence” that exists independently of that essemblage.
el budismo muestra que el atman es una reificación de un proceso, no tiene sustancia, sino dinámica. A esto refiere la doctrina de Annata.
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On one level the issue is about reality: is there an ontological core to the person we may call a “self”? The answer is no. But on another level the issue is about representations: how we represent ourselves to ourselves. And self-representations matter—they have profound effect on functioning and wellbeing
El hecho de Annata no niega el hecho de que podemos formarnos representaciones de nosotros mismos y que estás tengan consecuencias reales en nuestras vidas. Pensar en Carol Dweck.
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I agree with this Buddhist analysis of the concept of self. But I have never been satisfied with it. To my mind it still leaves the crucial question unanswered: Why would we represent ourselves to ourselves in just this way if it only produces suffering, as Buddhism maintains? This doesn’t make sense. We have to assume that every mental structure, every pattern of behavior, emerges only because it is an attempt at adaptation, either to meet a specific developmental task or to deal with some internal or external need. The way we organize ourselves, the way we present and represent ourselves, always constitutes a best effort to solve or negotiate some task or problem. Psychody-namically, our intent is never simply to create more pain for ourselves, even if this is often an unintended outcome. The most maladaptive beliefs and behaviors have some adaptive intent, misguided and pathogenic though they may be
El self como consecuencia de la búsqueda de la adaptación es bastante consistente con la lógica freudiana.
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We can accept the Buddhist analysis of the concept of self but still ask the kind of question we would ask about any other kind of behavioral psychological structure: What purpose does it serve? What situation is it attempting to address? To what problem is it an attempted solution? In other words, can we view the self as an adaptation in a way that would explain its emergence, its pervasiveness, and its function as something other than simply a delusional belief? This might cast light on its stubborn entrenchment in the psyche, the great difficulty and resistance we encounter in seeing through its illusory nature, and why attachment to this self, as Buddhism maintains, is the root source of self-generated suffering.
Estoy de acuerdo con este tipo de análisis, que es propio de las ciencias biológicas al observar un organismo o adaptación. Todo ser de organiza en función de un Telos.
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The reason for this is that “we learn to become a person through different kinds of interactions with different others and through different kinds of interactions with the same other” (Mitchell 1993, 104). This yields an experience of self that is “discontinuous, composed of different configurations, different selves with different others.” Mitchell cites Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1964) description of these as “me-you” patterns: very different, discrete “me-you” patterns arise in different circumstances. Each configuration embodies not only a representation of self but a representation of the other(s) with whom I am engaged. And each relational configuration can be experienced in two ways: there are times when I experience myself as myself in relation to the other—Mitchell gives the example of a dependent child being cared for by a solicitous mother; and other times when I organize my experience and sense of meaning around an image of that other in relation to me—a solicitous mother taking care of a dependent child.
Está propuesta es compatible con una lectura de la ecología de la mente en términos de la complejidad permitida por l interacción de las múltiples representaciones. También es profundamente intersubjetiva en el sentido Vigotskiano, en donde la metacomunicación tiene un rol fundamental.
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This is the type of self-experience that has traditionally been associated with meditative and mystical experience, though it actually comprises a range of experience from the ordinary to the non-ordinary. It is a blind spot in psychoanalytic theory. When an autonomous, differentiated identity and sense of selfhood is viewed as the fulcrum of development, this mode of experience inevitably tends to be interpreted as a regressive dedifferentiation of hard-won ego boundaries and a symptom of psychopathology—another example of how paradigmatic commitments determine which data are deemed relevant to theory.
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we have experiences of non-dual awareness all the time, though we are usually unaware of it, or we tend to dismiss them as unimportant
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notions as “regression in the service of the ego” miss the point. It is not that the self de-differentiates. There is no “transient loss of self-differentiation,” as Jeffrey Rubin (1997) and other theorists maintain. This conceptualization assumes that a differentiated self—a self experienced as singular and continuous—is the ideal or preferred form of self-experience. This self is not “lost” here. Experience is simply organized differently—not around a sense of self as separate from its experience
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he describes the ideal outcome of psychoanalytic treatment as a self functioning spontaneously, in accord with its own internal design, without the burden of superfluous thought and reflection, the details of the process—interpretations, insights, empathic failures and disappointments, rages and reparations—sinking into the background, not through repression but because the patient no longer needs them. Ideally, the result is a self that is aware of its actions without having to be aware of its own workings because these proceed seamlessly, silently, smoothly
Ideas de Kohut sobre el efecto de un tratamiento psicoanalítico exitoso sobre el self.
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He noted the similarly contradictory way in which both mystics and successful analysands talked about acting, deciding, or feeling unselfconsciously: fully aware of their actions, but without self-consciousness. He saw self-consciousness as consciousness tinged by conflict or anxiety. It is conflict or anxiety that turns us back to check up on and reassure ourselves, and in so doing literally brings a “self” into being as a structure separate from its experience. When conflict is resolved or anxiety is absent, there is awareness, purpose, intentionality, but no consciousness of self
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In addition to “ordinary” unselfconscious subjectivity and non-dual awareness, there are “non-ordinary” states. Most psychoanalytic commentators are not familiar with them. These are the states of consciousness associated with meditation and spirituality in the Great Traditions from time immemorial. In Theravada Buddhism they are called jhanas or “absorptions” (Buddhaghosa 1975; Vajirañana 1975). They are accessed through concentration meditation rather than through mindfulness, and are based on the mind’s becoming “one” with the object of concentration through sustained one-pointed attention. This is the opposite of mindfulness in which one attends to the flow of any and all objects as they arise in awareness without preference or judgment. The tradition identifies eight discrete levels of absorption, none of which have been recognized let alone incorporated into psychoanalytic thinking
concentración como el complemento menos familiar del mindfulness en el budismo theravada.