One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,but by making the darkness conscious. -- Carl Jung
Whenever Buddhism has spread to another culture, it has
interacted with the belief systems of that culture, resulting in the
development of something new. Today the main site of interaction within
the West is not Judeo-Christianity but psychology, a conversation that
has led to innovative types of psychotherapy and, most recently, to the
extraordinary success of the mindfulness movement.
There
is already a large and rapidly growing literature on the relationship
between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Many Western-trained therapists have
become Buddhist practitioners, and incorporate contemplative techniques
into their therapy. Some of them have also become authorized as
Buddhist teachers. Buddhism is providing new perspectives on the nature
of psychological well-being, and new practices that help to promote it.
On the other side, more than a generation of Buddhist practice by
committed Western students has made it apparent that meditation by
itself is sometimes insufficient to resolve deep-rooted psychological
problems and relationship difficulties. In its own short history the psycho-therapeutic tradition has gained considerable insight into the
mechanisms of denial, rationalization, repression, projection, and so
forth, which can help us understand how Buddhist practice sometimes goes
wrong--for example, the complicated transference/counter-transference
that can distort the relationship between therapist and client (or
between teacher and disciple).
Transference, as originally defined by psychoanalysts, is the
unconscious tendency of a patient to take emotions and behavioral
patterns felt toward one person (for example, a parent) and transfer
them to another (such as one's therapist or guru). Counter transference
occurs when the therapist (or teacher) also gets caught up in that
transference. If a spiritual teacher is surrounded by a coterie of
devotees who look upon him or her as god-like, that is transference.
When that teacher begins to agree with them, that is counter transference--a delusion incompatible with our usual
understanding of awakening, but not uncommon.
Traditional Buddhist teachings do not highlight such mechanisms
because the focus has been different. Buddhist practice emphasize non attachment to "empty" psychological phenomena, while psychotherapy
emphasizes understanding how those phenomena affect our relationships,
including one's relationship with oneself. The important discovery is
that these two approaches can supplement each other because they share
the same basic concern: alleviating our suffering.
The main challenge for each side in this dialogue is resisting the
temptation to swallow the other. It's easy for a therapist to reject
Buddhist awakening as an escapist fantasy, and just as easy for
Buddhists to dismiss a psycho therapeutic focus on relationship problems
as obsessing with past events rather than realizing one's true nature
and living fully in the present. This temptation is aggravated by the
fact that the cultural and historical gap between them is so great,
which tends to activate Euro centrism ("the intellectually imperialistic
tendency in much Western scholarship to assume that European and North
American standards and values are the center of the moral and
intellectual universe," according to Jeffrey Rubin) or to idealize
Orientocentrism ("the idealizing and privileging of Asian
thought--treating it as sacred--and the neglect if not dismissal of the
value of Western psychological perspectives"). If we are honest with
ourselves, most of us have a bias favoring one side or the other.
It's not easy to steer a course between them, and that's the
challenge: together they can help to free us from seeking a security of
sorts by identifying with one particular way of thinking, such as the
categories of Freudian psychoanalysis or the paradoxes of Chan/Zen.
Rubin, a Buddhist psychotherapist, describes this pitfall in his book
Psychotherapy and Buddhism:
Fitting in with the institutional ethos, including minimizing
self-vulnerability, enables trainees to solidify their precarious
status. Embracing the theories of the school to which one identifies
offers a sense of intellectual and emotional comfort.... It also gives
one a stable identity and sense of belonging. But it fosters unrealistic
ideals and expectations of self-knowledge, self-mastery, and selfless
service, as well as a phobic stance toward emotional distress and
vulnerability. Psychotherapists may thus have great difficulty
acknowledging or coping with their own vulnerability.
For trainee psychotherapists substitute Buddhist practitioners and
the passage offers as much insight into where Buddhists can get stuck.
Dwelling "in-between"--what might be called the position of no fixed
position--does not mean rejecting either perspective but being able to
appreciate both. Each can be helpful, according to the situation, yet
neither has exclusive claims to The Truth. Irvin Yalom makes this point
well in his book Existential Psychotherapy:
Therapists may offer the patient any number of explanations to
clarify the same issue.... None, despite vehement claims to the
contrary, has sole rights to the truth. After all, they are all based on
imaginary "as if" structures.... They are all fictions, psychological
constructs created for semantic convenience, and they justify their
existence only by virtue of their explanatory power. [Yalom's emphasis]
We need such fictions because our minds do not function in a vacuum but are activated by such constructs.
The Buddha was also careful not to set up his teachings as the only
truth. In the Canki Sutta he says, "It is not proper for a wise man...to
come to the conclusion 'this alone is truth, and everything else is
false.'" He compared his teachings to a raft that can be used to ferry
ourselves across the river of suffering to the "other shore" of
enlightenment, but not afterwards to be carried around on one's back. If
all psychotherapeutic explanations are imaginary "as if" structures
justified by the ways they help us change, and if Buddhist teachings are
roadmaps showing us the way to go, then the door opens for a genuine
cross-cultural inquiry with profound implications for how we understand
and transform ourselves.
That door may be open, yet it's also important not to minimize the
challenges involved in a dialogue between two such very different
approaches. Traditional psychotherapeutic approaches are concerned to
help heal the self, whereas the Buddhist model of well-being emphasizes
liberating insight into the delusion of self and developing what Rubin
terms "non-self-centric subjectivity." Neither tradition by itself
provides the full picture of who we are, what our problem is, and how we
transform.
The good news is that the burgeoning field of Buddhist psychotherapy
is aware of the difference and has begun to explore the relationship
between the two. We can be hopeful about the future of this dialogue
because it is anchored empirically in what really works to reduce the
dukkha "suffering" of therapeutic patients and Buddhist practitioners.
Given the pre-modern roots of the Buddhist tradition, the question
from a psychotherapeutic perspective is whether Buddhist teachings
mythologize the developmental process insofar as they understand the
ultimate goal as transcending this world of suffering and delusion.
Given the secular roots and pragmatic goals of psychotherapy, the
question from a Buddhist perspective is whether such therapies still
retain too limited an understanding of our human potential, ignoring
possibilities that transcend conventional assumptions about what it
means to be human.
The tension between these two questions is what makes the
conversation between Buddhism and psychotherapy so fascinating--and
important.
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