Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism
sought to organize disparate Buddhist teachings into a comprehensive view.
He addressed the nihilism of his age (Napper, 1989, p. 37) with commentaries
that stressed valid perception and valid cognition, in ways that exposed him
to criticism of reification (see Dreyfus, 1997; Hopkins, 1983; also Dalai Lama
XIV, 1993, p. 99). It would appear to be most difficult to do justice to the
staggering dimensions of the Mahayana deconstruction of apparent reality, while
likewise recognizing the human capacity for valid thought and perception, even
though the task of overcoming ignorance inevitably demands, and thus implies,
such intellectual and moral capacity, and its perfectibility. Gestalt theory may
ultimately face the same tension of demands, whose seeming conflict nears the
realm of paradox.
Thus, while the basic principles of Gestalt psychology echo Madhyamika
teaching, some critical implications of its message of relationality may have been
left unexplored. Perhaps as a result Gestalt theory has been hard-pressed to
account for those frequent situations, mentioned earlier, in which the relational
determination of meaning is not a matter of conscious insight – where it is substantially
overlooked in favor of absolutist thinking. Thus while Asch acknowledges
the human tendency to restrict relational thinking and to succumb to an
absolutization of social knowledge, he largely passes on the question of why and
how this occurs (1952, p. 442, but see p. 631). Recall also Duncker’s observation
of the tendency for value terms to succumb to reification as they become linked
with static external behaviors. When circumstances change and those behaviors
appear less fitting, the value itself – torn from its earlier context – may be disparaged.
In the process, relativism gains a measure of face validity. Just why this
kind of “cognitive freezing” (cf. Lewin, 1947) happens, or how it jibes with the
relationality thesis, Duncker does not explain.
Buddhism may help shed light on these problems. From the Madhyamika
point of view, Gestalt theory may have defined the object of negation too
narrowly, and thus overlooked subtler levels of reification binding the relational
structure, the gestalt itself, such it may appear to exist independently. After all,
relational understanding is not an all-or-none proposition. The awareness of
fitting relations that gives rise to a gestalt, which permits its perceptual or conceptual
discrimination, and grants it truth-value up to a point, need not reflect
the full extent of its relationality. Where further relational determination goes
unrecognized – where it remains unconscious – the result may be a measure of
absolutization. This absolutization of meaning and value may be needed for a
time in the development of individual and social consciousness (see Neumann,
1969), but its benefits do not come without eventual costs, among them, alienation
and enmity.
Thus while both Gestalt and Madhyamika accept a relational determination
of value, Madhyamika further radicalizes the Gestalt message of relational understanding
by extending it to subtler layers of reification that the Gestalt critique
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