Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 93
initially trust. In embracing their meanings, we avow our bond to those groups,
which we seem desperate to maintain, as though failure to agree would sever a
vital connection. Subsequent experience is organized in light of those received
views, with the resulting interconsistency reinforcing our sense of the credibility
of both. Even later reactions against these cultural meanings need not step free of
their cultural determination, shaped and polarized as they are within the very cultural
definitions they oppose.
It thus appears that cultural meanings may be powerfully shaped by contexts
that are emotionally charged by investments in group membership and personal
and social identity. Moreover, this functional aspect of contexts may be substantially
unconscious, even resistant to conscious awareness. For to the extent that
awareness of this further relational determination would threaten to reveal the
contingency and artifice of our images of self and world and their connection,
then those contents would appear to be ego-alien – offensive to the ego, which
depends upon them for an identity.
The superimposition of absoluteness, at least at this gross level of reification,
seems consistent with processes of depth psychology. Work by Erich Neumann
(1949/1969) offers a valuable introduction to the role of unconscious processes in
the attribution of meaning and value. He describes moral enculturation as a
process of internalizing the values (and presumably underlying meanings) of
one’s group and suppressing or repressing what in oneself does not appear to fit.
Repression begets projection of absolutized meanings onto others, and the incorporation
of a fixed identity within the self, maintaining a rigid moral dualism.
This depth psychological viewpoint helps expose risks associated with the
credulous application of absolute moral categories. In depth psychological terms,
we are prone to project our own disowned darkness onto others, absolutize their
moral difference from us, and elevate ourselves to a place of moral superiority to
condemn those below. Thus an inflated and compensatory morality may demonize
outer targets that correspond to our own hidden or disowned contents. Left
to its own devices, this pattern generates endless repetition, as its dualistic moral
censure perpetuates the conflicts it seeks to address. Within the world of moral
absolutes, conflict is inevitable and never fully resolvable: Moral absolutization
sets limits on both psychical integration and social reconciliation.
Are these hypotheses of depth psychology reconcilable with, and useful to,
Gestalt theory? Elsewhere (Ragsdale, 1998) I have described how “projective
contextualization” might lead to the false appearance of absoluteness and meaning
constancy, while remaining in full accord with relational determination. The
reification of meanings as seemingly context-free facts may involve a process of
projection of fixed contexts onto their objects. Objects may become absolutized
through an unconscious projection of contexts upon them. Likewise, introjection
of contexts onto the self may solidify a particular self-image within the incorporated
context. By this account, both fixity of meaning and our obliviousness to the