Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

46 C. Peter Bankart
Phase I: Psychodynamic Orientalism
I have argued elsewhere (Bankart, 1997) that psychoanalysis, in many respects,
reflects the highest flowering of the humanistic ideals of the Western Enlightenment.
Its fundamental assertion is that the only valid solutions to mankind’s emotional suffering
are the products of Western rationalism, and in particular, Newtonian science.
Indeed, as Ehrenwald (1976) observed, there is no room in Freud’s detached, uncompromisingly
scientific attitude toward human suffering for compromise with any
doctrine that is not thoroughly objective, impersonal, value-free, and absolutely
unencumbered by any religious overtones or influences. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, for example, Freud (1930) summarily dismissed all human experience
resembling oceanic feeling or religious bliss as an unfortunate consequence of a fixation
at the narcissistic stage of infancy. Freud viewed such occurrences as evidence
of regression to the infant’s innate wish for union with the mother.
Although the metaphysical wellspring of Freud’s theory is clearly traceable
to the teachings of St. Augustine who, in the fourth century described human
beings as “empty, desiring, deceptive, hungry, lustful, and at bottom inadequate,”
Freud has clearly filtered these teachings through the Enlightenment doctrines of
John Locke. Locke argued that human beings have the ability to engage a pure,
independent, and empowered self to transform their consciousness “into the final
arbiter of truth [through the exercise of] initiative and individualism.” Thus the
clearly articulated ideal in Freud’s metaphysics was the empowering of an
autonomous individual, free from any religious or political control, who has the
capacity to determine his or her own destiny. Psychoanalysis propounds a doctrine
of secular salvation that celebrates, and even constructs, a “masterful,
bounded, and empty self” (Cushman, 1995, pp. 361, 378, 287).
In Freud’s view the greatest enemy of human freedom was mankind’s
ancient reliance on mysticism, superstition and religion - external sources of
authority that maintain and enforce every individual’s ignorance of their full
human potential for personal liberation. It became the mission of psychoanalysis
to liberate the “interiorized, rational, secular, hardworking, self-disciplined,
fugal, [gendered], and secretly sexual and aggressive” (Cushman, 1995, p. 384)
self by bringing to it a cold, clear, and thoroughly objective self-awareness.
Freud’s ultimate legacy, then, was the enshrinement of individualism, intellect
and reason as the ultimate sources of human liberation. Anything else was not
only suspect, it was anathema to genuine psychic growth and development. In fact,
alternatives ways of knowing, alternative traditions which located a central spiritual
component of the psyche, anything that diverged from the rigorous antivitalism
of 19th century physics was not only foolish, it was psychically dangerous and
pathological. As the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry put it in 1976:
The psychiatrist will [only] find mystical phenomena of interest because they
can demonstrate forms of behaviour intermediate between normality and frank