Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Five Manifestations of the Buddha 47
psychosis; a form of ego regression in the service of defense against internal or
external stress; and a paradox of the return of repressed regression in unconventional
expression of love. (as quoted in Deikman, 1977, p. 215)
Nevertheless as psychoanalysis became the international gold standard of
psychotherapy in the 1940s and 1950s in the West it seems that in the East many
practitioners of Buddhist psychiatry sought to form a sort of intellectual alliance
with their Western colleagues. In 1953, Kondo, a founder of Morita therapy,
wrote in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis that in Eastern psychiatry, as in
psychoanalysis, “all neurotic symptoms are understood as the expression of the
total process constituting the inner conflicts or the sufferings from them due to
the unsuccessful efforts of patients to stop, deny, or to escape from their anxiety”
(Kondo, 1953, p. 31). Sato (1958) offered a systematic accounting of the similarities
and differences between Eastern and Western approaches to psychotherapy,
proposing strong similarities, for example, between the Buddhist doctrine of “no
mind” and the psychoanalytic doctrine of free association. In a related vein in
1976, Takeo Doi, probably Japan’s most noted psychiatrist, wrote an article that
drew a delightful parallel between psychotherapy and the children’s game of Hide
and Seek. He proposed that both Western and Eastern psychotherapies seek to
rescue human beings from the modern predicament by uncovering the personal
secrets that always lie at the heart of neurotic misery (Doi, 1976).
There remained, however, powerful resistances within psychoanalytic circles
to recognizing any kinship with non-Western modes of psychotherapy. In
part, this resistance was rooted in deep philosophical differences between the two
traditions. Consider, for example, Doi’s observation that “individualism can be
defined as contentment at being in hiding” (Doi, 1976, p. 276), or Sato’s (1958)
observation that Eastern psychiatrists’ practices were substantially less verbal
than those of Western psychiatrists, and substantially more concerned with the
physical well being of their patients. Perhaps, however, differences in epistemology
between Eastern and Western psychiatry lay at the heart of the divide:
Self-knowledge is possible only when the identification of subject and object takes
place; that is, when scientific studies come to an end, and lay down all their gadgets
of experimentation, and confess that they cannot continue their researches any
further unless they can transcend themselves by performing a miraculous leap over
into the realm of absolute subjectivity. (Suzuki, 1960, p. 25)
However, it seems clear to me that there was a more profound and culturally
pervasive reason for the more or less wholesale psychoanalytic rejection of traditional
Eastern theory and practice. I believe Western psychiatry’s response was
rooted in that form of cultural bias that Said (1979) has called “Orientalism”:
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with
the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, discrediting
it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism [is] a Western
style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (p. 3)