Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

48 C. Peter Bankart
How else could one interpret the voluminous highly critical psychoanalytic
critique of psychological phenomena inherent in Eastern traditions? Take as both
seminal and illustrative a paper published in 1931 by Franz Alexander with the
strident title, “Buddhistic Training as an Artificial Catatonia” (Alexander, 1931).
In his paper, based on a lecture delivered in Berlin in 1922, Alexander asserted
that Buddhist practices induce a profoundly deep regression into an autistic
asocial abandonment of the world:
Buddhistic self-absorption is a libidinal, narcissistic turning of the urge for knowing
inward, a sort of artificial schizophrenia with complete withdrawal of libidinal
interest from the outside world. [This is] a narcissistic-masochistic affair [that] leads
to asceticism, [a] systematic suppression of all emotional life. (pp. 130, 131,132)
Alexander concluded his lecture/essay with a psychoanalytic interpretation
of the historic Buddha’s personality, concluding that the Buddha’s teachings
reflect the neurotic strivings of a man who had not resolved, because he had not
analyzed [!], his “repressed object transference” (p. 144) with his followers. *
The assumption in the West that psychoanalysis provided the only legitimate
perspective for evaluating non-Western psychotherapy prevailed throughout the
middle years of the century. In 1952 two United States Navy medics visited a psychiatric
hospital on the island of Kyushu (then and now a region of Japan that is
rich in traditional Japanese customs and practices) to assess the current status of
Japanese psychiatry and psychotherapy. It appears the two Americans had little
knowledge of Buddhism or other Eastern traditions, but they described a treatment
milieu where, they were told, a patient’s recovery requires a “calm and well-regulated
mind.” Applying an implicit psychodynamic template to what they observed,
Jacobson and Berenberg noted with disapproval the complete lack of Japanese
interest in the roots and meanings of specific delusions. They were also concerned
that no attention was paid to transference phenomena of any kind; and noted a
complete lack of interest in patients’ dreams. In fact, as far as they could see, the
contents of the unconscious were completely ignored by post-war Japanese psychiatrists.
The Americans came to the conclusion that “suppression is the dominant
theme in therapy; conformity the goal”! (Jacobson & Berenberg, 1952, p. 328).
Many of these themes were still in currency in the mid 1960s when
Alexander and Selesnick published their canonical History of Psychotherapy. In
that volume they often appear to be trying to explain Buddhism objectively and
dispassionately to an uninformed Western audience. But a more careful reading
reveals the very essence of Orientalism as their intellectual frame of reference.
They observe, for example, that while psychoanalysis has as its aim “the
grasping of one’s true nature to achieve rational understanding” such an
* Interestingly, Rubin (1996) makes a far more reasoned case for the interpersonal dangers of
Buddhist teachers’ lack of understanding of transference phenomena.