Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

50 C. Peter Bankart
doctrines. The obvious similarities between schizophrenic regressions and the
practices of Yoga and Zen merely indicate that the general trend in Oriental cultures
is to withdraw into the self from an overbearingly difficult physical and social
reality. Only the future can tell how much Western psychiatry will learn from this
Oriental bent of thought, which for centuries coexisted with the more outwarddirected
Western mentality, without the two influencing each other to any appreciable
degree. (Alexander & Selesnick, 1966, pp. 25–26, 372)
Support for the allegations of psychological immaturity, pathological regression,
and perhaps even decadence by practitioners of Buddhism are sprinkled
through the Western psychiatric literature of this era. A classic example of this
sort of orientalism was reported by Abel, Metraux, and Roll (1987). It is based on
data collected in 1965 by a cultural anthropologist named Spiro who was invited
to visit a Buddhist monastery in an isolated village in Burma. He administered
Rorschach tests to the monks, and sent the protocols to an analyst colleague
for interpretation. According to Abel et al. (1987), the responses of the monks
revealed to the analyst: “Definite psychopathology among the monks. Among
other characteristics, they showed marked regression in manifestations of aggressive
and oral needs, hypochondriasis, ‘erotic self-cathexis’, greater fear of female
or mother figures, greater defensiveness, and latent homosexuality” (p. 62).
It was also noted that the monks’ responses were indiscriminable from the
responses of other males in the same village. The results put Abel et al. in mind of
another study using Rorschach responses from 1944 that described the entire population
of Atimelang villagers on an island in the East Indies as “brain damaged.”
Various Western scholars have tried to reconcile the split between Western
and Eastern theories and practices, but until relatively recently their work has carried
little weight in psychoanalytic circles. Fingarette (1963) asserted that
Buddhism was an antidote to the Western tendency to disregard the psychic experiences
of patients by dismissing these experiences as “pale, alien, merely verbal,
or ‘theoretical’ ” (p. 208). He tried to show how psychoanalytic transformation of
the self has many of the same goals as the “mystic” tradition, concluding: “In the
last analysis, then, the mystic way is a ‘simple’ and ‘obvious’ way – for those who
will open their eyes ... . It is the liberation from neurotic fixation and dogma of
all kinds” (Fingarette, 1963, p. 323).
In a more spirited, if perhaps strident, tone, Deikman (1977) described the
writings of psychoanalytic critics of Eastern teachings as displaying “extreme
parochialism, a lack of discrimination, and a naive arrogance in its approach
to its subject” (p. 213). He accused them of failing to discriminate between
lower (sensate) and higher (transcendent) states of consciousness reported by meditators.
Deikman held that this was a motivated blindness, a reaction to Eastern
psychology’s challenges to basic tenets of Western culture – the primacy of reason
and intellect, the separate, individual nature of man, and the linear organization of
time. He concluded: “Real gold exists, even though false coin abounds. Perhaps
the greatest teaching of the mystics is the need for humility” (p. 217).