Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Five Manifestations of the Buddha 55
themselves. And the more he can face his own fear, the more fearlessly he can
approach his clients’ problems as well. (as cited in Claxton, 1986, p. 320)
In short, the introduction of Buddhist teachings in to mid-century Western
psychotherapy offered an alternative to the rigid boundaries between self and
other that were the hallmark of traditional forms of psychoanalysis. In 1985, for
example, Rubin argued in the prestigious Psychoanalytic Review that the practice
of meditation by psychoanalysts would cultivate maximum listening and refined
attentiveness by training the analyst’s power of attention, improving his perceptual
acuity, and providing an optimal internal environment by systematically
enhancing mental tranquility.
In a similar vein, Claxton (1986) argued that Buddhist teachings “provide
a mirror that reflects the insights of perceptual psychologists back into our selves,
and it leaches us to apply those insights reflexively” (p. 313). For the practicing
therapist the product of this reflection is a newly discovered clarity of perception
and knowledge of the other. It yielded, as Claxton noted, a new level of awareness
that at the same time is extraordinarily intense, but also completely choiceless.
It offered a treatment milieu that was essentially human and rational, and
based in the healer’s morality and kindness.
For Fromm, who had proclaimed psychoanalysis to be a cure for the soul,
Buddhism also provided a link between psychoanalysis and humanistic religion by
stressing man’s innate power to seek freedom and independence through the existential
search for truth (Fromm, 1950). As Fromm (1960) emphasized throughout
his landmark essay that grew out of the meetings in his home, psychoanalysis
and Zen Buddhism shared the dream of liberating human beings by freeing the
contents of their unconscious minds into full and unfettered consciousness.
If, as Clifford (1984) noted, the central teaching of Buddhism was that “all
worldlings are deranged,” (p. 216) then it followed that the whole purpose of
Buddhism is to apply a sort of spiritual and mental therapy to a condition that masquerades
as bourgeois normalcy and “mental health” but is, in truth, nothing but a
universal delusion. In short, the dissemination of the teachings of Buddhism to
psychotherapy practitioners in the West provided a deeply satisfying theoretical
soapbox for a generation of mid-century existential philosopher-therapists. In
1958 the existential psychotherapist Wilson van Dusen published a paper in the
inaugural volume of Psychologia proclaiming that from reading and practicing
Zen he had found “a real readiness to finally see the tree in the courtyard that has
delighted adepts in Zen for centuries” (p. 229). This was highly similar to a theme
sounded by the Japanese Morita therapist, Kondo (1953), who had described the
plight of neurotic patients as being “so much absorbed in their egocentric demands
that they forget all about [the] kind of happiness, contentment, and inspirations
which everyone shares” (p. 33). Kondo called on psychotherapists to embrace the
work of restoring their patients’ “natural feelings” of being fully awake and alive.