Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

56 C. Peter Bankart
Clifford (1984) articulated the vision of a great many neo-analysts of his
time when he wrote:
The entire thrust of the Buddha’s teaching and the Buddha’s path is to encounter the
mind, become aware of how it works and how it controls us, and then to bring it
under control and through this to cure suffering. For according to Buddhism, the
source of all physical and mental disease and suffering is the lack of control of
mind. Buddhism’s means of mental therapy is a transformation of self through the
development of morality, meditation, and wisdom. Through meditation one can
become aware of unconscious motivations, mental habits and inner conflicts, and
free oneself of bondage to them. (pp. 215, 216)
Karen Horney’s interest in Buddhism resulted in her visit to Japan to meet
with D. T. Suzuki in 1952. Horney died from cancer a few weeks later, so the
actual record of her engagement with Buddhist teachings is necessarily rather limited.
If we look at the core of her ideas, however, it is clear where her interest in
Buddhism originated. In 1945 Horney wrote Our Inner conflicts: A Constructive
Theory of Neurosis, a book that references the writings of D. T. Suzuki. In this
work Horney stressed the central importance of whole heartedness, a quality that
Horney considered to lie at the heart of human sincerity. Nobody, Horney
observed, divided within himself can be wholly sincere; and she quoted Suzuki to
the effect that “Sincerity, that is, not deceiving, means putting forth one’s whole
being, in which nothing is kept in reserve, nothing is expressed under disguise,
nothing goes to waste” (as cited in Horney, 1945, pp. 162–163).
For Horney this quality of sincerity was a reflection of a person’s moral
integrity, and she was one of the few Western readers of Zen in those days that
clearly understood the necessary connection between Zen and moral character.
Strength of character, Horney argued, is reflected in “spontaneity of feeling, an
awareness and aliveness of feeling, whether in respect to love or hate, happiness or
sadness, fear or desire. This would include a capacity for expression as well as for
voluntary control marked by the capacity for love and friendship” (pp. 241–242).
By the end of 1952 Horney had made a more definitive link between sincerity,
wholeheartedness, spontaneity of feeling, and emotional awareness and the
practice of Zen. In a lecture she wrote a short time prior to her death she called on
her fellow analysts to listen to their patients with Zen-like concentration and nonattachment.
She encouraged them to develop the ability to learn from the Zen masters
that the essence of living is “being with all one’s faculties,” and she called on
them to bring these qualities with them into the analytic session. What was
demanded, she wrote, was “Wholeheartedness of concentration [where] all our
faculties come into play: conscious reasoning, intuition, feelings, perception,
curiosity, liking, sympathy, wanting to help, or whatever” (Horney, 1987, p. 19).
Horney’s student, Harold Kelman, brought these themes together in a comprehensive
essay written in 1960, and reprinted in 1976. Enlightenment, Kelman