Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

62 C. Peter Bankart
The second was the publication in 1969 of an important new source for scholarly
exchange about the psychology of consciousness, the Journal of Transpersonal
Psychology. The third was the integration of theory and practice of Eastern psychology
into a Western developmental perspective in a book edited by Ken Wilber,
Jack Engler, and Daniel P. Brown in 1986, Transformations of Consciousness:
Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development. Taken together
these three primary sources created legitimate space for a serious extended academic
discussion of consciousness, and its role in physical and psychological well-being.
As early as 1953 Alan Watts was writing in scholarly journals about the correspondence
of ideals between Western psychotherapies and traditional Buddhist
teachings. Watts was unhappy with the standard focus on the analysis of the
unconscious that was the mainstay of psychotherapy at mid-century. He argued
that consciousness could be explored without adopting the goals of diagnosis and
social control; and rejected the assumption that psychotherapy was designed to
produce “happy adjustment” of sick individuals to the conventions of society. He
saw society populated by unhappy people, and wondered how fitting in better into
such a social milieu could constitute a therapeutically desirable goal.
For Watts, the critical philosophical idea from the East was that of mushin,
or “no mind”; a state of consciousness which is not analyzed but rather informs
all life. Watts championed “the therapeutic value of the subjective abandonment
of any psychological goals, in the future, coupled with the gentle but persistent
focusing of attention on the immediately present totality of feeling-sensation –
without any attempt to explain, diagnose, judge, or change it” (Watts, 1953,
p. 28). He ended his essay with a quote from Chuang-tzu that read: “He who
knows that he is a fool is not a great fool.”
In his 1961 Psychotherapy East and West Watts refined his message, arguing
that both Eastern teachings and Western psychotherapy seek to bring about
“changes in consciousness and our ways of feeling our own existence and our
relation to human society and the natural world” (Watts, 1961, pp. 15–16). But he
now went on to claim that ordinary Western style consciousness was in fact a
“breeding ground of mental disease” (p. 16). He argued that Eastern philosophy,
and especially Buddhism, offered a powerful critique of Western culture, and he
wondered out loud if traditional models of Western psychotherapy were even
capable of bringing about a reconciliation between individual feeling and social
norms without sacrificing the integrity of the individual.
Psychotherapy East and West was a far-reaching call for psychology and
psychotherapy to facilitate the liberation of individual souls from the suffering
resulting from the suffocating conformity of a joyless, sexless, over-analyzed and
vastly over-controlling society. He rejected the Freudian call for what he called
the domination of Eros by reason, and called, in its place, for Eros expressing
itself with reason. The book was, for all extents and purposes, a vivid and heartfelt
rejoinder to Freud’s (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents.