Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

sense of who we are and what we do. 292 Black illustrates this from the Buddhist concept of
trikaya (‘three-body’) which ‘offers three ways of relating to the essential notion of
Buddhahood, each reflective of the psychological development of the practitioner,
culminating in the proper experience of Buddhahood as ultimate reality itself, empty of any
dualities’ (Prebish and Keown 2006: 110). 293 ‘The trikaya is not a relationship of ‘persons’
like the Christian Trinity, but a powerful intellectual structure for making comprehensible,
and promoting, a certain range of experiences. These experiences, in particular, are those
encountered in meditation’ (Black 1993a: 621). It offers a move from the physical and the
embodied, to the transitional held through theoretical constructs, to the transcendent. Black
suggests that this doctrine emerged out of the felt need for an internal object containing all
psychic states, projective identifications, and inward experiences. While Black finds
correspondence between object relations theory and Buddhism, he suggests there is a
fundamental difference related to truth as the ‘crunch question for religion in response to the
psychoanalytic challenge’ (Black 1993a: 622).
Psychoanalytic concepts are heuristic devices which do not claim, as religious statements
do, to be objective and ultimate truth. For example there is a concept of an ‘internal mother’
but there is no actual ‘internal mother’. The presence of internal and external objects sets up
a tension between internal and external reality first identified by Winnicott (Winnicott
1935/1958). So a Buddhist internal object is an internalization of external Buddhist truths,
morality and values brought about through meditation. There are positive aspects to this
292 Rizzuto’s unique contribution was to suggest that religious objects and representations belonged in the
same category as internal object representations, although Black seems unaware of her work at the time of
writing this article.
293 These include the ‘apparitional body (nirmanakaya), enjoyment body (sambhogakaya) and the essence
body (dharmakaya)’ (Prebish and Keown 2006: 286).
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