Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

sympathy, justice and compassion. Secondly a balancing of the hemispheres of the brain
that allows a better fit between the verbal and non-verbal aspects of awareness and being.
Transcendence is not access to a higher reality or ultimate truth as understood in religious
terms, though Black does make room for the phenomena of the numinous and faith.
Buddhism and psychoanalysis in Britain find two expressions through Coltart and Black:
one offering a form of integration through clinical practice and the person of the analyst; the
other offering integration through a new theoretical construct that has its origins in Buddhist
concepts but is able to embrace other religious traditions. Both forms of engagement fit best
when working with religious experience although as Black recognizes it still leaves the
difficult, if not irreconcilable issues of the nature of ultimate truth.
Psychoanalytic and Buddhist engagement in the USA
In the USA the major influences have been Zen and Tibetan forms of Buddhism. 297 In
terms of historical impact, Zen Buddhism was explored by Horney (Quinn 1987; De
297 A helpful overview of Buddhism is found in (Prebish and Keown 2006). Buddhism is variously: a set of
non-theistic religious truths that offers wisdom for all; forms of meditative practice refined over centuries; and
various understandings of the nature of the universe, self and enlightenment. Early in its history Buddhism
split into two main paths about how each of these beliefs and values were to be pursued. The Theravada
tradition - literally ‘Those who hold to the doctrine of the elders’ – embraced a strict practice and conservative
tradition, geographically focused in Sri Lanka, before spreading to south east Asia. The Mahayana tradition
was a reaction to the ‘highly ecclesiastical, somewhat pedantic’ expression of Buddhism and offered ‘a
liberating vehicle for the masses of Buddhist practitioners’ (Prebish and Keown 2006: 94). This became the
dominant form of Buddhism found in India, China, Korea and Japan, although each country often developed
its own form within the overall tradition. Zen Buddhism emerged from Japan through a variety of schools but
‘they all emphasize Zen as a teaching that does not depend on sacred texts, that provides the potential for a
direct realization, that the realization attained is none other than the Buddha nature possessed by each sentient
being, and that transmission occurs outside the teaching ... Soto utilizes a practice known as shikantaza or ‘just
sitting’. It presumes that sitting in meditation itself ... is an expression of Buddha nature. Rinzai combined
sitting meditation, with the use of koans, enigmatic, riddle-like ‘public cases’ designed to dramatically push
the mind beyond conceptual thought patterns, fostering sudden illumination (Prebish and Keown 2006: 172).
Tibetan Buddhism, has four main schools all within the Mahayana tradition, that have adopted ‘exoteric and
esoteric Buddhist traditions’ that include reincarnation, most popularly known through the Dalai Lama
(Prebish and Keown 2006: 181). Finn makes particular application of Tibetan Buddhism to object relations
theory (Finn 1992, 2003; Finn and Gartner 1992).
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