Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

of their own tradition more adequately than they, using the resources of that
tradition, have been able to do (MacIntyre 1988: 167).
Rubin believes a scandal in Zen Buddhism in the 1980s could have been avoided if this two-
stage dialectic engagement had taken place, and where issues of enlightenment and
selflessness could have been informed by psychoanalytic understandings of both
unconscious personality traits and transference issues. The common ground for dialogue
between psychoanalysis and Buddhism finds particular expression in object relations’
theory allied to transitional space and meditation (Finn and Gartner 1992). Rubin also
focuses on goals and techniques through promoting positive change, relieving suffering, the
moment-to-moment flux as a form of ‘evenly hovering attention’ (Rubin 1985), and
learning from teacher/master/analyst/training analyst through transference and counter-
transference. Both disciplines could develop a ‘non-self centred subjectivity’ that allows
equal and unique insights into each other (Rubin 1997). Subsequent writing on Buddhism
and psychoanalysis has focused on details of the debate that Rubin outlined (Safran 2003).
Rubin’s model of dialectic engagement does not deal with objective truth and the notion of
deity, in the same way Black does not deal with objective truth by focusing on religious and
psychoanalytic experience. Coltart sees truth as part of a human search aided by Buddhism
and psychoanalysis, but rejects objective truth and deity. Bobrow relates truth to Zen
enlightenment as moments of truth but again does not engage with objective truth. 304
Consequently psychoanalysis finds itself freed from a long-held reductionist view of
religion and deity that therefore gives the opportunity for new forms of relating,
304 Bobrow offers a paradoxical Zen tradition, which engages with truth more specifically. ‘Enlightenment
and truth ... begin with the awareness of ... unconscious and emotional activity. Insight, conscience,
atonement, and compassion develop in concert. None of us is exempted. Each new self-representational
structure is both a discovery and may become the next blind spot’ (Bobrow 1997: 136; 2003).
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