THE FIRST INGREDIENT of a successful therapy, taught Freud, is the remembering of forgotten aspects of childhood experience. Psychotherapists have experimented with different techniques of accomplishing this remembering, such as free association and the interpretation of dreams, and meditation adds another method to this arsenal. When Westerners begin to meditate, they often remember a longing that dates from early in their lives but that has been unconsciously propelling them ever since. One of the primary purposes of integrating Buddhism and psychotherapy is to help people deal with this discovery effectively.
REMEMBERING THE PAST
Freud described three types of remembering that are possible in psychotherapy, three ways of putting the patient in touch with what needs to be completed from the past. The first method, the cathartic view of therapy, stemmed directly from his early interest in hypnosis and consisted of having the patient directly remember a traumatic event, helped by the hypnotic state to bring out that which had theretofore been repressed and presumably “forgotten,” kept alive only in the disguised form of the symptoms. This view presupposed a direct channel into the repressed material such that the patient could recover what had actually happened to so traumatize him. For example, when I was in the fifth grade, a classmate of mine was waterskiing with her brother and witnessed the motorboat she was riding in run over and decapitate him. She became blind (what is today called hysterical blindness), and it was not until she could recover the actual memory of the event that she regained her ability to see.
When there are cases of actual physical or sexual trauma, this kind of remembering is possible, but for those of us without a single etiological event in our past, it is useless to search for such pivotal memories. Freud gave this method up soon after abandoning the hypnotic technique, yet it remains the model for many of those still entering psychotherapy, who hope to recover the single lost memory that will release their repressed emotion and return them to a state of full functioning.
Freud’s next technique for remembering consisted of following the patient’s free associations in order to discover what the patient was unable to remember consciously by sheer force of will. The technique of free association freed the patient from conscious deliberation and allowed material to come forward, as it does in a dream state, without the usual inhibitions. Rather than reaching directly into the past for a traumatic memory, this modification of technique required that the patient overcome her criticisms of her free associations so as to follow them to their logical conclusions.
The essential point here was that, rather than recovering the repressed memory in one grand cathartic motion, the gaps in memory could be filled in through a process of circumventing the resistances. Free association made this adaptation possible, because the defensive functions of the ego—those that strove to keep the disturbing memories out of consciousness—could, in effect, be tricked into relaxing their grip. Even with this modification, however, Freud was still pursuing a clear memory whose recovery would somehow click things back into place.
In his third modification, Freud moved his focus away from the pursuit of the forgotten past and trained his vision instead on the immediate present. By focusing exclusively on what was actually happening in the therapeutic encounter, Freud found, the very resistances that had masked self–understanding could be evoked and then be described to the patient. In this process, patients often recovered their necessary memories, almost as a by–product of the therapeutic exchange. As Freud described it, the analyst “contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient.”1
There are, of course, memories of a different caliber from those that Freud drew much of his early theory from, memories that are not so much about something terrible happening but, in D. W. Winnicott’s words, about “nothing happening when something might profitably have happened.”2 These events are more often recorded in the soma, or body, than in the verbal memory, and they can be integrated only by subsequently experiencing and making sense of them. In the paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working–Through,” Freud refers to such a “special class of experiences” that were not understood at the time of their occurrence but can only be “subsequently” understood and interpreted.3 It is this class of memory that increasingly has dominated the thinking of psychotherapists as the problems of low self–esteem, emptiness, and alienation have moved to the forefront of their clinical work.
REMEMBERING THE PRESENT
Buddhism, too, sees remembering—a remembering of the present—as central to psychic stability. As difficult as remembering the forgotten past might be, it is more difficult to align our awareness with our actual present–tense experience. All too often, the Buddha found, we are out of sync with ourselves, lost in thoughts of past or future and unable simply to be with our immediate experience. Turning this tendency around by repeatedly bringing the attention back to immediate experience was what catalyzed the most profound psychic change.
The meditative technique that became central to Buddhism was that of mindfulness, in which this continual returning of awareness to the here–and–now was established as a practice in and of itself. Indeed, the classic definition of mindfulness emphasizes the capacity for remembering, which is essential for its successful application:
By its means they remember, or it itself remembers, or it is just mere remembering, thus it is mindfulness. It has the characteristic of not wobbling. Its function is not to forget. It is manifested as guarding, or it is manifested as the state of confronting an objective field. Its proximate cause is strong perception, or its proximate cause is the Foundations of Mindfulness concerned with the body, and so on. It should be regarded, however, as like a pillar because it is firmly founded, or as like a door–keeper because it guards the eye-door, and so on.4
In a curious twist, the kind of remembering that Freud came to after abandoning the hypnotic technique and modifying his reliance on free association, what he called “studying whatever is present on the surface of the patient’s mind,”5 is exactly the kind of remembering that the Buddha emphasized all along with his reliance on mindfulness. Freud saw this remembering as something that could only be done in the hours of psychoanalysis; the Buddha taught that it could be much more far–reaching, that it could be done steadily and consistently throughout the day. As Freud came to see, the pursuit of this strategy sometimes yields important memories that can be valuable in making sense out of an individual history. Buddhist teachers have tended to deemphasize the individual, historical memories that surface, preferring to aim for a constant application of mindfulness, a consistent remembering, which they have seen as more valuable than any single revelation about the past could be. Yet, as any practitioner of intensive meditation can testify, the steady practice of mindful’ ness meditation will produce all three of the types of memories that Freud elucidated.
There is often good reason to pay attention to this psychotherapeutic material, to integrate the memories in a manner consistent with a good psychotherapy. As the two disciplines begin to interact more and more, this will prove to be one important linking point between them. Meditation can indisputably frame an area in need of therapeutic attention. As Buddhist teachers become more familiar with psychotherapy, and as psychotherapists become more familiar with meditation, the contributions that each can make around these recovered “memories” will become clearer. Let me offer some examples from my own experience.
TRAUMA
There are times when the practice of meditation can act in a manner most reminiscent of Freud’s hypnotic technique, directly releasing memories that would otherwise have remained repressed. This occurs most frequently around issues of psychic or physical trauma, memories of which are often unleashed through the concentration on breath or body sensations that forms the backbone of beginning meditation practice. Depending on the meditator’s ego strength and the therapeutic support available, these released memories can be either destabilizing or incredibly healing. They are often violently disturbing and require significant effort to be integrated.
One day not long ago, for example, a man called me soon after completing his first ten–day intensive meditation retreat. A veteran of six years of psychotherapy who had also made good use of twelve–step recovery groups, this man, a science teacher named Joe, had made peace with his abusive upbringing by a violent and rageful father who had terrorized his wife and four children (of whom Joe was the oldest). Joe had gone on to find a career, a network of friends and associates, and, most recently, an intimate relationship of his own that did not bear any resemblance to his parents’ troubled one. He was a mature, self–confident, and capable man. At the retreat, however, for reasons that he could not articulate, he found himself quite fearful of watching his breath. It did not feel like the neutral object his teachers described it as; it felt dangerous and made him anxious. He avoided attending to the breath, concentrating instead on simply listening to the sounds that surrounded him for the first three days of the retreat, until he felt composed enough to approach his breathing once again. Developing the qualities of tranquility and peacefulness that come with increasing concentration, Joe then had a particularly blissful sitting (which he described as like visiting a fairy godmother’s house in a fairy tale). This was immediately followed by the feeling of an iron band constraining his abdomen, hurting him and restricting his breath.
So intense and unpleasant were these sensations that Joe felt unable to work with them meditatively. Nevertheless, he tried to watch the pain with bare attention, although he found it necessary to walk around, lie down, and stretch out, changing his position constantly. NO amount of attention, no change in position, no associated thoughts or feelings, no advice from his teachers seemed to affect the intensity of the sensations, which lasted for the better part of the day. Finally, Joe lay in one position and found himself overcome with sadness. He sobbed and shook for several hours and then had a childhood memory that was new for him. He remembered hiding in the closet from his raging father, filling his mouth with rags to stifle his sobbing out of fear that his father would hear him and become even more angry. Attention to the breath had evoked the memory of choking in the closet, where his efforts had been not to attend to the breath, but to hold it so he would not provoke his father’s wrath.
Joe knew from his years of therapy that, as the oldest of four children, he had had to set an example for his siblings and stifle his reactions so as not to set off his father. He knew how threatening his own anger could feel. But, as he said to me, “I knew what had been done to me, but not what I had done to myself.” Joe had learned to hold his breath in that moment in the closet, had learned how to bind all of his fear and rage and despair in the muscles of his abdomen. For him, attention to the breath was the key that unlocked his emotional experience. The iron band around his diaphragm was the feeling that resulted from his sobbing and holding his breath, with his diaphragm rising and falling until it cramped. This most basic therapeutic realization of how Joe had closed himself down came not out of therapy but out of the meditative state, although his years of therapy obviously helped him see the experience through in a way that many other such traumatized people could not.
While an extreme example, Joe’s story illustrates the power of meditation to focus us in on the places in our bodies where fear has taken hold. The concentrated state of the mind in meditation seems to make these states of contraction particularly visible. They are the internalized remnants of chronic defensive reactions, fossilized within the body out of reach of our usual awareness. Uncovering how we ourselves are creating those body sensations, long after the trauma has passed, removes them as concrete objects (like Joe’s iron band) with which we identify or from which we recoil. When there has been a specific trauma, there is often a specific focal point in the body that needs to be experienced. When there has been no such single trauma, the somatic experience is often much more diffuse.
ESTRANGEMENT
In my own case, one of my most recurrent feelings during intensive meditation retreats was what felt like a deep well of longing for what I could only conceptualize as true love. Since these retreats involved weeks of silent and steady mindful awareness of thoughts, feelings, physical actions, sensations, memories, plans, and so on, there was ample time for the superficial chattering of my thinking mind to quiet down and for the development of some of the qualities of calm and clarity that are traditionally associated with the meditative state. Yet, even in the midst of such comparatively spacious states of mind, I would often be aware of what felt like a deeper yearning. My situation was roughly analogous to that which Freud described in his discussion of free association. In following the train of my free associations, as one does to some degree in meditation of this type, I kept encountering this feeling, which a psychoanalyst would probably interpret as an early, preverbal memory.
At one point, after about a week at one of my early retreats, out of this spaciousness of mind came a sudden memory of the bodily sensations I had recurrently had as a child alone in the night. My body began to shake uncontrollably on my meditation cushion for the next twenty minutes or so, an experience that eventually gave way to what can only be described as great peace, light, and love. My meditation teachers seemed nonplussed by my experience, but I took it as a sign of the importance of this particular meditation practice for me. Yet my sense of longing, while temporarily abated, did not disappear. In fact, I spent a good portion of my next several retreats trying to recapture that very experience—a notoriously foolhardy endeavor when it comes to meditation, but one that is very common among Western meditators who begin their practice with an inner sense of emptiness or alienation.
Many years later, when I was actually fortunate enough to marry the woman I loved, I found that even this real and palpable love, which I had longed for and had thought out of my reach, did not take away the depth of my longing. In fact, it seemed to bring it out even more. I began having trouble sleeping, found myself becoming insatiably demanding of my new wife’s attention, had difficulty with even the most trivial separations from her, and, when I did sleep, was plagued with nightmares of my teeth crushing against themselves. I had come to personify the predicament of the Hungry Ghosts: just as they are unable to swallow the very food that they need because of the pain that it causes, I was unable to receive the very love that I craved because of the depth of my unfulfilled longing. Needless to say, it was time for (more) psychotherapy.
I could, of course, use my meditative skills to calm myself when pressed, but the strength of my identification with the feelings of unassailable isolation were so strong as to require the more specific attentions of a psychotherapist. Meditation had made me exquisitely aware of my predicament and had helped me recover the early feelings surrounding it, but I was still unable to act in a way that was not completely determined by my past experiences.
The key to my recovery lay, of course, in the recurrent dreams of my teeth crushing against themselves, which I came to understand as a potent expression of “oral rage’—my violent resentment at some kind of early parental unavailability. These dreams eventually gave way to others about not being able to get through to a loved one on a telephone: I would forget the number, the phone would not work, the handle or dial would disintegrate, the person would not answer. These dreams ultimately crystallized in an actual memory of my parents leaving me in charge of my younger sibling when I was five years old while they went next door to see friends, instructing me to call them on an intercom they had set up in case I had any problem. Prematurely separated from my childhood dependence, I was raised to be “responsible” my unresolved anger was my frustrated aggression at not being able to remedy the relationships with my parents. My sleeping problems and frustrated aggression were not helped, I am sure, by the fact that, in accordance with the customs of the times, I was often laid down to sleep, tired or not, at about six o’clock in the evening so that my tired parents could have a little time to themselves. Once I had this additional insight, I was able to manage the difficult emotions with a bit more grace and humor. The actual love that I was finding in my marriage forced me to grieve the earlier loss of my childhood.
THE BASIC FAULT
In fact, this experience of mine, in one form or another, is a rather typical Western predicament. Both meditation and psychotherapy often reveal memories not so much of a specific traumatic event but of the psychic remnants of absence in one form or another. Dependent as we are on the nuclear family, on the attentions of, at best, two overcommitted parents, and oriented as we are to the development of independence, our culture tends to foster the internalization of whatever absence was initially present. Thus, if the relationship with one or both parents is strained, or if the child is forced to grow up before he or she is ready, there remains in that individual a gnawing sense of emptiness, a flaw that the person perceives as lying within himself or herself, rather than in early personal experiences. This flaw, which has been termed the basic fault, is often what one remembers in bodily form in meditation.
By the basic fault, I refer to what the English psychoanalyst Michael Balint means when he talks about the psychic remnants of inadequate childhood attention, a trauma so prevalent that it has spawned a chronic spiritual hunger in Western culture:
The patient says that he feels there is a fault within him, a fault that must be put right. And it is felt to be a fault, not a complex, not a conflict, not a situation…. There is a feeling that the cause of this fault is that someone has either failed the patient or defaulted on him; and…a great anxiety invariably surrounds this area, usually expressed as a desperate demand that this time the analyst should not—in fact must not—fail him.6
The trauma involved here is often one of neglect, rather than abuse. It is experienced as a kind of inner emptiness that is not at all what the Buddhists mean when they use the same word. Yet it is precisely this emptiness that is often first uncovered in meditation and that requires specific psychotherapeutic attention if it is not to tarnish the entire meditative experience. From the Buddhist perspective, the closest parallel lies in the descriptions of the hungry ghost realm. Many Westerners require a combined approach of psychotherapy and meditation precisely because the hungry ghost realm is so strongly represented in their psyches. This is a phenomenon that is new to the recorded history of Buddhism: never before have there been so many Hungry Ghosts engaged in Buddhist practice. Their prevalence requires some modifications in technique that are best appropriated from the psychoanalytic tradition.
MOTHERS
In Eastern practices, as demonstrated most clearly in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, remembering of childhood is done primarily to support and enhance meditation. In the West, these memories tend to disrupt it. This point was driven home to me early in my exploration of Buddhist psychology. In my last year of medical school, I managed to spend three months in India, primarily with various refugee Tibetan communities scattered across northern India. For the first six weeks or so, I was in the small village of Dharamsala, nestled in the Himalayan foothills, home of the palace in exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Because I was there as part of a larger research project, one of my companions, Jeffrey Hopkins, was a Tibetan scholar and translator, and a professor of Tibetan studies at the University of Virginia. This was my first real exposure to the breadth of the intellectual tradition of Tibetan Buddhism; my previous studies had focused on the traditions of Theravada, or Southeast Asian, Buddhism. One of the things that impressed me was the Tibetan effort to cultivate compassion and tranquility of mind through specific exercises that were more like guided meditations or visualizations than anything I had ever been exposed to. The most common such exercise involved imagining all beings as mothers.
Since cyclic existence is beginningless, the argument runs, all beings have, at one time or another, been in every possible relationship to one another. Thus, all beings have been both enemies and friends, and it is only through the impact of greed, hatred, and ignorance that the benevolent relationships have soured. The particular exercise involves recognizing all beings as our mothers—feeling their kindness, developing the desire to repay their kindness, feeling love for them because of their potential for this kindness, and developing the wish that they be freed from suffering and its causes. The psychic root of this practice is the unambivalent love that the Tibetan population is able to summon for their own mothers.
This meditation has always intrigued me. I have had a number of Western psychotherapy patients, for example, with no exposure to this particular exercise, who actually did treat all beings as mothers, and the results, in their personal lives at least, were disastrous. Westerners have a difficult time with this practice: their relationships with their own mothers are much too conflicted. Our child-rearing process, our nuclear family structure, and our desire for autonomy and individuation put a great strain on the parent-child relationship. When the child’s temperament runs counter to the parent’s or when the parent’s ambitions for the child obscure who the child actually is, the family unit easily becomes an alienating or claustrophobic environment in which the child must hide out from the very beings toward whom she is most needy. “The family,” chuckled my psychotherapy teacher Isadore From, “is the worst invention of a God that doesn’t exist.”7
I had the chance recently to ask the Tibetan master Sogyal Rinpoche, the author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the teacher of hundreds of Westerners in Europe and America, about this practice of treating all beings as mothers. “Oh, no,” he laughed, “not for Westerners. I always tell them like grandmother or grandfather.”
EAST IS EAST
The starting point, psychologically, seems to be rather different in the two cultures—a point that is not exactly a revelation. It was Rudyard Kipling who first declared the gulf between East and West unbridgeable. East is East, he argued; we need not try to fathom its depths. Among psychotherapists, even Carl Jung agreed, despite his own personal interests. Eastern practices were too foreign, he felt; Westerners must draw on their own philosophical and spiritual traditions for inspiration.8
One reason for this foreignness is that the Eastern self is enmeshed in a web of family, hierarchy, caste, or other group expectations from which the only escape is often spiritual practice. Indeed, the spiritual search in the East can be seen as a kind of culturally sanctioned safety valve for the individual self who can otherwise find no privacy. The Eastern practitioner of meditation is motivated by the same need to “find herself” as is the Western meditator, but the starting points are opposite. As one ancient Buddhist text begins, “This generation is entangled in a tangle.”9 This enmeshment, a common thread running through many generations, gives Easterners a certain strength that meditation traditionally builds on.
The person’s capacity for empathic awareness, relaxation of outer ego boundaries, emotional attunement and receptivity, and a sense of belonging is accepted as a given in the East. Meditation, as it has been taught in Eastern cultures, uses this capacity quickly to establish a receptive inner environment for spiritual work.
The starting point in the West rarely is an enmeshed self; more commonly it is an estranged one. The emphasis on individuality and autonomy, the breakdown of the extended and even the nuclear family, the scarcity of “good enough” parenting, and the relentless drive for achievement versus affection in our society leave a person all too often feeling cut off, isolated, alienated, empty, and longing for an intimacy that seems both out of reach and vaguely threatening. At the first cross-cultural meetings of Eastern masters and Western therapists, the Dalai Lama was incredulous at the notion of “low self-esteem” that he kept hearing about. He went around the room asking each Westerner there, “Do you have this? Do you have this?” When they all nodded yes, he just shook his head in disbelief. In Tibet, said Sogyal Rinpoche, a positive sense of self is assumed. It is inculcated early and supported through all of the interdependent relationships that are established by the web of family. If a person cannot maintain this positive feeling about himself, he says, he or she is considered a fool.
In the West, the starting point is different. The Western psyche, it seems, is increasingly vulnerable to feelings of alienation, longing, emptiness, and unworthiness—to emotions that, from the Buddhist viewpoint, characterize the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. We feel unlovable, and we carry that feeling with us to all of our intimate relationships, along with the hope and expectation that such relationships could somehow erase that preexisting feeling. As children, we sense our parents’ inabilities to relate to us, their tendencies to treat us as objects or reflections of themselves, and we personalize their inattention, attributing the lack of connection to our own failings. Children are almost always self-referential in this way: they will explain anything that goes wrong by blaming themselves.
MEDITATION AND THE WESTERN SELF
The different starting points in the two cultures are responsible, I believe, for the different ways that Easterners and Westerners experience meditation. In my experience, it is not true, as Carl Jung believed, that the practices of Buddhism are so foreign as to be unintelligible to the Western mind, but it is true that meditation will bring up different experiences, depending on whether the starting point is an estranged one or an enmeshed one. For those, primarily Westerners, who begin with a history of estrangement, meditation will inevitably yield memories of early unmet longings that survive in the form of the basic fault. For those, primarily from cultures outside of the current Western mode, who begin with a history of enmeshment, meditation is much more likely to bring memories of primitive longings for escape, which will be accompanied by all of the guilt and shame over violating family expectations that Westerners now reserve for issues like excessive dependency. The terror that is emphasized in the traditional psychologies is at least in part a terror of breaking out of or loss of the web of enmeshment, of turning one’s back on the obligations of family that so define the non-Western self. The story of the Buddha’s life, in fact, in which he leaves his father’s palace, his wife and young son, and all of the members of his caste who are dependent on him can be read as a metaphor for the need of the enmeshed self to confront the fear of his ultimate separateness.
In our culture, this separateness is often experienced very early in life. One of the consequences of this more common starting point is that meditation practice now tends to stir up these early feelings, just as Freud found that hypnosis, free association, and the careful attention to what is present “on the surface of the patient’s mind” will do. This presents today’s meditators with something of a dilemma. They often begin meditation practice only to find that they rather quickly uncover remnants of the basic fault which, like my own longing, do not necessarily go away with further meditation. The low self-esteem that accompanies this longing, stemming from the sense that there is something deficient in the person who longs, often requires special attention of a psychotherapeutic kind, which traditional meditation teachers are not trained to provide. As Freud was to discover, there is commonly a compulsion to act out this unworthiness repeatedly, rather than face it directly. Without the help of a therapist or teacher, the person so afflicted will continue to attempt to jettison the unworthiness by magical means. Meditation is all too vulnerable to this kind of misuse. If the basic fault is not exposed and accepted, the longing to fix it will corrupt the meditative experience.
It is here that I have found the greatest need for a combined approach, tailored to the needs of the hungry ghost, as well as to the human realm. Meditation is often extremely efficient at bringing out the basic fault, but rather silent about dealing with it. This does not mean that meditation cannot deal with it, but only that it must be adapted for that specific purpose through an interaction with what works from the psychotherapeutic approach. Buddhism’s potential contribution to the mastery of the basic fault does not lie only in the ability of its meditations to elicit the psychic remnants of the fault. Buddhist meditation, when properly adapted, can also have a critical impact on the other two components of Freud’s therapeutic approach, what he called “repeating and working–through.” It holds the key, in fact, to resolving the frustrating inability of psychotherapy to move beyond recognition and reconciliation to the far shore of relief.