I REMEMBER ONCE, not so many years ago, sitting in my therapist’s office, telling him of an argument that I had had with someone close to me. I can no longer recall the details, but I had done something to get my friend upset with me, and she had become quite angry—unjustifiably and disproportionately, in my view. I was still obviously angry, too, but I remember feeling upset and frustrated as I recounted the events to my therapist.
“All I can do is love her more strongly at those times,” I insisted somewhat plaintively, drawing on my years of meditation practice and the sincerity of my deeper feelings in the hope of freeing my mind from the anger that was brewing.
“That will never work,” he snapped, and it was like being hit with a Zen master’s stick. My therapist would look at me somewhat quizzically at such times, as if amazed at my foolishness. “What’s wrong with being angry?” he would often say.
This interaction has stayed with me because, in some way, it crystallizes the difficulties that we face in trying to integrate Buddhist and Western psychological approaches. Is there something wrong with being angry? Can we get rid of it? What does it mean to work it through? I have to address questions such as these over and over again in my therapy practice, where it has become clear to me that working through an emotion such as anger often means something different from merely eliminating it. For, as the Buddhist Wheel of Life has consistently demonstrated, it is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening. To work something through means to change one’s view. If we try instead to change the emotion, or the precipitants of the emotion, we may achieve some short-term success; but we remain bound, by the forces of attachment and aversion, to the very feelings that we are struggling to be free of.
As Freud discovered, he could bring out the troubling emotions or behaviors in the field of the therapeutic relationship, but he could not necessarily make them go away. Merely pointing out the patient’s repetitions did not bring those repetitions to a halt, nor did interpreting their infantile sources. Something else was necessary, something that the Buddha’s strategy of bare attention also aimed at: the gradual knowing of the disaffected material as coming from one’s own being. As Freud put it: “One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.”1
So working through, even to Freud, was a process of making whole, of repossessing that from which we have become estranged, of accepting that which we would rather deny. It was also a process of making present that which was otherwise buried in the past, so that it could, in fact, be experienced as emanating from one’s own person. “We must treat [a patient’s] illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force,”2 Freud insisted.
Working something through, it turns out, means first coming to terms with its inescapability. This was the first message that my own therapist was giving me when he asked me what was wrong with being angry. It is also the conclusion that one inevitably arrives at in dealing with what I have described as the basic fault. This “scarring in the mental structure”3 that takes the form of anger, shame, or bereft aloneness must finally be accepted just as it is, stripped of the futile demands for reparation that otherwise obscure its direct apprehension. This is what Freud was implying when he spoke of treating the illness “as a present-day force.” In the practice of bare attention, Buddhism offers the method for widening one’s view of troubling emotions and for accepting them as a present-day force. Just as free association, transference, and the analysis of resistance can be expected to bring out the scarring, so bare attention provides the vehicle for making it one’s own. This is the therapeutic maneuver that Freud described in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” as being so difficult to achieve. Working something through, it seems, involves not just the remembering or repetition of repressed material but the acquisition of perceptual skills that permit a development in what the psychoanalysts call the ego. Buddhism has always presented meditation as a form of mental development; psychotherapy has come to a place where it, too, has recognized the need for something more than mere insight. It can turn to Buddhism for instruction in how to accomplish this.
THE IT
When we begin therapy, just as when we begin meditation, our emotions often seem dangerous to us. The clue to this, in a therapeutic encounter, is the description of an emotion as if it were an independent entity. “This incredible anger came up in me,” I might have said in describing my own difficulties with my friend who had so upset me. This indicates a very different way of experiencing anger than if I had simply said, “I got angry.” As a therapist influenced by Buddhism, I find that I am sensitive to this kind of disclaimed mode of describing emotion because it is such a good indicator of what has not yet been worked through. The very act of verbally acknowledging one’s own connection to an emotion propels a confrontation that is often an important step in the therapeutic process. The Buddha holds up a mirror, remember, to those beings of the Hell Realm who are tormented by anger and anxiety. The therapist, in such a situation, must create “an environment in which one can safely and easily be in bits and pieces without the feeling of falling apart.”4
As psychoanalysts have continually pointed out, it is the tendency of the neurotic character to become estranged from emotional experience, to see thoughts, feelings, or sensations as “it” rather than “I,” to deny fundamental aspects of the self-experience. Correctly understood, the Buddhist perspective is that we are nothing but these experiences: to deny their subjective reality is to further empower them as something fixed, powerful, and out-of-control. The person in such a predicament is then cut off from essential aspects of the self-experience. It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person’s awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.
Taking my cue from the progress of meditation, I have found that the first task of working through from a Buddhist perspective is to uncover how the spatial metaphor of self is being used defensively to keep key aspects of the person at bay. When emotions such as anger are described in a disclaimed or dissociated way, they are inevitably experienced as things or entities in their own right, over which the person has little, if any, jurisdiction. This creates a situation that is eerily reminiscent of early trends in psychoanalytic thinking, in which the id was seen as the repository of infantile “drives” that were, by their very nature, “immutable,” or incapable of maturation or development.5
Just as the Buddhist practices counsel concentration as the method for exploring the spatial metaphor, so has concentration turned out to be the key in therapy to reclaiming the dispossessed and reified emotions such as anger. When the attention is trained on the emotion in question—in particular, on the bodily experience of that emotion—it gradually ceases to be experienced as a static and threatening entity and becomes, instead, a process that is defined by time as well as by space. The technique of concentration permits the difficult emotion to be experienced as coming from one’s own being, and it can then be understood and accepted rather than feared for its brute strength. So in my own example, when I was able to concentrate my awareness on the bodily feelings of being angry, rather than trying to ward off the dreaded “thing” by countering it with “love,” I was able to recognize the inescapability of my response. I had been offended and had gotten angry, yet all was not lost. When I admitted it, I could then begin to relax.
While anger is often a likely candidate for this kind of treatment, the feeling of excitement can also be surprisingly threatening. I was reminded of this recently when a young woman with whom I was working began to tell me about a romantic evening with a prospective boyfriend that had made her disappointingly uncomfortable. “I can see the whole scene,” Gwen reported to me the day after that evening. “The romantic music, he’s coming to sit down next to me. This anxiety starts welling up. It was so strong, I was out of there.”
“You say, ‘This anxiety was welling up,’” I responded, pointing out the way in which anxiety was being described as an independent entity. “What happens if you say, ‘I got anxious?’”
“It’s so intense, so overwhelming…” Gwen trailed off, unwilling or unable to rephrase her experience.
Gwen was a good example of someone who had not allowed her anxiety, or possibly her excitement, to become part of her self-experience. Phobic toward her own response, Gwen was unable to experience herself as anxious and was thus unable to remain in any intimate encounter whose excitement or threatened loss of ego boundaries provoked the not-to-be tolerated emotion. As it turned out, Gwen thought that “it was wrong” for her to be anxious in a romantic situation such as this and that she should, instead, “be opening like a flower.” Her actual response confirmed a view of herself consistent with one she had developed in response to a critical and rejecting mother: that there was something wrong with her. The flaw, in her view, was the anxiety, which she experienced as a dangerous and threatening entity that could overwhelm and embarrass her, rather than as a temporary and contextual self-experience.
If Gwen had scrutinized herself in classical psychoanalysis, she might have remained estranged from her anxiety and excitement, continuing to see them as dissociated and threatening “others” that she could, at best, learn how to control or regulate. Through the process of learning how to bring awareness to her physical experience of anxiety, however, Gwen began to permit a more spontaneous and alive expression of herself, one that could embrace anxiety as well as intimacy, excitement as well as fear. As she learned that her dreaded anxiety would change over time, and that she could be anxious and intimate simultaneously, Gwen began to permit herself a more varied kind of experience.
Just as occurs in the traditional path of meditation, Gwen began to expand her conception of herself from one that relied exclusively on a spatial metaphor of discrete and conflicting “parts” to a more integrated and cohesive view that was organized around a view of herself as ebbing and flowing with resilience and flexibility. This was a major shift in her self-perception, one that came about through the learning of new perceptual skills that allowed her to be with her own excitement rather than turning it into a fearsome force that threatened to overwhelm her. She was able to move from a position of conflict, in which the should feeling of “opening like a flower” clashed with her actual anxiety, to a position of ambiguity, in which she could tolerate being both excited and anxious.
INJURED INNOCENCE
In working through, from a Buddhist perspective, the first step, as in meditation, is to learn to be with threatening emotions in a nonjudgmental way. The next step is to find the sense of “I” that is hidden behind the disclaimed actions and emotions when the spatial conception of self predominates. Thus, Gwen needed to find and accept the “I” who was anxious, and I needed to find and accept the “I” who was angry. As one works in this way, the conflicted emotions become less of a threat to a precariously balanced system and more of a reflection of basic human needs that require attention. Thus, anger can be seen as one’s inability or unwillingness to use aggression to overcome a frustrating obstacle, while anxiety can be understood as an inability or unwillingness to admit hunger or desire. By tracing the feeling back to the original unfulfilled need, and to the “I” that could not admit to that need, the process of working through is begun. In many cases, once the need or obstacle is identified and the person admits to being involved, the therapeutic work proceeds quite easily.
This process works very well up to a point. When the traumas of childhood are reached, however—and with them, the impossible demands for reparation that are so characteristic of the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts—it appears to have its limits. When the realization occurs that needs from the past were never and can never be met, that obstacles from the past were never and can never be overcome, there is often a sense of profound outrage. As I have made clear in the preceding chapters, it is this kind of realization that tends to characterize the estranged Western experience in psychotherapy. This very outrage is the hallmark of what has come to be called narcissism: the vain expectation and selfish insistence that one’s sense of hollowness should somehow be erased. To assume that by merely tuning into the feelings of outrage we will somehow be released from them is, unfortunately, too naive a view. Reclaiming the disaffected emotion does not, in these cases, bring the situation to a resolution, since the only resolution that can be imagined is to retrieve the connection that is already broken.
Meditation practice actually offers a means of temporarily assuaging this hollowness that is not often accessed by contemporary Western therapies: through the development of states of sustained concentration in which ego boundaries dissolve and feelings of delight predominate. Such states, which in the Buddhist cosmology represent the highest and most pleasurable desire realms, represent developed gratifications that reinforce a sense of optimism, hope, and possibility. But another contribution of the Buddhist approach is even more helpful once one has reached the bottom of one’s own outrage. It is, in some sense, the secret weapon of Buddhism, the means by which one can shift the perspective from how outraged one feels to who it is who feels it, and thereby appreciate what the Buddhist psychologies consider the relativity of the narcissistic emotions.
In the Tibetan tradition, according to the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, the best time to observe the self clearly is when we are in a state of injured innocence, when we have been insulted and think, “How could she do this to me? I don’t deserve to be treated that way.”6 It is in this state, he says, that the “hard nut” of the self is best found; and the self cannot be truly understood, from a Buddhist perspective, until it is seen clearly as it appears.
This state of injured innocence is the Buddhist equivalent of the basic fault, but in Buddhism it becomes a tremendous opportunity rather than a place of resignation. From the Buddhist perspective, to reach this state of injured innocence, to hold the feeling of outrage in the balance of meditative awareness, is the entrance to the path of insight. It is just this moment that all of the preliminary practices of meditation have been leading up to, because the path of insight is, above all else, about investigation into the nature of this “I” that feels injured. Until it is felt, it cannot become the object of meditative scrutiny. So in my practice of psychotherapy, I have to somehow celebrate the appearance of this elusive “I,” to convey to my patients at the moment of their most poignant indignation the possibilities that are now open to them. In Zen they might call this the gateless gate, the doorway to the path of insight that, upon close examination, is found to be insubstantial.
The power of this approach in dealing with the intractable nature of the reactive emotions that so color the experience of the basic fault cannot be overestimated. While the first step is to integrate the disclaimed emotions and to find and accept the feeling of “I” that has been displaced, the crucial step, from the Buddhist view, is to shift the perspective from the reactive emotions to the feeling of “I” itself. In so doing, one’s investment in outrage is gradually withdrawn and replaced by interest in exploring the nature of “I.” The Buddhist view of the mutability of the reactive emotions has always rested on this phenomenon. It is not that the emotions necessarily disappear (although some Buddhist schools go so far as to assert that they eventually do), but that the life goes out of them as the feeling of “I” is found to be so much less substantial than was first assumed. The very emotions that, from the perspective of injured innocence, seem so much a matter of life and death seem, from the perspective of a metaphorical self, to be absurd or, at the very least, relative.
EMPTY OF CONTENT
Within the field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis there has long been a raging debate over whether or not the so–called instinctual emotions are, in fact, capable of transformation. The classical view holds that they are not—that after repression has been lifted or after anger has been owned, they must still be regulated or modulated by the ego. The alternative view holds that once the disaffected material is integrated through the actions of consciousness, there is an actual change in the way those emotions are experienced. When that happens, this latter view insists, these primitive emotions are felt to be “empty of content.”7
In this view, the ego need not condemn the instinctual emotions once they are made conscious; the very act of making them conscious empties them of their infantile content. The Buddhist approach posits an all–important intermediate step in bringing this about. Such an emptying is indeed possible, the Buddhists assert, but it comes not just from making emotions conscious but from carefully examining the underlying feeling of identification that accompanies the emotional experience. In making this identification the focus, the Buddhist approach pulls the rug out from under the reactive emotions while opening up a new avenue for their working through. Such an approach derives directly from the logical progression of the meditative path, in which techniques of bare attention, concentration, and mindfulness give way to those of analytical investigation into the nature of the self–experience. By shifting the attention from the emotion to the identification with the emotion, the emotion is experienced in a new way. It is analogous to the experience of trying to see a distant star with the naked eye: by looking away from the star just a bit, one actually sees it more clearly.
This is an approach that I imagine Freud would have admired. In his writings on the “instincts,” he appeared to have developed a similar faith in the power of consistent objective scrutiny to bring about a transformation in consciousness. In so doing, Freud came to conclusions about the instincts that are very close to the Buddha’s conclusions about the self. “The theory of the instincts is so to speak our mythology,” said Freud in his New Introductory Lectures.8 “Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.”
Psychotherapists using a Buddhist approach would agree, but they would insist on shifting the focus of observation from the instincts to the self, for when the magnificent indefiniteness of the self is realized, the “instincts” become much less significant. This transformation is made possible through the examination of the self that feels injured, not just through examination of the feelings of injury. When the mythical nature of that appearing self is realized, the emptiness of the egoistic emotions can hardly be avoided.
In a psychotherapeutic context this approach is particularly useful because it permits a simultaneous appreciation of the intensity of the reactive emotions and of the precarious ground on which they are perched. Working through means coming to terms with both. Consider what happened to my patient Carl, a forty–year–old advertising executive who had an experience on a meditation retreat that crystallizes this discussion concretely.
Carl could take care of anyone. In his therapy with me, he was a masterful storyteller, threading one vignette seamlessly into another so that I was never bored. It took me quite a while to realize that Carl was effortlessly repeating a behavior with me that he had also used in other critical relationships in his life. His stories were so enjoyable and seemingly relevant that he gave the appearance of being deeply involved in therapy, but it turned out that he was deeply involved in taking care of me.
Carl’s need to take care of those with whom he was intimately involved and his underlying fear of dependency stemmed most directly from the tragic death of his older brother in an automobile accident when Carl was four. Carl’s parents reacted with understandable grief, but their mourning never ceased, nor was it ever discussed. Carl had no memories of his own loss: he became an outwardly cheerful, high–achieving student and athlete who successfully buried his feelings of isolation until the breakup of his first long relationship. Carl’s progress in therapy need not be detailed here, but he was able to reach the point that I would characterize as an appreciation of the basic fault. He was no longer hiding from the devastating emotional consequences of his brother’s untimely death.
When Carl began to meditate intensively, his experience was one of relentless and oppressive physical pain. This was not the kind of pain that more frequently characterizes beginning meditation: pain in the back, the knees, or the neck that intensifies but then fades away once the places of muscular tension are experienced and relaxed. This appeared to be a different order of pain, of a quality that soon convinced Carl that he had something physically wrong with him. The pain began preoccupying Carl’s attention so fully that he imagined all kinds of desperate scenarios and became panicky. He did everything he could think of to escape from the pain, but that only seemed to make it worse. He felt caught in a vise.
It was not until he had the thought “This is the pain that will never go away” that Carl tied his physical experience in meditation to his emotional one in therapy. At this point Carl was able to work with the pain as, in fact, the pain that would never go away, stemming as it did from the simultaneous loss of his brother and of his parents’ affection. Using bare attention, Carl was able to sit with his pain without panicking, but until he was able to shift his focus from the pain to the “I” that was feeling hurt, there was little sense of progress. This shift occurred as Carl found himself repeating the words “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” to himself, as if he had been the person responsible for his parents’ grief and emotional unavailability.
Holding this feeling and surrounding it with meditative awareness, Carl began to experience his persistent physical pain as ribbons of light and sensation fluttering up and down his back. His experience was similar to what patients with chronic pain report when they are given effective analgesia: “My pain is the same but it doesn’t hurt anymore.” Carl knew his pain, his anger, and his guilt thoroughly after this experience, and yet he no longer felt restricted by them. His feelings did not go away, but his compulsive need to be a caretaker did. He was able to have a different kind of intimate interpersonal experience thereafter. This is what it means to empty the instincts: Carl’s feelings did not really change, but he was no longer driven by their content.
REDIRECTING AGGRESSION
The power of the Buddhist approach is that, at the critical moment of injured innocence, it deftly redirects one’s attention and aggression from the disappointing “object” to the misperceived subject. The insistence on reparation is really a barely disguised form of aggression toward the disappointing loved one, a hidden fear that the loss of connection was really caused by one’s own hatred or need. By shifting the perspective back onto the felt sense of “I,” the Buddhist method permits a full exploration of the vagaries of these emotions, while continually questioning the implicit identification with them that otherwise prevents a thorough investigation. Thus, when I began to take interest in the feeling of self that came with my anger, I had the sense of expanding the field in which that anger was expressed. I felt less guilty, but not any more angry; in fact, I became much more able to treat being angry as an inevitable and fleeting response to a perceived disappointment, rather than as a menacing threat to an inherently unstable connection.
An emotion such as anger can be said to be worked through when its arising permits one to focus on the concomitant sense of “I,” when that becomes more compelling than the sense of indignation. This redirection or expansion of attention is not developed defensively, so as not to have to experience the anger, but is developed out of the intent to use every opportunity to explore the nature of self. By challenging the agency of an emotion, one can move from a self-referential perspective to a position of openness. While not denying the immediate reality of the feeling, one can nevertheless begin to smile at oneself and at one’s habitual reactions.
One of my major discoveries in therapy was that I am made angry by the least interruption of intimate connection. Although I came to understand that this stemmed from a premature feeling of estrangement in my childhood, this knowledge alone gave me insight, but not relief. I remained hostage to my feelings each time a friend or loved one disappointed me. When I became able to use those disappointments to bring my own primitive sense of identification into focus, however, something began to shift. I found that I could not possibly remain so righteously indignant time and again. I was forced to relax my grip and question my conviction that an individual episode of withdrawal needed to be interpreted as abandonment. By tapping my own aggression and using it to redirect my awareness, I prevented myself from being held prisoner by my own instinctive reactions. The ability to make this transition from identification with the thinker to doubt over its reality is what permits an adequate working through of therapeutic discoveries.
As long as the thinker is implicitly accepted, there will always be some narcissistic attachment to the injury that is uncovered in therapy. When that injury can instead be used to pinpoint the elusive sense of self, then it begins to serve some function and can, in turn, be used for a greater purpose. Therapy all too often leaves people in possession of their pain, but without the tools to put it to any use. It can uncover the latent sense of “I,” the seed of narcissism, without knowing how to make that discovery worthwhile. Despite therapy, one continues to feel stuck—without a sense of hope or possibility. It was in such cases that Freud despaired of ever being able to terminate analysis.
TERMINATION
The ending of a psychotherapy is the last chance to encourage this shift from injured innocence to investigation of the “I.” It represents the final opportunity to use the therapeutic relationship in teaching one how to redeploy awareness away from feelings of injury and toward the emptiness and egolessness that the Buddha taught as an antidote to mental suffering. While this can sound lofty in the abstract, it can sometimes be the most practical method available for helping a person deal with the resurrection of difficult feelings at such a time, because termination always brings out the residual emotions that have not been worked through.
For example, one of my first long-term patients was a man named Jerry, who had often expressed fears about ending his relationship with me. After working together for many years, however, we eventually began to reduce the frequency of his sessions. After a tumultuous therapy, punctuated by episodes in which he would wait outside my office door to jealously time my sessions with other patients, Jerry found himself ready to begin the process of termination. When the time of the first missed session came around, however, Jerry felt as if I was kicking him out. He became angry and hurt and he felt rejected, abandoned, inadequate, and enraged—reactions we had explored thoroughly in his therapy. Jerry could not help reacting this way, even though, from a distant island of clarity, he could recognize the way in which these beliefs did not ring true. This recognition gave him the strength to work with his feelings in the way I have described. By expanding his awareness, as he had learned, to include his own physically felt identification with his feelings of injury, they began to seem absurd to him. The more he focused on the subjective sense of “I,” the more able he became to confront the one feeling that he was not experiencing: sadness over leaving me. As a consequence, Jerry had the experience not just of being angry with me but of missing me during the week of his missed session. As a result of all of our work together, he was able to accomplish most of this process on his own; my only contribution was to point out how he seemed to be rushing toward the completion of his therapy without stopping to experience what it was like.
WORKING TOWARD
As Jerry became able to miss me, he became much more able to seek out new experiences that had the potential to make him happy. Rather than dwelling in his anger or even in his sadness, he took on the responsibility of finding new ways to keep himself interested in his life. He was able to move from a focus on working through his difficult feelings to one on “working toward”9 greater satisfactions. He was aided in this by the Buddhist technique of redirecting attention at the crucial moment of injured innocence, for he was by no means immune to the resentments that he had entered therapy with. He was still prone to exaggerating any perceived slight, but he was able to turn those catastrophic events into opportunities for breakthrough. If the Buddha’s promise can be believed (remember that he was reluctant to proclaim it, out of the conviction that it would not be), then the possibility of a greater satisfaction lies ahead for those who are willing to work with their psychic pain in this fashion.
By uncovering not just the unresolvable feelings of narcissistic injury but also the subjective sense of “the injured,” psychotherapy can mesh with Buddhism in a way that enhances both. By bringing out the subjective sense of “I” in a sensitive and supportive environment, psychotherapy can do what meditation practice alone often fails to accomplish: overcome the obstacles of a Western mind to find and hold the estranged and alienated self–feeling. By refusing to be put off by the sense of injured innocence that often precipitates out of a successful psychotherapeutic relationship, but instead using that feeling as a springboard for the investigation of the appearing “I,” Buddhism offers the crucial link between working through and working toward that has long eluded psychotherapists. This link represents a shift in perspective that can suddenly make a closed situation seem open once again.
This shift, which Buddhism is continually trying to encourage and to describe in new ways, is the most important contribution that Buddhism has to offer to the world of psychotherapy. Just when it seems that nothing more can be done, the Buddha promised that another door can be opened. The Buddha continually used examples of death and loss in his teachings, not because of a belief that it was wrong to have an emotional response to their occurrence (as has sometimes been assumed by eager followers or skeptical critics), but because even these most devastating experiences can be worked with in the way I am describing. We cannot approach a release from emotional pain without first confronting the thinker.
THE ENGINE OF SUBLIMATION
The Dalai Lama begins every talk by describing how human beings yearn for happiness and how the only point of spiritual practice is to make that happiness a reality. The strategy of focusing the attention on the appearing “I” at the moments of narcissistic injury is but an advanced example of an approach that the Buddhist path makes extensive use of: that of consistently working toward more mature satisfactions. The antidote to the heedless desire of the Animal Realm, for example, is portrayed in the Wheel of Life by a book, and the antidote to the bottomless thirst of the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts is described as spiritual nourishment, both of which are potent symbols of sublimation. The ability to hold an emotion in the transitional space of bare attention is always portrayed in Buddhist teachings as more satisfying and more complete than the strategies of disavowal or indulgence.
The pleasurable feeling states of the concentration practices are known for their delightful and gratifying feeling tones, and the possibility of becoming attached to their sensual dimension is a sure sign of their being sublimated states of desire. The balanced state of equanimity, like a fine tea, is always praised in the Buddhist literature for the superior pleasure that it affords. Clearly, the Buddhist view is that awareness itself is the engine of sublimation; its cultivation permits the meditator a method of uncovering gratifications that would not otherwise be available. It is in this context that the strategy of penetrating narcissism emerges as the antidote to the scarring of the basic fault, and it was in this context that the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote in his landmark Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, “For those who suffer from alienation, cure does not consist in the absence of illness, but in the presence of well–being.”10
Yet Fromm was mistaken in equating the Buddhist approach solely with the generation of well–being. As we have seen, Buddhist meditation produces experiences of delight and of terror, of sublimated states of desire and of aggression. In highlighting only the states of delight, Fromm was making the same mistake that Freud did when he equated the mystical experience with the oceanic feeling. For, as the Buddha taught, states of well–being are inherently unstable; they may temporarily counter the symptoms of alienation, but they are not a cure. Alienation requires meaning, not well–being, in order to be effectively put to rest: what the Buddha offered was a path, a sense of purpose, whose generation requires the aggressive reorientation of awareness to include the assumption of identity. At precisely those moments when we are feeling most besieged, when our innate aggression and self–protective feelings are being instinctively evoked, we have the opportunity to work toward greater understanding. The aggression of injured innocence can be harnessed to explode narcissism: this is what is meant by the “destructive potential” of meditation.
When Freud wrote about the oceanic feeling as the apotheosis of the mystical feeling and when Fromm extolled well–being as the fruition of Buddhist meditation, they were overlooking a simple but essential point: meditation is not just about creating states of well–being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self. “Thoughts exist without a thinker,” taught the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion. Insight arises best, he said, when the “thinker’s” existence is no longer necessary. This is precisely what the Buddha had discovered many years before. The meditative experience does not have to be oceanic, it turns out, to reveal how much at sea we really are.