Further Observations on Asian Psychology and Modern Psychiatry (1956)
When we compare some of the trends in modern psychotherapy with certain practical disciplines of Asian philosophy, we begin to discover a most instructive clarification of the whole function of therapy, and especially of its relation to social institutions. Among social institutions we must understand conventions of every type; not only the family, marriage, legal codes, and systems of language, but also ideas of motion, time, space and personality, which are generally understood to be properties of the physical world rather than conventions of social origin.1 But it would seem that the rigorous procedures of mathematics and physics are confirming the intuition of Indian and Chinese thinkers as to the essentially conventional character of our conceptions of the physical world.
In Indian philosophy the world as we conceive it is termed maya—a much misunderstood word derived from the Sanskrit root matr—, “to measure,” and from which we have in turn derived such words as meter, matrix, and material. Stated rather baldly, the theory of maya is that the world as we conceive it is a mental construct as distinct from an “objective” reality. This is not to be confused with Western views of subjective idealism. It is rather the more easily verifiable notion that the world as we conceive it (e.g., as a multiplicity of “things” in relative motion) is not to be identified with the world as it is, in the same way that one does not identify the measure with what is measured. One does not confuse the cloth with the yard, since it would be impossible to make clothing from merely abstract yards. Thus a person is said to be spellbound by maya when he confuses the concrete with the abstract, when he is hypnotized into believing that the world of immediate experience is precisely the system of concepts (vikalpa) and measures that he employs to manipulate that world, and to make reconstructions of it in terms of the symbols of thought. These concepts and measures are our social institutions, and include, as here defined, so-called laws of nature, ideas of “human nature,” of matter, of things, and of events—all of which are held to be fundamentally arbitrary conventions of measurement and classification into which the real world is “fitted” as water is poured into jars, bottles and conduits of varying shapes and uses.
It is as if the real world corresponded to the amorphous ink blot of the Rorschach Test, and the world-as-conceived to the picture that the subject projects upon it. The actual ink blot is satyam or brahman, the immeasurable reality, and in this case the “blot” includes both the perceiver and the perceived. The subject’s projection upon the blot is maya, but in this case the subject—every individual in a society—does not fabricate his own projection. He learns it from society in the course of his upbringing, and is taught to regard it, not as a projection, but as “what really is.”
In every society, Western and Eastern, upbringing and education is the process of learning the conventions, a process that entails many types of difficulty and conflict. For social conventions are like the bed of Procrustes: those too short for it have to be stretched, and those too long have to be cut down. Since all these conventions are in some sense types of language, of symbolic classification and representation of the world, the difficulties in learning them are the same as those encountered in mastering the complex vocabulary and grammar of an unfamiliar tongue.
Here are two immediate sources of conflict. Because every system of “language” is an attempt to represent the world in terms of a static and usually linear system of signs, it appears that the world is, in itself, frustratingly complex. But the complexity lies in the language rather than the reality, and is analogous to the complexity of trying to drink water with a fork. Nothing is simpler than to breathe; it becomes complex only when one tries to represent how it is done in communicable signs, that is, to think about it. Furthermore, all such systems must of necessity have a static—because generally accepted—character that makes the real world appear bewilderingly changeable.
Conventional systems necessarily involve rather rigid conceptions of what man is, whether as the knowing subject or ego, as possessing a human nature with more-or-less fixed and “proper” characteristics, or as having a defined role in society that the individual is obliged to identify with “himself.” Such concepts do not necessarily correspond with what we feel ourselves to be, in ways that we cannot easily formulate.2 This, together with misunderstandings as to what the rules of the system are supposed to be, leads to the most excruciating conflicts between the individual and the system, or rather, between the individual’s version of what he is and his version of what the system requires of him. To the extent that he identifies the rules of the system with the laws of nature, or of God, he feels himself to be at odds with reality itself, and to be faced with the choice of an intolerable submission or foolhardy rebellion against “iron facts.”
Still another source of conflict is that the confusion of the abstract formulation with the concrete reality leads to the pursuit of goals that, because they exist in the abstract alone, cannot be attained or do not give satisfaction when attained. The ideal of a state of pleasure or happiness unalloyed with pain, or the goal of success, of wealth measured in the symbolic terms of money, are obvious examples of such abstract mirages. So, too, are life-goals conceived in terms of future time, as in the feeling that life is insupportable without a promising future, however agreeable the immediate present.
The idea of motion in time is perhaps the most problematic of all conventions, since it appears to be at once the source of our highest culture and our deepest misery. It is not difficult to see that there is an important sense in which only the present is real, even though constantly eluding our grasp. There seems to be no way of measuring it, of determining how “long” it lasts, and it cannot be regarded as infinitesimally “short” since this would seem to make any experience of it impossible. Likewise we feel that the present experience cannot be held in consciousness, and the more we try to retain it, the more we are aware of its evanescence. But this appears to be a special case of the whole problem of trying to define or measure the real world in terms of conventional structures. The problem of defining or grasping the present is essentially the same as that of trying to write a law without loopholes, or of formulating an exhaustively accurate description of a simple event.
By the convention of time we identify ourselves, collectively and individually, with history, with a linear series of past events projected into a future. This series is conventional not only in the sense that the present alone has actuality, but also in that the events constituting the history are a selection of “significant” events from an infinite possibility, just as there are infinitely many ways of projecting pictures into the Rorschach ink blots. To be identified with a history is to be identified with an abstraction, and thus to have the constant, gnawing sense that one lacks reality, that one is perpetually and ineluctably “falling apart,” that one is everlastingly inadequate. But the definition, the description, is always inadequate to the reality. Therefore, to be identified with such an abstraction (e.g., a social role), or, worse, to be in search of security in terms of such an abstraction, is to be self-condemned to inadequacy.
The foregoing may sound as if social conventions were under attack. On the contrary, they are the sine qua non of human communication, the foundations of all culture. But, like every useful and creative instrument, they involve costs and dangers. There is certainly no doubt that every member of society must be disciplined in its conventions. But it must be recognized that the disciplinary process brings about inner conflicts, and almost inevitably warps the indefinable naturalness and spontaneity that every adult envies in the child.3 Therefore certain Asian societies provide optional means for relieving people of the warping effects of their acculturation and upbringing, which give them inward liberation (moksha) from the conventions that they have been compelled to learn. This liberation is, however, utterly different from rebellion against the conventions, since rebellion always implies a bondage to that against which one rebels. Liberation enables a man to be the master instead of the slave of his social conventions, and requires not that he condemn them as wrong, but that he “see through them” as arbitrary, like the rules of the game.
The process of acculturation and liberation is reflected in the outward structure of ancient Hindu society. The society as such consisted of four castes or role-groups: brahmana (priesthood), kshatriya (temporal power), vaishya (merchant), and shudra (laborer). By virtue of membership in one of these castes an individual possessed an identity. But, whenever he had completed his responsibilities, he might abandon caste to follow the way of liberation, giving up his identity and becoming a sanyassin, or homeless monk. The sanyassin was an “upper outlaw,” just as the Untouchable was a “lower outlaw,” for as the latter was beneath the law the former was above it. Ideally, the sanyassin was a jivan-mukta—one who, though still appearing to be an individual from the standpoint of social convention (maya), is from his own standpoint “no one,” since he no longer identifies himself with a role, a persona, but with concrete reality, which is nonconceptual (nirvikalpa).4
In Chinese society, the process of acculturation is represented by Confucianism, and of liberation by Taoism or Buddhism, since the typical Taoist is the old man who has retired from the world to live alone in the mountains.
I will cast out Wisdom and reject Learning.
My thoughts shall wander in the Great Void.
(Chi K’ang, A.D. 223–262, as cited in Waley, 1947)
In common with the sanyassin, the Taoist sage is a superior outlaw who has freed his mind from distinctions, from good and evil, life and death, pleasure and pain. But the Chinese view differs from the Indian in that the sage need not necessarily abandon his worldly duties, for as “king without and sage within” he can continue in outward observance of the conventions though inwardly free from their compulsions. “If the mind is without wind and waves, everywhere are blue mountains and green trees” (Saikontan, 291).5
In Chinese and Indian culture the “superior outlaw” was in the social order but not of it in the sense that society itself usually recognized him and even honored him. For the culture admitted the relativity and the limitations of its own conventions, and could assent in theory to the validity of a viewpoint beyond its understanding, as one might extrapolate an outside to a closed space of which one knows only the inside boundaries. But the cultures of the West, both Christian and secular, have never really had a place for the “upper outlaw,” a fact that has surprisingly far-reaching and disastrous results. Christian theology has persistently identified the system of conventions—the moral order—not only with the will but also with the very nature of the Absolute, and has been resolutely opposed to any idea of God as beyond good and evil. The secular cultures of the West are in an even worse state, for having abandoned the belief in God there remains absolutely nothing but the system of conventions. Thus the secular state recognizes nothing outside its jurisdiction, nothing that “is not Caesar’s.” The Church admitted a degree of supra-conventionality in God through the doctrine of his infinite love and forgiveness. Behind the Law stood the Person who made the Law, an understanding heart rather than a blind principle. But the secular state cannot admit anything higher than Law, and thus is ever in danger of becoming a mechanism without mercy.
To identify the system of conventions with the Absolute is to weight them with excessive authority, and is actually a danger to the system, somewhat as an electric wire will burn out when the current is too strong for it. The Western mind seems to have difficulty in thinking in other terms than extremes—true or false, right or wrong—and thus finds it hard to see that a conventional principle can be true and important without being absolutely true and absolutely important. Thus when there arise between the man and system, the types of conflict described above there is no release save through catastrophic revolt against the whole system. But such revolutions “throw out the baby with the bath water,” and usually establish worse tyrannies than those that they remove, since they go to the opposite extreme, and every extreme is a tyranny.
This Asian parallel suggests, then, that the most important function of a psychotherapy is to deliver people from the inevitable warping and the inevitable violence done to them in the course of their upbringing and education. It is not simply to ease the process of acculturation for intractable individuals, to “adjust them to the group.” We must recognize that acculturation is at once a blessing and a curse, that it is both a necessity and a positively splendid achievement, which, however, entails the price of damage and danger. But as meat salted for preservation may be unsalted for eating, so the wise society provides a cure for the ill effects of social discipline—an initiation, a therapy, for the fully cultured adult, which releases him from compulsive identification with the system of conventions.
One may ask whether Western psychotherapy is in a position to fulfill this function. In some respects it begins to be so, as, for example, in its emphasis on self-acceptance and in its faith in the self-healing properties of the psyche. But its official “schools” seem, as yet, to have a long way to go, and this not only because of the still prevalent notion that its role is to provide adjustment to social norms. The chief difficulty is that the standard systems of psychotherapy—Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian, as well as the more physiologically oriented systems of “orthodox” psychiatry—are still all too unconscious of their own identification with some of the more basic social conventions. One might say that these systems have an unanalyzed Unconscious whose contents are primarily intellectual, consisting of unexamined assumptions and premises derived from the philosophy and scientific theory of the nineteenth century. These include those conceptions of time, motion, causality, progress, history, and human nature that appear all too easily to be laws of nature rather than conventions of thought. For many years it has been fashionable to underrate the power of ideas as factors in producing neurosis, and the emphasis has been laid on the traumatic experiences of childhood, a fashion reflecting the theoretical assumption that physiology is more “real” than ideology. But the therapist can no longer neglect the force of ideas, and especially of unconsciously accepted ideas. He must be a philosophical analyst as well as a psychoanalyst—and this he cannot be unless he is himself philosophically “analyzed.” He must be able to reveal the conflicts arising from the patient’s unconscious self-identification with his conventional history, with his identity in time, with his conventionally delineated “body,”6 and with many other conceptual entities.
Little can be done in this direction unless Western thought can overcome its characteristic fear that the only alternative to the conventional systems is total chaos. Thus many readers of the above may have formed the impression that the real, concrete, and nonconceptual world (corresponding in our analogy to the Rorschach blot) is in fact a disorder, a lawless and directionless wasteland. But this, again, is but another symptom of unconscious acceptance of a conventional pattern of thought that provides “con” as the only alternative to “pro.” Both order and disorder belong to maya, to the category of conceptual projections upon a real world that altogether escapes the dualistic definitions of our thinking. Thus the one indispensable prerequisite for a therapy of this kind is the realization that man’s concrete identity can never be an object of formal knowledge, definition, and control. This realization forces him into a psychological trap where nature—in her kindness—virtually compels him to see that he has no other alternative than a leap into the dark. And this is that “leap of faith” that is essential to every creative action: not belief in a formally defined God or philosophical dogma, but trust in that most concrete unknown that is the atman, the actual self.
1. For this extension of the concept of a social institution I am largely indebted to the work of my colleague, Leo Johnson of Berkeley, California, from research in the field of the history of science.
2. As witness the intense difficulty of most patients in trying to describe the “peculiar feelings” that occasion their neurosis.
3. In the child this naturalness is still embryonic, and is similar in kind but not in quality to the naturalness of a “twice-born” adult who has “become again as a child.”
4. And thus “supernatural” and “meta-physical” in the proper sense of being above nature or physis when the word refers primarily to class, as in asking, “Of what nature is this?” Similarly, the immaterial is that which escapes the abstract category of matter or meter, and cannot be defined. Occidental conceptions of spirit relate it to the abstract rather than the concrete.
5. [Saikontan (Chinese—Caigentan) is a collection of aphorisms by Hong Zicheng, a Ming Dynasty scholar writing in the late 1500s. See Aitken and Kwok (2006) for a contemporary English translation—Eds.].
6. Since it is really a matter of opinion that I am “this” body as distinct from, e.g., a group of bodies (family or community), or that I am effectively confined within my skin.
Aitken, R., & Kwok, D. W. Y. (Trans.). (2006). Vegetable roots discourse: Wisdom from Ming China on life and living: The caigentan by Hong Zicheng. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard.
Waley, A. (Trans.). (1947). One hundred and seventy Chinese poems. London, UK: Constable.
From The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1956, 16(1), 63–67. Copyright © 1956 by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Reprinted with permission of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.