Status Updates From Awakening and Insight: Zen ...

Buddhist methods, in contrast to therapy’s focus on personal relational and identity themes, are designed to alleviate suffering and increase compassion in terms of broader universal themes. In all of its methods, Buddhism focusses attention on craving, aversion, and ignorance as experienced particularly through creating, sustaining, and defending the illusion of a separate, stable, independent self.

Aspects of interdependence in Zen and Jung

In one example of how this interdependence can be traced in psychotherapy, Kopf (1998) compares Jung’s account of the transferential phenomena of therapy with the account of katto (vines) from Zen Master Dogen’s analysis of the master-disciple relationship in the chapter of Katto Shobogenzo.

[in client/therapist relationship] One person transfers a whole context or story, or a particular feeling state, to another and believes that it originates with the other. Countertransference is simply the reaction of the second person to the transference of the first, especially in the feeling states and images of the second person.

Not only the complexes of the unconscious, but also the ego complex of conscious awareness can throw us off balance through defensive emotional patterning

Dukkha


The First Noble Truth taught by the Buddha is often translated into English as ‘Life is suffering.’


Dukkha refers literally to a state of being off-center or out of balance, like a wheel riding off its axle or a bone riding out of its socket.

If you explain suffering only in organic terms, then you exclude the possibility that you can change your life through changing your mind.

Buddhism teaches that our suffering arises from the illusion that the individual self is enduring and needs to be protected

Unique among religions, Buddhism has developed systematic methods for investigating the roots of suffering and other psychological responses in ways that are valid and reliable. The methods of Buddhism are objective and empirical and do not contradict the metaphysics of science

A great deal of harm has already occurred as a result of embracing biological determinism as a fundamental explanation of human suffering.

When people seek psychotherapeutic or other kinds of psychosocial help, they now come with vague theories of biological determinism such as ‘I am depressed because I inherited depression from my mother’s family’ or ‘I have an addiction because my genetic history is loaded for substance abuse’...

The spiritual problem of the end of the century

Carl Jung more than once said that science is the ‘spiritual adventure of our age’...

Science did not transcend metaphysics, however. It created its own metaphysics with widespread cultural consequences.

An American dread of suffering, based on ignorance about what suffering teaches and how it can be transformed, has recently led to more and more physicalistic and materialist explanations of our pain and adversity.

Throughout my development as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, I have been sustained and renewed through my own practice and study of Buddhism—as a student first of Zen and now of Vipassana. I became a Zen Buddhist in a formal ceremony in 1971, nine years before I received my Ph.D. in psychology in 1980, fifteen years before I received my diploma as a Jungian analyst

Although my training as a psychoanalyst is Jungian, I have for many years been associated with institutions and settings that were mainly Freudian, object-relational and/or intersubjective. In the following paper, I mean to speak to the goals of psychotherapy and Buddhism in ways that are common to all analytic approaches to psychotherapy

THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN SUFFERING
A perspective from psychotherapy and Buddhism
By Polly Young-Eisendrath


In my view, there are two main objectives that are shared by Buddhism and long-term analytic psychotherapy: the gain of a perspective and skill that alleviate personal suffering in everyday life, and an increase of compassion for self and others.

As a rule Christian scholars engaged in the dialogue with Buddhism tend to more tolerant view of heresies in their own tradition than do scholars closer to the centers of orthodoxy.

When Jung saw flying saucers as symbolic of a desire for salvation from without, and belief in an afterlife as the symbolic anticipation of the
desire for an ideal society, he was thinking from the same basic posture as that which produced the Christian heaven or the Buddhist nirvana—just offering a different, more radically anthropocentric explanation of the phenomena.

Jung’s refusal to distinguish God from the collective unconscious
qua psychic phenomena begins to look less and less loyal to the facts.

He [Jung] knew what it was to trust in the revelations of dreams; he consulted the I Ching, used the services of a dowser (successfully),
and had more than the normal share of paranormal experiences.

A third assumption that corroborates the monarchic quality of the Jungian psyche is the idea that archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious tend to seek completion in their opposite (reflecting the tendency of conscious and unconscious mind towards wholeness), crystallizing in symbols of the Self that take the form of a union of opposites

...‘the destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality.

This archetype, the Self, he came to see, has as its ‘psychic equivalent’ the image of God: ‘The symbols of divinity coincide with those of the Self: what, on the one side, appears as a psychological experience signifying psychic wholeness, expresses on the other side the idea of God.

The monarchic psyche

The ontological status of ego and Self in Jung’s writings is ambivalent at best, muddled at worst. Depending on the context, they are alluded to as energies, forces, functions, classes of phenomena, archetypes, or entities

As a result, Jung took a dim view of group therapy

Undiscovered Self, uneradicable ego

However much Jung insisted that ego-consciousness was only one part of the psyche, whose true center was the Self, in an important sense his psychology—both in theory and in practice—remained centered on the concrete individual as the subject of the first person singular. He always made it clear that his first duty as a therapist was to the individual.

"We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew"
C. G. Jung