You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When in 2003 Jeremy Safran published a collection of papers on Buddhism by psychoanalysts and Buddhist meditators, he subtitled it: an unfolding dialogue. That was clearly a correct description. The psychoanalysts involved included such well-known figures as Stephen Mitchell, Stuart Pizer, James Grotstein and Owen Renik. But every one of them, on both sides of the ‘dialogue’, with the single exception of Neville Symington in Australia, was American. For UK analytic thinkers, it was as if we were overhearing an interesting conversation taking place in another room.
This dialogue had its roots in the 1950s, when D. T. Suzuki in particular brought Zen Buddhism to the United States, and independent psychoanalysts such as Fromm and Horney recognized something of the richness and psychological profundity of Buddhist thought. Since then, there has been a big influx of Tibetans and teachers from other schools, and Buddhism has quietly established itself in religious America at a more deeply integrated level of seriousness than has yet been possible (though there are many growing-points) in relatively irreligious Britain. And of course I am begging a question in putting it like that. Is Buddhism a religion?
The return of Buddhism onto the American psychoanalytic scene, in the past 25 years or so, links with the rise of ‘relational’ psychoanalysis, which finds a principal ancestor in Winnicott (so the British don't need to feel left out entirely). Winnicott's ‘no such thing as a baby’ might be the motto above the gates of relational psychoanalysis, and the no-self doctrine of Buddhism (we never are, we only ‘inter-are’, in Thich Nhat Hanh's term) fits neatly into place with such thinking. The relationalist's emphasis, that psychoanalysis is the co-creation of two subjectivities, can find support and inspiration in both sources.
Mark Epstein has been a major contributor to this development, and he acknowledges Winnicott, along with relationalists such as Robert Stolorow, as a key