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In this paper, we consider the classical Chinese metaphor of “ox herding” as a path to Zen enlightenment. In so doing, we find a telling analogy to the path to the mature and developed practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
In offering this meditation on an extended metaphor, we take a position which is at once in our experience universally embraced among our colleagues and at the same time — in the current clinical/professional climate — unfashionable and often all but disowned. (See, for example, recent references to the recommendation for “evidence-based psychotherapy” and the controversy it has engendered [Shedler, 2013a, 2013b, and 2017; McCay, 2017; Mazur, 2017]). Our view is that the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is an art and not a science. It is, to be sure, an art supported by science, by whatever empirical regularities science may turn up.1 (We use the terms “psychotherapy” and psychoanalytic psychotherapy interchangeably. We assume practitioners of other forms of psychotherapy will have their own positions on the relationship between the art and the science of their practice.) But it is not science.
Our conviction grows out of a personal immersion — as psychoanalytic practitioners continually involved in the development and the contemporary sub-culture of our shared art. Our view grows too out of ever-interesting and ever-fruitful personal collaborations and ongoing interaction among the authors (see for example Lin, and Seiden [2015a, 2015b] and Seiden and Fried [2015]).
We start from the notion that working through the stages of self-mastery and self-transcendence involved in developing as a Zen adept and eventually enlightened master is also an art. The process by which this development takes place has powerful analogy with the development of any serious art (be it painting, dance, music, poetry, photography), where ultimately, in W. B. Yeats's felicitous phrase, one cannot tell the dancer from the dance. That is, where the art and