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I enjoyed reading Elizabeth de Bianchedi's paper, “The Passionate Psychoanalyst or Learning from the Emotional Experience,” and Charles Dithrich's response in the Fall 2001 issue of fort da. In a spirit of dialogue, I want to explore in particular their ideas on the mystical dimensions of the psychoanalytic process, some rooted in Bion and Winnicott. One prism I will use is that of Buddhism, which developed in India, and has a 2500-year-old philosophical and practice tradition. Zen Buddhism — a meditative practice and way of living that reached fruition in T'ang period China, found fertile soil in Japan, and took root in the West — offers perspectives that are thought-provoking and may be enriching.
The ideas in this brief essay coalesced over the course of several stimulating exchanges with candidates in a class on Winnicott that I taught at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Winnicott's (/1965a) paper “Communicating and Not-Communicating Leading to a Theory of Opposites” was particularly inspiring. One person saw the incommunicado self as a wellspring out of which all things emerge (and perhaps to which they return). Another felt a phenomenological resonance with the idea and spoke about the experience of listening to Ravel. The former is a metaphorical understanding, the latter a phenomenological experience — both are important. I want to explore two questions. First, does Winnicott's (/1965a) “hard fact” that, in our heart of hearts, we are an “… isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, unfound “… (p. 187) adequately describe and illuminate such metaphors and experiences? Second, does associating mysticism with an incommunicado isolate do justice to mysticism and psychoanalysis?
As one candidate described it, Winnicott seems to refer to difference, the encounter with otherness, the “hard fact” of how solitary and alone we are. I think this puts us in touch with our own difference and separateness as well. This realization can