Response to Helen Morgan

I am most grateful to Helen Morgan for her thoughtful response to my paper. She raises important issues and questions, a full discussion of which would occupy us for a long time. Perhaps it would be worth a symposium some time to consider the essential differences between the Western and Eastern minds, for different they are, and as Christopher Bollas expresses it, in the quotation shared by Morgan, they lead ‘to profound differences in the way the world is viewed’ (Bollas, 2013, p. 7). Can the gap be bridged somehow, at least in part?

Many attempts at such a rapprochement have been made over the past century (and more), and yet the differences remain as stark as ever and far from resolved in any satisfactory way. Morgan speaks of the need for a paradigm shift, ‘like the leap from an earth- to a sun-centered universe’. It is something to think about. But I wonder if this isn't what Jung was proposing in relocating the psyche's centre out of the ego to the self? Wasn't this precisely such a paradigm shift? Maybe we still haven't grasped his proposal in full. Morgan believes he made an advance in this direction but didn't go far enough.

What I am suggesting in my paper is that a possible way to bridge between Jungian and Zen approaches to ‘liberation’ (to use the Buddhist term) might be to consider the late stages of the individuation process, as conceived by Jung, as being quite similar to the stages of development shown in the series of illustrations of the classic Zen Buddhist Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. Both describe a development from position ‘A’ to position ‘O’ (‘A’ standing for the beginning of the process, and ‘O’ standing for the endpoint of the ensuing development). Both share the notion of a developmental process. So it seemed to me reasonable to think about how the stages described by Zen Buddhist practitioners might correspond to experiences we have in the analytic process and its extensions. This is what I speak about in my paper. Of course, much more can be