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Psychoanalysis, existential phenomenology, and the great spiritual traditions are kindred disciplines devoted to discovering, exploring, and living in accordance with the depth dimensions of existence. Reverence for the depths of Being and being human serves as the guiding ethos of these traditions. The depth dimension is a metaphor for ways of being that transcend our usual ways, defenses, and identity, together with everything experienced thereby, including aspects of self and world still undiscovered. Always potentially accessible, contact with the depths tends to be foreclosed unconsciously by our conventional existence. Appreciating the wisdom and transformative power of a living relationship with the depth dimensions, these disciplines endeavored to create reliable ways of going beyond the habitual, defensive, and surface. They
Dr. Adams practices, teaches, and supervises psychotherapy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
developed analogous methods of practice involving a radical openness to what is. Psychoanalytic evenly suspended attention, the phenomenological attitude, and meditative awareness are consonant practices which aspire to cultivate a privileged mode of awareness, namely, revelatory openness wedded with the clarity of unknowing. To explore this special open awareness, I offer a collaborative dialogue between psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the world's spiritual traditions (especially Buddhism and Christianity). Principal witnesses include Freud, Bion, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, the Buddha, Jesus, Meister Eckhart, and William Blake.