One of the reasons I decided to pursue full clinical training in psychoanalysis as a CORST candidate was that, as a cultural anthropologist doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Sherpa people of Nepal, I was deeply impressed by the richness and profundity of the Tibetan Buddhism I encountered there. Not wanting to commit myself as an adherent to that tradition (as some Western “seekers” of my generation did), I nonetheless wanted to pursue a path from within my own cultural tradition that offered something like the disciplined investigation of subjectivity and the way toward a fulfilling life in a spirit of fearless inquiry and truth seeking that characterizes the best of Tibetan Buddhism. In psychoanalysis, I found a practice that embraced many of the same assumptions about the nature of human life and consciousness and offered a method of self-knowing that had the power to alleviate suffering—in myself and in those for whom I could undertake the role of healer.
The Tibetan form of Buddhism is unique and differs considerably from that found in such traditions as Zen or the Theravada schools of Southeast Asia; and on the face of it, with its elaborate iconography, rituals, and pantheon, it seems a far cry from the austerity of “original” Buddhism. The Vajrayana doctrine of Buddhism that came to Tibet from India already fully formed was a synthesis of three traditions, each arising from successive waves of religious innovation and reform, of which it was the third. It first entered Tibet in the seventh century CE as a state-sponsored royal cult at the pinnacle of Tibet's political and military might in its vast empire and, then again, after the collapse of the royal dynasty in the ninth century during a second wave of religious renewal effected by the proselytizing of great Indian masters in the tenth and eleventh centuries. At about the same time, Buddhism disappeared from India under the twin onslaught of popular Hinduism and Islamic incursions. The Vajrayana, or “Thunderbolt Vehicle,” survived only on the isolated and forbidding vast, but sparsely populated, Tibetan plateau.
The Vajrayana tradition was the result of three great waves of Buddhist innovation in India, which were all encompassed in a form that also, in Tibet, incorporated many aspects of the indigenous Tibetan pre-Buddhist “shamanistic” religious system to create a highly distinctive syncretism. I will look at each of the three layers that compose the complete Tibetan Buddhist amalgam—the Theravada, the Mahayana, and the Vajrayana traditions—each tradition offering an analysis of the human condition and a set of values that have much in common with psychoanalysis as it is practiced today.
The first 500 years after the Buddha lived and taught in the sixth century BCE, his doctrine flourished in monastic communities where the ideal aim was to follow the Sakya sage's path and achieve enlightenment for oneself as an “arhat.” The key, through renunciation and the observance of an ethical code, study, and meditation, was to recognize the nonexistence of the self as an inherent, independently existing entity. This is not nihilism but rather an effort to disengage one's consciousness from the fantasy of a self whose existence and success form the center of one's world, and which harbors desires and attachments that inevitably lead to suffering. In other words, this Buddhist value of selflessness was a critique of narcissism and of the investment in irrational and excessive defenses of the ego that parallels a paramount value of psychoanalysis.
All the psychological disorders leading to unhappiness and dysfunction that we treat, not just the narcissistic disorders, have the effect of cutting oneself off from rewarding and spontaneous relations with others in the interest of protecting a threatened ego or self. The desires and aversions that motivate action that leads to frustration, disappointment, and feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and despair arise from an overprotective attitude toward the self and an overinvestment in both urges and fears originating in fantasies that have, at least at one point in the person's life, served the supposed interests of that self.
If this imagined self is recognized as illusory, as all forms of Buddhism teach, then the rigidity and clinging that keep us from interacting with others in a satisfying way can be reduced. In Buddhism, this is achieved through both intellectual, philosophical reflection and through the direct experience of “no self” achievable in the practice of meditation. In psychoanalysis, too, the illusory self's hegemony is diminished through both insight and the relationship to the analyst/therapist. In the ego psychological tradition, the rigid and automatic ego defenses are modified so that choices can be made more freely; in the self and relational schools, a damaged and fragile self that fears real interaction with others is bolstered through empathic responsiveness; and in the Lacanian tradition, of course, the ego is seen as a “false self” in a way that closely parallels Buddhist formulation. The Theravada Buddhist tradition that prevails in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia focuses on this essential Buddhist teaching.
Robert A. Paul, Ph.D., is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University, and senior faculty and training/supervising analyst, Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute.
In the early years of the first millennium CE, a new idea arose in the Buddhist world, leading to the development of the Mahayana school. This new idea was the bodhisattva ideal. For Mahayana thinkers, it was not sufficient, nor consistent with enlightenment, to seek salvation through enlightenment for oneself only. Rather, it was thought, an enlightened being would feel too much compassion for the suffering of others and would therefore choose not to attain the pure nonexistence of nirvana, but would instead choose to remain in the world in order to help lead all sentient beings toward enlightenment. The wish to achieve enlightenment so as to be of service to others in the quest for salvation is called the arising of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment; and a being who, through meritorious action over countless lives, has achieved the goal is called a bodhisattva, a hero of enlightenment.
We ourselves must be empathically attuned…, and feel compassion for their suffering, while scrupulously avoiding either aversion or clinging attachment to them.
The value of compassion thus enters the stream of Indian Buddhist thought, based on the insight that all beings are devoid of independent self-sufficient essence but are dependent on others for their own transitory existence in this life. Having overcome the misguided investment in the illusory self and its desires and aversions, the person becomes capable of a compassionate identification with others and wishes to free them from suffering. The complex pantheon of Mahayana Buddhism, which prevails in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, insofar as these countries are Buddhist, is made up in large part of bodhisattvas who have vowed to help lead people who worship or are guided by them towards enlightenment and the end of suffering.
One such bodhisattva is the Great Compassionate One, Avalokitesvara, who is regarded as the ancestor of the Tibetans and is the patron deity, reincarnated in the person of the Dalai Lama. He looks down on suffering humanity with the love and devotion of a mother for her children. We, too, as analysts/therapists, not only expect that as the narcissism of our patients wanes, their compassion for others will grow. We ourselves must be empathically attuned to them, and feel compassion for their suffering, while scrupulously avoiding either aversion or clinging attachment to them.
The final component that created the Vajrayana tradition is that of Tantrism, flourishing in India in the second half of the first millennium CE. The Tantric texts not only introduced yoga and various “magical” practices into the religion but also featured the extensive use of sexual and violent symbolism (and sometimes not just symbolism). Psychoanalysis, too, recognizes lust, rage, dread, horror, and other strong emotions as ineradicable aspects of the human condition; and, like the Tantrists, we seek not to exclude and deny these, but rather to rescue them from the cellars and attics of the mind, to put them to use where appropriate, and otherwise to transform them through sublimation into symbolic form so that they cease to subvert our more pro-social aims but can actually serve and energize them.
Finally, psychoanalysis shares with all forms of Buddhism a commitment to the idea that the best way to spend this short human life we have been given so improbably in the vast and lifeless universe, is a relentless, long-term, uncompromising quest to understand ourselves and our place in the world of sentient beings, and how best to make use of this precious gift for ourselves and for the service of our fellows.