My thoughts, at first aimless, wandered at random, like a greyhound chasing butterflies. As a modicum of focus gradually developed, the noise of mid-Manhattan imperceptibly receded, and attention to inner experience magnified and intensified.
My meditation was interrupted by the shrill sound of the office buzzer.
In the waiting room I encountered a middle-aged man I shall call “Sam.” He was tall and gaunt with horn-rimmed glasses, a shaved head, and huge bags under his eyes. We exchanged a firm handshake and solid eye contact.
In my office Sam dove in. He had consulted with me because he felt profoundly alienated and utterly alone. Deeply grounded in both major schools of Zen, indefatigably committed to the truth; open, humble and sardonic; he was, from all accounts, an immensely talented and maverick Zen teacher who had trained closely with one of the great Buddhist teachers of the 20th century and embodied what he had learned over several decades of samurai Zen practice.
He had a melancholic and haunted air about him. He was riddled with intense anxiety and assaulted by dread. He also described feeling both alien and split in two: a skilled and admired Zen teacher and a scholar and poet and a “screwed up person” who “felt like a reject and a loser.” “Forever on the outside looking in,” certain that he “didn’t belong anywhere,” he craved love and felt a deep sense of failure—like a misfit, irremediably disconnected from the human race; longing for normalcy. He claimed he was “playing at living.” He admitted he married to have the “semblance of a life;” to “pass for normal with a cover.” And he felt invisible. Very invisible. In fact, he called himself “The Invisible Man.” I doubt you would even notice him, even if he were standing in your field of vision because he was so self-effacing he was easy to miss.
In our beginning sessions, I was immediately struck by how present he was. Nothing seemed to escape his attentive ears and watchful eyes. He listened deeply and was unusually open and disarmingly honest, down-to-earth, without pretense or guile. He displayed a non-defensiveness that many years later still deeply impresses me.
I also admired his self-awareness and his capacity for self-reflection. He had an unusual facility for exploring what he was experiencing, staying directly with a wide range of emotions and tracking patterns in relationships. I attributed this to his deep meditative practice and his capacity for direct experience more than to his formidable intellect.
In the early sessions I learned that he came by his pessimism, melancholy and loneliness honestly. Raised by his paternal grandparents, he had little contact with both parents, who were alcoholics. His father showed up occasionally drunk, was completely uninvolved with him, and offered no emotional or concrete assistance. “I hated my father beyond belief,” he said.
There was a “conspiracy of silence” about his mother: He was told she was dead. He was also warned “to hang up the phone if a strange woman called.” He suspected his mother was alive. He learned from his grandparents that when he was a baby his mother had used his skin as an ashtray and had beaten him with a brine-dipped switch. She left when he was three.
His paternal grandparents raised him on the outskirts of a metropolitan area on the West Coast. He led an intensely solitary childhood. His grandfather was private and hidden, an outwardly rational man who became a Christian Scientist
and secretly hoarded Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower magazines. His grandfather spent most of his time in his basement workshop, crafting hundreds of miniature sailing ships in bottles.
His grandmother was senile toward the end of his childhood and seemed superstitious and irrational. “She spent most of her time lying in bed among her large collection of dolls, wearing layers of house dresses [she] hardly took off and her Dodgers baseball cap.” When a friend of Sam’s came over to their house she jubilantly served strawberry ice cream on a block of frozen french fries.
His grandparents “hated each other, and hardly ever spoke.” The resounding abandonments and emotional neglect were “devastating.” Sam became ashamed and intolerant of his own needs. This led to massive self-deprivation. He convinced himself that going to college was “selfish.” He only applied to one college and thought he’d skip university, live with his grandparents, and be a typist and write poetry.
He assumed he “must have somehow been worthless to the core.” But he couldn’t figure out what he had done wrong. The shadow of essential badness and inadequacy stayed with him throughout his life; it was never touched or transformed despite decades of intensive and wholehearted Zen training and practice, leaving him feeling bereft and angry.
Sam drew great solace from language and ideas. He devoted his considerable talents to scholastic pursuits and athletics and graduated first in his high school class at 16.
“If you leave this house it will kill me,” his grandmother said. He applied to an Ivy League college, but never heard from it. Several months after the college acceptances were sent, he reached into the back of a cabinet for a cup and discovered an envelope. He pulled it out and noticed it was addressed to him. He opened it and it said he had received a complete scholarship. He felt his grandparents had betrayed him by hiding his acceptance letter.
“Childhood led to extreme alienation,” he told me. “I was never touched or reached. And I was filled with alienation and despair; the despair of never having a fulfilling life.”
After his freshmen year of stellar academic performance, he found out his mother was alive. “Would you like to meet your mother?” his inebriated father asked him over the phone. Sam was disturbed and angry but agreed to go.
When he met his mother she was drunk, which only deepened his revulsion. She told him he was better off without her. He left after she downed a row of sloe gin fizzes.
He was 17. And shattered.
The drunken meeting, the way he had been betrayed about his mother’s supposed death, and his abandonment by both parents induced a homicidal rage. He moved to Europe for a year, unable to speak and express the condition he was in, in his words, “catatonic.”
Upon his return to America he graduated with high honors from college at 20 and was accepted in a doctoral program in literature. He read all the literature on metaphor in English, French and German—including Max Black’s Language and Philosophy and Jacques Derrida’s “White Magic,” Ernst Cassirer’s Symbolic Forms and Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. When his doctoral advisor relocated, he told Sam to contact him in two weeks, after he settled into his new home. When Sam called, the advisor acted like they had never met and dumped him—another abandonment.
In his 20s, a friend introduced Sam to Zen. He took to it immediately. He read no Zen literature, not wanting to intellectualize or contaminate the process, and just meditated. At his first meditation retreat the teacher advised him, “Kill the watcher.” “Die on the cushion,” Eido Roshi told Sam, “and you’ll never have to die again.” Sam found this easy and natural, in part because it tragically replicated the annihilation of his being he had experienced with his parents and grandparents. Sam quit his newly acquired tenured professorship and became a full-time student of Zen.
At his first retreat he reached kensho—he had an enlightenment experience when he felt one with everything. The boundaries between inner and outer evaporated and he saw to the depths of and through his constructed sense of self. “I felt as if something like an earthquake or an implosion was about to happen,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography. “Everything around me looked exceedingly odd, as if the glue separating things had started to melt. By the time I got to my room I was weightless; there was no gravity. Then the earthquake or implosion, body and mind dropping off, occurred. There was an incredible explosion of light coming from inside and outside simultaneously, and everything disappeared into that light…there was no longer a here versus there, a this versus that…I understood nothing except that nothing would ever seem the same to me… And despite the fact that I had no understanding whatever of what had happened (nor do I now), this experience changed my life completely.”
His meditative practice and his insights continued to expand and ripen during his studies with Zen masters from several different traditions.
He taught a course on Buddhism. An older Japanese man sat in the front row all semester listening intently without saying a word. After the last class the man came up to Sam and invited him to tea. As Sam and Maezumi Roshi drank sake together Maezumi told Sam he was a Zen master and wanted Sam to be his dharma heir, a rare honor in which a student is chosen by his or her teacher to eventually be a successor. “Forget about it,” Sam said, “you’re drunk.”
Sam studied with Maezumi’s protégé and was eventually chosen to be one of his successors. Sam also received informal transmission from Soen Nakagawa, a roshi many consider the greatest Zen master of the 20th century, who told him he had had an enlightenment experience at his first retreat. Despite the fact that Sam was a Zen prodigy, he couldn’t answer the question one of his teachers asked that he sensed was central to his being: “What is it you want?”
“The question renders me dumbfounded,” he said.
After we had explored various possible meanings and functions I said, “I wonder if you exposed yourself because you were desperately trying to break through the horrific prison of invisibility, the wall of alienation between you and the rest of the world, so you could finally be seen.”
How could he know when he had been brutally abused and neglected?
Further relationships with several Zen masters increased Sam’s alienation. He left several he was slated to succeed when his teachers became embroiled in sexual or financial scandals. Whereas most of the students turned a blind eye to the way these men exploited female students sexually or used members of the community to build a spiritual empire, Sam refused to compromise his principles in order to keep his standing with the teachers and in the community. He exposed and left each teacher, even though he was slated to be a successor. This undermined his position and visibility in the rather cliquey American Zen community. He became again, an outcast; a Zen-master-without-a-temple. And, a man without a home. He reported, at the time, “I have no place to go. Returning to the real world,” he added, “was not a world to me.”
His father died several years later: They never reconciled and he was “guilty over hating him so much.” He had a “profound sense of nowhere to go” and that “nothing mattered.”
And then his wife betrayed him. When he found her in bed with another man it merely confirmed his deep-seated belief he was worthless and there was no place on earth for him. In psychoanalysis he realized he had never really been seen or emotionally touched by his wife.
Sam supported himself by leading meditation retreats and teaching literature and Zen in various colleges and universities. His students loved him, but he remained on the fringes of the Zen mainstream, as former students of his moved up the American Zen Buddhist ranks and garnered positions and teaching opportunities he rightfully deserved.
At the beginning of treatment Sam appeared vulnerable and terrified, tense and fragile. The source of his fear was not immediately apparent. It was not until later that I learned beneath the fear was shame. The origins of that humiliation took even longer to emerge.
Several months into the treatment, I learned that before Sam began psychotherapy with me he had been staying at an inn across the street from a Zen monastery. Years before, he had spent the night at the same inn after his marriage ceremony at the Zen center. Sam asked the roshi who ran the monastery, a man who credited Sam with inspiring his meditation practice, if he could live there and do intensive practice. The teacher said no. Sam was angry. Staying at the inn and being disconnected from the Zen center reminded him of his separation from his wife and his frustrated Zen path and was disturbing and disorienting. He felt rebuffed again in trying to find a place for himself.
In a shame-filled phone message Sam left for me he said he had the fantasy of exposing himself, of standing on the inn’s front porch and opening his robe. He called himself “weak and cowardly” for revealing this over the phone. A few weeks later in an actual session he admitted he had acted on this fantasy, and that was, in fact, the reason he initiated treatment.
He feared I would judge him and shame him. He was also terrified he would be sent to jail and his life would be over. When he talked about the incident he had a very concrete opinion of what he had done. He viewed it and judged it very literally. It was sick, he said, and perverted, and he was “bad.” I knew he was a kind and empathic man and not a danger to anyone. I tried to interest him in exploring the meaning of what he did. What did he feel before, during, and after he exposed himself and what was he trying to accomplish? In other words, what was the action saying?
After we had explored various possible meanings and functions, I said, “I wonder if you exposed yourself because you were desperately trying to break through the horrific prison of invisibility, the wall of alienation between you and the rest of the world, so you could finally be seen.”
He looked deeply relieved and moved. “I am so glad you said that,” he replied. I could sense his trust in me growing. I later learned that when I said this he felt truly “seen” for the first time. He noticeably relaxed, and the dread left his face and body. “It was a plea for help. I feel like I’m from a different planet…a weird mystic.”
Our sessions over the next six months had a remarkable openness and intimacy. We engaged in a transparent, no-holds-barred dialogue with minimum defensiveness and maximum honesty. An unusual fondness and respect developed between Sam and me. The therapeutic relationship—and the treatment—expanded. Themes of abandonment and neglect, passivity and invisibility took center stage. We got clearer about how his parents, his doctoral advisor, and some of his Zen teachers abandoned him, and how he neglected himself personally and professionally.
We both realized Dogen’s “Genjokoan” or “The Way of Everyday Life,” a seminal 13th century Zen text, resonated with how Sam felt:
To study the Buddha Way is to study the selfTo study the self is to forget the selfTo forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas
On a profound emotional level, Dogen’s famous words perfectly captured Sam’s neglect by his family of origin. This Zen text mirrored Sam’s experience of himself and his view of the world when he realized, midway through psychoanalysis, that many people in his life (from his mother and father to his graduate advisor and a Zen teacher) had forgotten about him.
“Forgetting the self,” in Zen, refers to letting go of the pervasive, taken-for-granted, and silently debilitating, self-referential self-consciousness that alienates most of us in Western culture from each other and ourselves. Sam’s highly developed capacity, in this sense, to “forget” himself and forego such self-consciousness aided him in being deeply engaged and manifesting an unusual presence. I am certain it helped him access his buried history of trauma in psychoanalysis and explore a wide range of emotions with little judgment and great depth.
His strategy to protect himself against further re-traumatization…was to forget about and abandon himself. If there was no self, then there was no one who had been forsaken.
But in ordinary parlance outside of Zen circles, “forget oneself” has, of course, a more harmful connotation: It can mean to neglect ourselves; to fall asleep to ourselves. Sam, unfortunately, also experienced this kind of self-forgetfulness. And the consequences were disastrous.
His strategy to protect himself against further re-traumatization, what psychoanalyst Masud Khan in the Privacy of the Self called his “practice of self-cure,” was to forget about and abandon himself. If there was no self, then there was no one who had been forsaken. Sam was self-neglectful, inadvertently repeating what had traumatized him in his youth. He didn’t need his mother, father, academic advisor or Zen teacher to dump him; Sam beat them to the punch. He was an incredible survivor, but deeply passive. While he felt “invisible” and longed to be “seen,” he dismissed his feelings and his needs, “feasting on crumbs” and settling for emotional deprivation while using meditation to more wholeheartedly engage whatever else he was experiencing.
Sam was very skilled at being-intimate-with-this-moment, appreciating everything from the birds serenading him in the early morning outside his window to the taste of a cup of tea, yet he unwittingly deprived himself of much human contact, fulfillment and joy.
The analyst’s own willingness to examine his or her assumptions and biases, especially those that may interfere with understanding the patient, is crucial to the success of therapy. Ever since Freud, psychotherapists have known they can interfere with the progress of psychotherapy. Such countertransference, the therapist’s characteristic ways of organizing his or her experience and responding to the patient, could be viewed as the therapist’s contribution to obstacles in the therapy.
Sam and I worked our way through a countertransferential knot, what one might think of as addressing moments of failure, and that intensified our work and aided Sam in transforming his self-deprivation. As Sam’s trust in me grew, his massive unmet dependency needs emerged. He became very passive and needy, adopting a stance of pseudoincompetence regarding self-care and navigating the world. He acted like he could not manage any of the practical aspects of his life and other people were responsible for taking care of him. Like many neglected people, his (self) deprivation became intolerable and morphed into entitlement, as psychoanalyst Peter Shabad aptly noted in Despair and the Return of Hope. In other words, the world frustrated me, now you owe me. I was supposed to make up for what Sam never received from his parents or grandparents.
At first I approached what Jody Davies and Mary Frawley in Treating the Adult Survivor of Sexual Abuse, call the “entitled child demanding rescue,” by trying to be empathic and attuned to his neglect. But his neediness and sense of entitlement expanded. Repressed wishes for emotional nurturance he never received became entitled needs that I and other people must provide now. I subtly constrained myself by trying to override my irritation about his entitlement, rather than studying it. Striving to be empathic and responsive trumped understanding the source of his emotional hunger and his self-damaging response to it. I reacted to my irritation, which had perhaps shifted, at times into low-level anger, by slightly withdrawing from him when he was highly needy.
…analysis had touched core issues and feelings that decades of intense and sincere meditation practice missed, like his abuse and neglect and self-depriving behavior. He began taking himself more seriously and being less self-neglectful.
We eventually explored this pattern. At first we discussed it gingerly. He was afraid of being abandoned by me. As I responded without defensiveness to his muted irritation, he elaborated. His pseudo-incompetent, passive stance—a “going on strike”—was designed to preserve a snapshot of his unwitnessed pain and keep alive the hope other people could witness what had been done to him so that someone might save him and be the mother he never had. As I understood this on an emotional level, and he felt seen and heard, he no longer needed to embrace his symptom as a way of preserving a snapshot of his unwitnessed emotional pain. And this enabled him to begin taking more responsibility for his own life.
Several months later he didn’t show up for three weeks because of sickness and snowstorms. In between he called and we had phone sessions. At the beginning of the third phone session, he said, “Please don’t abandon me.”
The irony hit me like a gale force wind. “I’m staring at my empty couch,” I gently but firmly said, “You are the one doing the abandoning … Are you abandoning yourself the way you have always been abandoned?”
“I never thought about it that way,” he said. “I think there is something profoundly disturbing and true about that.”
He went through a phase of fear and depression. Depression as he awakened to what he had done to himself; fear that he would never get beyond self-neglect.
“I got frightened that for ages I had abandoned my life,” he said. “I realized my response to being abandoned was to abandon myself and neglect myself. From psychoanalysis I’m learning that the shadow side of Buddhism is the notion of no-self, which can lead to self-abandonment and self-neglect.” He believed this aspect of psychoanalysis was consistent with Zen master Bodhidharma’s interpretation of the precept of not killing as “not nursing a view of extinction,” not trying to eliminate aspects of our humanness, realizing that at best we integrate and come to terms with, rather than get rid of troubling experiences.
Sam then began talking about how analysis had touched core issues and feelings that decades of intense and sincere meditation practice missed, like his abuse and neglect and self-depriving behavior. He began taking himself more seriously and being less self-neglectful. He sought out companionship and became less isolated. He also focused on constructing a life that reflected his current passions and interests.
He now wanted a life, felt entitled to one, and was taking steps to have one. “I have fantasies about having a relationship and even sex.” And he became more available for each. I learned when he was younger he enjoyed socializing, but had fallen into a harmful habit of self-protective isolation. He moved closer to the Zen community he had founded, where he had been a non-resident teacher. He not only appeared more buoyant and less melancholic, he was more visible, less isolated and more engaged. He was eager to make his life his own.
Toward the end of treatment, Sam said: “It is a source of great pathos to reflect that without psychoanalysis I might have died without having been reunited with myself! And in that sense, without having truly lived. I don’t feel divided anymore,” he added, “and I finally know what I want: To be at ease within my own skin.” He felt “joy,” he said, the joy, I suspect, of a man, who was on the road to living a life he could honestly call his own.