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As Phillips makes clear, the relentless demand to make relationships flawless squeezes the life out of them. With this insight, psychoanalysis and Buddhism are of a piece.
Buddhist psychology, after all, takes this core sense of identity confusion as its starting point and further claims that all of the usual efforts to achieve solidity, certainty, or security are ultimately doomed.
The essential point is that as long as beings are driven by greed, hatred, and delusion—forces represented in the center of the circle by a pig, a snake, and a rooster attempting to devour one another—they will remain ignorant of their own Buddha-nature; ignorant of the transitory, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory nature of the world; and bound to the Wheel of Life.
From a psychodynamic perspective, the Hell Realms are vivid descriptions of aggressive and anxiety states; beings are seen burning with rage or tortured by anxiety. They do not recognize their torturers as products of their own minds, however. They believe themselves to be tortured by outside forces over which they have no control.
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
The Buddha’s first truth highlights the inevitability of humiliation in our lives and his second truth speaks of the primal thirst that makes such humiliation inevitable. His third truth promises release and his fourth truth spells out the means of accomplishing that release. In essence, the Buddha was articulating a vision of a psyche freed from narcissism.
We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease. We are all engaged in a futile struggle to maintain ourselves in our own image. The crises in our lives inevitably reveal how impossible our attempts to control our destinies really are.
Birth, old age, sickness, and death are distasteful not just because they are painful but also because they are humiliating. They violate our self-regard and are blows to our narcissism.
Common to all schools of thought, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, the unifying theme of the Buddhist approach is this remarkable imperative: “Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.”
Beginning with the in and out breath, proceeding to bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, consciousness, and finally the felt sense of I, meditation requires the application of bare attention to increasingly subtle phenomena.
Whereas psychoanalysis takes the therapeutic relationship and cultivates it through the power of the therapist’s analytic attitude, meditation takes actual qualities of mind and cultivates them internally so that the person’s powers of observation are increased. With these increased contemplative powers, the meditator is then able to scan and to hold what can best be described as the building blocks of self-experience, the basic cravings that give rise to the sense of self. In so doing, one’s deeply ingrained sense of self is profoundly and irrevocably transformed.
To work something through means to change one’s view. If we try instead to change the emotion, or the precipitants of the emotion, we may achieve some short-term success; but we remain bound, by the forces of attachment and aversion, to the very feelings that we are struggling to be free of.
When we begin therapy, just as when we begin meditation, our emotions often seem dangerous to us. The clue to this, in a therapeutic encounter, is the description of an emotion as if it were an independent entity. “This incredible anger came up in me,”
When the attention is trained on the emotion in question—in particular, on the bodily experience of that emotion—it gradually ceases to be experienced as a static and threatening entity and becomes, instead, a process that is defined by time as well as by space.
