Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

by Mark Epstein

Although Winnicott wrote extensively about the importance of mother-child attunement, he also came to a profound appreciation of how vital it is for a mother to be able to let her child down. A parent has to be willing to disappoint, he found, because disappointment, as the Buddha also said, is inevitable. In so doing, in letting a child down, in being truthful about one’s inability to meet all of one’s child’s needs, a disappointing parent moves a child toward a capacity to cope with everyday life. In one of his final papers, Winnicott wrote movingly of how a child’s primitive anger at his parent’s imperfections can turn into empathy. The critical ingredient for this transformation is the parent’s ability not to take the child’s anger personally, a Buddhist idea if there ever was one.

There is no obvious sound to one hand clapping; the koan conveys a sense of the emptiness infused with compassion—the engaged silence—at the heart of the Buddha’s awakening.

Hakuin was reminding people of the benevolent kindness of the bodhisattvas, those beings who have already awakened to their relational natures and remain in the everyday world. According to some believers, their energy is available even when one is in the midst of one’s own suffering—one has only to ask for it.

Kuan Yin is thought of as “she who hears our cries,” and is one who responds with a mother’s sympathy to our troubles.

If we can acknowledge the truth of our suffering, we will spontaneously reach out. We will lift a hand in the manner of a drowning person and create the possibility of receiving help. The bodhisattvas, like the cuckoo, are already there for the asking.

We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones.

As Wilhelm Reich demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on the formation of character, the personality is built on these points of self-estrangement; the paradox is that what we take to be so real, our selves, is constructed out of a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge.

When those aspects that have been unconsciously refused are returned, when they are made conscious, accepted, tolerated, or integrated, the self can then be at one, the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears, and the force of compassion is automatically unleashed.

As the famous Zen master Dogen has said: To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others.

Long recognized as the crucial stepping-stone between infantile dependence and the ability to tolerate being alone, transitional space has been called an “intermediate area of experience”10 that permits the child a feeling of comfort when separated from the parents.

The transitional object—the teddy bear, stuffed animal, blanket, or favorite toy—makes possible the movement from a purely subjective experience to one in which other people are experienced as truly “other.” Neither “me” nor “not-me,” the transitional object enjoys a special in-between status that the parents instinctively respect. It is the raft by which the infant crosses over to the understanding of the other.

Many qualities of the transitional object—its ability to survive intense love and hate, its resistance to change unless changed by the infant, its ability to provide refuge and warmth, and its gradual relinquishment—are all shared by bare attention. Like the transitional object for the infant, bare attention enjoys a special status for the meditator: it, too, is an in-between phenomenon.

Like the transitional object, bare attention can be a constant. Neither intense emotion nor intense stimulation need disrupt it, because its mirrorlike clarity can reflect whatever enters its field.

The transitional object that Winnicott described enables the infant to manage the intense feelings of desire and hatred that must inevitably be faced if the child is to come to terms with the realization that the parent is really an other and that the child, by implication, is really a self.

The lesson for psychotherapy is that the therapist may well have as great an impact through her presence as she does through her problem-solving skills. Especially when the root of the patient’s emotional predicament lies in the basic fault, in experiences that were preverbal or unremembered and that left traces in the form of absence or emptiness, the therapist’s ability to fill the present moment with relaxed attentiveness is crucial. It is not just that such patients tend to be extraordinarily sensitive to any falseness in relating, but that they need this kind of attention in order to let themselves feel the gap within themselves. It is much too threatening otherwise.

The Buddhist word sunyata, or emptiness, has as its original, etymological meaning “a pregnant void, the hollow of a pregnant womb.” When a therapist is able to create such a fertile condition, through the use of her own silence, the patient cannot help but come in contact with that which is still unfinished and with which he is still identified, albeit unawares.

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person’s awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Taking my cue from the progress of meditation, I have found that the first task of working through from a Buddhist perspective is to uncover how the spatial metaphor of self is being used defensively to keep key aspects of the person at bay.

Thus, anger can be seen as one’s inability or unwillingness to use aggression to overcome a frustrating obstacle, while anxiety can be understood as an inability or unwillingness to admit hunger or desire.