Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

by Mark Epstein

These beings, which embody the ego’s aggressive strivings, are trying to garner the fruits of the gods through relentless competitive force.

They represent the energy that is needed to overcome a frustration, change a situation, or make contact with a new experience.

ego and aggression

aggressive nature of ego is not seen as the problem; this energy is in fact valued and is necessary in the spiritual path.

meditation practice seeks to kidnap the various ego functions, reorienting them away from attempts at possession of “things” and toward the achievement of discriminating awareness.

In order to accomplish this, however, the ego functions themselves must first be freed.

As a representation of the neurotic mind, then, the Wheel of Life shows not just how beings can be self-indulgent but also how they hide from themselves.

The developing infant needs to hate in order to truly love, sexual passion must be lived in order to understand its limitations, fantasies of gratification of unfulfilled needs must be understood as fantasies in order for actual gratification to be appreciated, ego functions must be freed in order to use them for spiritual, as well as worldly, purposes, and ego boundaries must be temporarily relaxed in order for confluence to be understood as a natural outcome of satisfying contact instead of some kind of unapproachable heaven state.

If the lower realms are concerned, as Freud was, with unacceptable desires, and if the God Realm and Realm of the Jealous Gods are the province of ego functions and their temporary dissolution, then the Human Realm is concerned with what has come to be known as the self (or the lack thereof).

the Human Realm is not just about the false self but is also about the possibility of transcendent insight into the true nature of self. It is here that the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) can be appreciated. The Buddhists assert that the more we grasp emptiness, the more we feel real—that the core, the incommunicado element, is really a place of fear at our own insubstantiality.

At the core of the Wheel of Life, circling endlessly, are the driving forces of greed, hatred, and delusion, represented by a red cock, a green snake, and a black hog, each one biting the tail of its neighbor, to indicate their interconnectedness.

On the one hand are those who see the id as a “seething cauldron” of primitive energy that must be mastered or regulated and kept under firm control. On the other hand are those who see the possibility of transformation of the infantile drives through the process of giving them “access to consciousness.”

The entire Wheel of Life is but a representation of the possibility of transforming suffering by changing the way we relate to it.

True thoughts “require no thinker,”

In psychological terms, the Buddha’s first truth, for instance, is really about the inevitability of our own humiliation. His insights challenge us to examine ourselves with a candor that we would prefer to avoid.

No matter what we do, he taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease.

physical illness and mental anguish

our own likes and dislikes

The cause of his fright lies in his error, his ignorance, his illusion.

the inability to tolerate unpleasant truths about oneself was essential to narcissism.

We do not want to admit our lack of substance to ourselves and, instead, strive to project an image of completeness, or self-sufficiency. The paradox is that, to the extent that we succumb to this urge, we are estranged from ourselves and are not real. Our narcissism requires that we keep the truth about our selves at bay.

When the ego is not able to “unravel its structure,” when the capacity for love is shut down because of fear, insecurity, or confusion, then the person becomes isolated by and imprisoned in individuality. Where there is no unburdening and no rhythm of tension and relaxation, there can be no freedom to bond, no surrender of ego boundaries, and no merging of the kind that characterizes all forms of love.

Winnicott’s false self offers protection against exploitation or lack of interest. “It is a primitive form of self-sufficiency in the absence of nurture,”10 a strategy of “compliance”11 that permits the person to survive while hiding out from the unsympathetic parental environment.

Prematurely separated from the nourishing attention of the mother, people lose touch with their own bodies and retreat to the confines of their minds;

the thinking mind thus becomes the locus of the sense of self. But this is a disappointing and dissociated compromise,

the cause of suffering is craving or thirst.

The first, the craving for sense pleasures, we can grasp immediately.

The second, what the Buddha called the craving for existence and nonexistence, is what we would today call narcissistic craving: the thirst for a fixed image of self, as either something or as nothing.

the state of rest is first disturbed by the demands of internal needs for food, comfort, warmth, and so on.

Pleasurable sensory experiences, which are inherently enjoyable, do not themselves force the establishment of the reality principle.

Similarly, the Buddhist view is not pleasure denying: it does not counsel rejection of pleasurable experiences, but only of the attachment to them as sources of ultimate satisfaction.

fourteen subjects that the Buddha repeatedly refused to discuss, all of them searching for absolute certainty:

Whether the world is eternal, or not, or both, or neither. 2) Whether the world is finite (in space), or infinite, or both, or neither. 3) Whether an enlightened being exists after death, or does not, or both, or neither. 4) Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it.

likened the asking of questions about the ultimate nature of things to a man wounded by an arrow refusing to have the arrow taken out until all of his questions about who the assassin was, where he came from, what he looked like, what kind of bow he was using, and what make of arrow had been shot had been addressed.

They are, in fact, the two poles of the false self: namely, the grandiose self developed in compliance with the parents’ demands and in constant need of admiration, and the empty self, alone and impoverished, alienated and insecure, aware only of the love that was never given.

for it was being asked from a place that already assumed that the self was an entity.

The false self is often symbolized in such a manner, as an inability to express what one really means.

the suffering of the false self derives from attachment to the two extremes of self-sufficiency and emptiness.

As children, we were all forced to comply with the selfish demands of parents who needed us to act in a certain way to meet their needs. We were all given the sense, at those moments, that who we were was somehow wrong and that we had better compensate in some manner.

“What would have happened if I had appeared before you, sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-behaved, reliable, empathic, understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all? What became of my childhood? Have I not been cheated out of it? I can never return to it. I can never make up for it. From the beginning I have been a little adult.

According to Buddhist psychology, narcissism is endemic to the human condition; it is an inevitable, if illusory, outgrowth of the maturational process.

The ability to become aware of self-representations without creating new ones is, psychologically speaking, a great relief. It does not mean that we drop the everyday experience of ourselves as unique and, in some way, ongoing individuals, but it does mean that whenever we find ourselves entering narcissistic territory, we can recognize the terrain without searching immediately for an alternative.