1. Describe your participation and responsibilities in this learning activity.
I started by arranging all the books and articles that I am currently reading into nine subject headings:
1) Zen Training, 2) Group therapy, 3) Reichian, 4) Zen and western disciplines, 5) Maslow, 6) Transpersonal psychology, 7) Education, 8) Drugs, and 9) The Farm. This was too unwieldy, so I decided to try to focus on Buddhism and Psychotherapy. I compiled a bibliography on this subject, and divided it depending on which of three varieties of Buddhism was referred to: Zen, Tibetan, or Theravadan.
Under Zen I made reprints and read the articles listed:
1. Aitken, Robert. “Zen and Therapy”. Talk given at ZCLA.
2. Dai, Bingham. “Zen and Psychotherapy”. In Cox, Richard H. “Religious Systems and Psychotherapy”, pp. 132-141.
3. Jung, C.G. Preface to D.T. Suzuki’s “Introduction to Zen Buddhism”.
4. Kondo, Akihisa. “Zen in Psychotherapy: The Virtue of Sitting.” Chicago Review, 1958.
5. Lesh, Terry. “Zen Meditation and Empathy in Counselors”. J. Humanistic Psychology, Spring, 1970.
6. Wise, David. “Zen From a Reichian-Bionergetic Perspective”.
Under Tibetan I read these articles:
1. Aleksandr, Lloyd. “Tibetan Buddhism and Gestalt Therapy”. Gesar Magazine, 1975.
2. Casper, Marvin. “Space Therapy: A Buddhist Approach to Sanity”. J. Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 6, No. 1.
3. Tulku, Tarthang (ed.) articles collected in “Reflections of Mind: Western Psychology Meets Tibetan Buddhism”. Dharma Press.
Under Theravadan I read the article:
1. Goleman, Daniel. “Mental Health in Classic Buddhist Psychology”. J. Transpersonal Psychology, 1975, No. 2.
From these I chose the two articles which seemed most relevant to my own personal growth, abstracted them, and related them to the state of my practice.
On the advice of my evaluator I read “Puer Aeternus” by Marie Louise von Franz, Spring Publications, 1970. I wrote a brief abstract, and related the thesis of the book to my own development and future choices. I also mention the relation between the thesis of this book and the two articles on Buddhism and psychotherapy, to the extent to which they all address themselves to the particular crossroads at which I find myself.
2. Describe new skills and knowledge derived from this learning activity which contribute to your Degree Plan. Feel free to attach additional pages as necessary.
My learning was in two specific areas: A) The relation between Buddhism and psychotherapy and B) The archetype of the eternal youth and the problem of growing up. In section three, Self-Assessment, I discuss the relationship between this reading and my own personal growth.
A) The relation between Buddhism and psychotherapy. I will discuss two articles, those by Kondo and Wise, listed above, which throw the most light onto the relationship of the practice of Zen as I know it to the practice of psychotherapy as I know it. Kondo’s article is in the context of therapy, and uses zazen as a factor to add effectiveness. Wise’s article focuses more on zen practice, and uses bioenergetics to suggest how to add effectiveness.
Akihisa Kondo, “Zen in Psychotherapy: The Virtue of Sitting”. Kondo describes his use of zazen as an important part of his psychotherapeutic practice. He strongly advises his neurotic clients to sit fifteen minutes a day according to the instructions of Dogen Zenji. He finds that at first this intensifies their symptoms, but as he works through these problems with them in therapy, he encourages them to keep sitting every day. After a while they develop “joriki”, the “strength of stability” which zazen produces. They are better able to concentrate on their problems in the therapeutic interview, and more accurately perceive their internal states from this practice of looking inward.
Here is a possible way of using zazen to focus and clarify the therapeutic process. The therapist who can use zazen has a powerful tool for focusing on internal states, and developing the strength and stability to deal with them.
David Wise. “Zen From a Reichian-Bioenergetic Perspective.” Dr. Wise does not feel that Zen is a good method of psychotherapy. He sees it more as “a practice for people who have finished with the issues that much of psychotherapy deals with.” But he does use Reichian-Bioenergetic ideas to make some interesting criticisms of Zen practice as it is sometimes distorted.
First he notes the strong similarities between the two practices, especially regarding surrender to the powerful forces of the unrepressed organism or “original self”. When the muscular blocks begin to dissolve in zazen, from the long periods of deep breathing and awareness withdrawn from normal defenses, the Zen student is put in a bind. He is not to express any of the deep feelings which surface. Dr. Wise suggests that because there “is little institutional room to express these feelings…a common response…is subtle internal withdrawal.” The student puts his energy instead into the hierarchy of the Zen center, which offers justification for his withdrawedness from zazen. The traditional asceticism gives a lot of support to the masochist, and to the person who can tolerate only a little charge and needs to space out.
Here is a view of Zen practice which says that application of bio-energetic insights could add to the effectiveness of practice. The Zen teacher who understands these ways of avoiding growth can steer his student away from such avenues of withdrawal.
B) The archetype of the eternal youth and the problem of growing up. In discussing the self-assessment of my past learning from Independent Reading in Buddhism and Psychotherapy, my evaluator asked me where I go next. I told him I felt split between a country mode and a city mode, returning to the communal farm at one extreme, or going to graduate school in social work at the other. He suggested I read “Puer Aeternus” by Marie Louise von Franz, to help clarify this matter.
This book is a series of talks with question and answer sessions, on the subject of the puer aeternus, or “eternal youth” archetype. The first half analyzes “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupery, and the second half analyzes “The Kingdom Without Space” by Bruno Goetz. In both books there is a split between an “eternal youth” figure and an ageing corrupt structure. The psychological point of the analysis is that neither of these extremes can live without the other, and that they must be integrated in the individual. Often, after we identify too long with the eternal youth we overcompensate and become very formalistic and resistant to any threat of youthful joy, thinking that we must choose between reason without life on the one hand or eternal movement without result on the other. The author is talking about how to integrate the strengths of each aspect, and how to separate out the weaknesses.
3. Self-Assessment: Evaluate this learning activity. Mention such things as the quality of the experience itself and its personal significance to you.
I will discuss the personal significance of this reading under three headings: A) The articles, B) The book, and C) The points of convergence.
A) The articles. Part of what I wanted to do when I started at Antioch was to find a way to possibly combine Zen and therapy. Akihisa Kondo’s article is the most satisfactory description that I have found of anybody actually combining these practices. This helps to clarify the current relationship between my own zazen and my own therapy. That is to say, I can see how zazen focuses my energy and builds up strength of concentration, and how therapy serves as a way to work through the personal aspects of the problems that arise in this focused condition.
As I look forward to beginning training as a therapist, I consider this a very possible direction for my own practice. I can see myself maybe not prescribing zazen to all of my clients, but more likely suggesting it to those who seem most open to that kind of a practice. It is interesting to see the effects that Kondo reports on his clients. I think I could reasonably expect the same kind of effects: some resistance and then a build up of focused energy which could make some of the growth seem almost automatic.
Wise’s article is a little less precisely tuned in to what I feel is happening in my own life. My feeling is that he makes a lot of generalizations which slightly miss my experience of both practices. But he does make a connection between Reichian work and zazen which is a little more explicit than I had been able to make it.
When I moved out of the zendo, I felt a need to tune in to the natural rhythms of my body rather than rigidly following the zendo schedule. I was encouraged in this move by the book I was reading at the time, “Man in the Trap”, by Ellsworth Baker, the man whom Reich left in charge of training therapists after his death. Wise seems to suggest that the release offered by Zen and Reichian work is valid where they overlap, but that Zen training is anti-life and anti-growth when it becomes too rigid and dogmatic. I had felt this but had little outside validation until I started reading Reich and then doing Reichian therapy. Zen and Reichian work are not mutually exclusive, it is just that I feel I can grow more if I combine them so that I honor the needs of my body, not just sitting and torturing myself in the zendo feeling that is the only way to grow. Reading Wise’s article gave me some more validation for this intuition and helped me formulate it a little more clearly.
In terms of my future development as a therapist, I like to think that I could make use of Reichian techniques in some way when it seems appropriate to the client. One place it might be appropriate, as suggested by this article, is when somebody is being very ascetic and self-denying in the name of “spiritual growth”. From my own experience, massive release of the physical tension caused by self-denial can often create the state of ecstasy, exhilaration, or insight that you were looking for in the self-denial. This is where my Reichian work can bring a richness to my zazen which I hadn’t quite been able to formulate before.
B) The Book. I was immediately struck by the way this book cut through a lot of the conflict I was feeling. My first impression was that it was telling me it was a daydream, a youthful folly, to think about moving to the country. It was a way of avoiding my adult responsibility, my “calling” to stay in the city and train to be a therapist. And so it was very simple. The eternal youth daydreams and can’t get practical, can’t “get up on a rainy morning and go to work”. I had to grow up.
But after that my reaction started to become more complex. Assuming that I do stay in the city and train to be a therapist, while studying at the Zen Center, what then is the message of the book for me? Within this context it becomes a matter of integrating the creative, youthful, emotional with the rational, ageing, mechanical aspects of myself. But this is the dichotomy that I began dealing with when I read Norman Brown’s “Life Against Death” right before taking LSD, beginning to redress the balance away from the years of dry intellectual upbringing. Ten years later I have been through a series of ever smaller swings of the pendulum, to the point where I often feel that I have completely integrated or transcended this dichotomy. One message of the book for me is that these poles are no longer involved in a great war within me but are to a great extent harmoniously enriching each other.
Some of the ideas von Franz throws out in the last part of her analysis of “The Kingdom Without Space” seem like comments on the odyssey which I have documented in this portfolio. She talks about Goetz’ projecting the renewal function onto the East. I can see that this is what I was doing at the beginning of this program, when I assumed that Zen would be unilaterally enriching the shallow world of western psychology. Since then inputs like the Wise article have shown me that our Zen practice has something to learn from psychology too.
I heard echoes of my early identification with Jack Kerouac in her comments on the youth archetype, Fo. He is an eastern, Buddha-like figure, except that instead of advocating a release from the wheel of life, he advocates eternal wandering in this world. And I could see that this was the same element Kerouac represented for me in “On the Road”, and the model I used for so long to keep from settling down.
She offers a diagram of the characters in the book:
Von Spat Melchior Fo
Reason without life ego eternal movement
without result
On the same page she discusses rock and roll as creative ecstasy with no further goal, and I could again see how I had been acting out of this half of the dualism to make up for the years of reason without life. But in referring to this same diagram she makes a comment that neither von Spat nor Fo have a feminine aspect, that two other poles are needed for a real healing to take place. I don’t know exactly how this fits with her Jungian system, but this is exactly the personal problem that I feel. Throughout this long odyssey I have not shared any of this struggle with a mate. It almost seems like I’m trying to get myself together enough that I can find somebody who will want to share all this growth with me.
There is no strong feminine figure in “The Little Prince” either, and this is the problem with the eternal youth, and this is the problem I feel in my life, that I deal with in therapy with Pat and in therapy with Meri. All of this struggle is going on in a sort of unreal vacuum, and von Franz suggests to me that the unification doesn’t just take place on a horizontal level, within the self, but on a vertical level too, becoming part of a greater whole with another person. This is where I do hold on to my eternal youth place, in refusing to take the risk of being with a woman. But that is changing too.
Von Franz’ final conclusion feels like the kind of integration that I am evolving. She says that the creative urge represented by the eternal youth is very important, is the life spark itself. The mistake is when we externalize or politicize it, as happened in Germany with Hitler. We must realize that it is the seed of our own individual transformation, and have the capacity to bring it into the world harmonized through our own internal searching. Otherwise, she says, we are always building rosy buildings on burnt out ruins. And so now I can see I am no longer trying to build a rosy structure, as the utopian farming commune. I am deeply committed to integrating the creative and the rational within myself, and bringing this hard earned unity up against reality as we know it.
C. Points of convergence. It seems that the reason I chose these particular selections, and after describing my situation that my evaluator suggested this particular book, is that I am dealing with the problem of growing up externally through the metaphor of balancing my Zen practice with therapy experience. The terms outlined in “Puer Aeternus”, of creativity vs. structure, certainly come up in the Wise article. I have decided to choose when my sitting seems creative, and when it seems like I am just part of a mechanical institutional routine. I take responsibility for the balance between spontaneity and form. The Kondo article suggests zazen is a seed of pure awareness, and therapy is an opportunity for working through. The dualism is so well overcome in this format that it is difficult to see Zen and therapy in terms of the problem of the Puer Aeternus. Both sides of the equation are taking responsibility for growth and integration.
What is emerging is a focus on myself growing up rather than a focus on Zen and/or psychotherapy. These are the paths, but what really unifies them or anything else is the actual progress of the walker. I am not simply integrating Zen and psychotherapy, some external entities, I am bringing my own life to a functional focus, informed by a highly complex background of available resources
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