Polly Young-Eisendrath gives an impressive example of her application of what is
called the ‘fundamental koan’ in her treatments: ‘When it is impossible to do
anything, what do you do?’ This koan is about the value of tolerating insecurities,
about room for ambiguity, open-endedness, for potentially new things for both client
and therapist, instead of the illusion that the therapist knows, in which solutions are
sought, or support and advice are given (Young-Eisendrath 1997).
To get back to John: he and Rose turned out to be good ‘teachers’ to one another,
resulting in a closer and closer relationship, and eventually marriage. After one year
they had a son, named John Jr., of whom father John was extremely fond. At one
time in our treatment John called me in the afternoon, crying and completely upset,
to tell me of the tragedy that his two-year-old son had been hit in a traffic accident
and died instantly. John came to see me immediately. There we sat, with his
immense unspeakable grief. We both felt so powerless. What could I do except be
with him, present and aware, mostly without words. Understanding his being the
father, the husband, his self-reproach, his identification with being the little boy,
himself the abandoned child—and not understanding.Where pain and suffering of the client can be so profound, it is important that the
therapist remains open-minded and knows that she or he doesn’t know; and when it
is impossible to do anything, one must do something with that.
Brazier cites the title of Carl Rogers’ book On Becoming a Person as a modern koan.
One could say: If I am not a person, what am I? Can I become fully the person that
I can be? Rogers wanted us to take up this question afresh as a means to help us
become the most we can possibly be. The answer cannot be in words, it can just show,
and be manifested. As Brazier states, solving a koan means changing our way of being,
and this generally means giving up some ideas rather than producing new ones
(Brazier 1995).
ConclusionWithin certain critical arenas as I have presented, psychoanalysis and Buddhist
psychology can provide each other with important insights and approaches.
Psychoanalysis helps us to suffer less from unconscious conflicts, confusions, and
fixed attitudes; Buddhism helps us to be more awake and aware in the here and now,
and to be open to the spiritual dimension which is present in everything. As therapists
and clients who practice Buddhism we become more open to the ‘sacred’ in the
psychoanalytic work, as phrased by Eigen, the sacred in the transformations that
awareness can facilitate, transformations into the mindful self and beyond.
What might psychoanalysis have to offer to Buddhism and what can psychoanalysis
learn from Buddhism? One of the things psychoanalysis may have to offer is an
extensive development of theories about forms of defense and resistance, and of the
therapeutic intersubjective interaction, of (counter) transference and enactment.
With the example of John, in his letting go of fixed self-identifications, we got a
100 ADELINE VAN WANING