principles and, conversely, Western therapists becoming cognizant of
Buddhist-inspired meditation techniques.
In the last ten or fifteen years, several pleas have been made for an integration
between Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy. The more forceful pleas have come
from Western Buddhist psychotherapists who are long-standing practitioners of
concentration and mindfulness meditation, such as Zen, Vipassana, and
Dzogchen-Mahamudra, some of who are meditation instructors as well. Their
writings are visible in both Buddhist and psychotherapy journals. Concerned about
the tendency in Western teachers and students of Buddhist meditation to ignore their
personal wounds, their cry is for Western Buddhist practitioners of meditation to
incorporate psychotherapy into their lives (Engler 1984; Kornfield 1993a; 1993b;
Rubin 1996; Welwood 2000). If not integration, at least Western Buddhist teachers
and students of meditation would do well to take emotional deficiencies that are
common in Western society into account (Kornfield as cited in Tworkov 2000). The
milder pleas for integration have come from therapists in the West who also practice
Buddhist meditation and whose writings are more visible in psychotherapy journals
than in Buddhist journals. Convinced of its overall contribution to psychological
health, these therapists enthusiastically urge their colleagues and clients to explore
meditation and consider using it as an adjunct in therapy (Cooper 1999; Deatherage
1975; Dubin 1991; 1994; Kelly 1996; Kutz et al. 1985; Mikulas 1981; Muzika 1990;
Urbanowski and Miller 1996). There is a third group of therapists in the West who
feel that the best way of integrating Zen Buddhist and mindfulness meditation into
psychotherapy is for therapists to practice meditation themselves and to bring their
full presence and attention to the therapy session (Brazier 1995; Epstein 1995;
Watson 1996).
From a psychodynamic perspective, the key to integration may lie in revising and
giving equal value to the views of the self that psychoanalysis and Buddhism offer
respectively (Rubin 1996). Western psychodynamic psychotherapy views the self as
a historical, embodied, substantial agent capable of perception, choice, and action.
Buddhism views the self as a fluid, changing, moment-by-moment unfolding process.
Traditionally, Western psychodynamic psychotherapy does not acknowledge the
influence on consciousness and behavior of episodic, transient, mental states that arise
in the present, moment by moment. Nor does it acknowledge non-self-centric modes
of human subjectivity, nor transcendent mind states, as conducive to psychological
growth (Rubin 1996). Buddhism, on the other hand, lacks a developmental
perspective on the formation of the self. Buddhism disregards the role of early
childhood events in the shaping of the personality (Engler 1984; Krynicki 1980;
Muzika 1990; Rubin 1996). Due to mistaken notions of emptiness and no-self,
Buddhism may foster pathological self-denial, which may also lead to another form
of self-centeredness. By denying the subject, the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’
resurfaces in acting out disowned aspects of the self that have not been worked through
because, as contents of the mind, they have not been examined (Rubin 1996:67).
Western psychotherapy can shed light on Buddhism regarding transference,
countertransference, and unconscious phenomena. Buddhism can go beyond the
160 KATHERINE V.MASÍS