one. Holding that meditation and psychotherapy are distinct, he sees the two as
working in a mutually supportive fashion. For Epstein,
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to lead to experiences that reenact earlier
and more formative emotional relationships so that the person’s history can
be, in effect, reconstructed. Buddhist meditation tends to intensify certain ego
functions so that the sense of self is at once magnified and deconstructed.
(Epstein 1995:129)Another conception of the relation between Buddhism and psychotherapy is to view
the two as engaging different aspects of the person. Buddhism is viewed as dealing
with the universal aspects of the human condition, while psychotherapy is viewed as
dealing with the personal. A difficulty with this view is that the distinction between
personal and universal seems obvious and straightforward only in the context of
Western thought, heir as it is to Aristotle. Upon examination, however, the distinction
is itself based on a number of problematic implicit assumptions. First, Buddhism
rejects any essence or universal characteristic as having any existence other than in
the particular actually existing entity or person, and therefore the distinction is
arbitrary. More subtle, and therefore potentially more distorting, is the uncritical
acceptance of the Buddhist tradition’s description of the human condition as in fact
universal. This fails to acknowledge the constructive role of religion in defining a
person’s conception of what the human condition is and, therefore, the way in which
that person then conceives of his/her own situation. The universality of suffering and
its cause is itself a claim made by Buddhism that creates a particular view of one’s
own situation, and at the same time offers a solution to that situation.
Addressing the genre of apocalyptic writing, Thompson has pointed out that
People discover the crisis dimensions of their existence by reading an
apocalypse. An apocalypse thus functions in a social situation not only to bring
comfort, hope, perseverance, and the like but also to cause people to see their
situation as one in which such functions are needed and appropriate. An
apocalypse can create the perception that a situation is one of crisis and then
offer hope, assurance, and support for faithful behavior in dealing with the crisis.
(Thompson 1990:28)In the same way, the teachings of Buddhism are not simply a universally applicable
description of the human condition, despite their own claim to be that. They are,
rather, a view of the human condition as problematic in a particular fashion, while
at the same time offering solutions to the particular form that the problems take when
understood in the terms established by the view itself. This shift in self-concept is,
however, exactly what makes the Buddhist teachings and practices
psychotherapeutically effective. It is exactly this shift—conceptually, emotionally,
experientially—which is the goal.
RICHARD K.PAYNE 175