most often used to explain personal desires, intentions, and actions. The term ‘gene’
or ‘adaptation’ has replaced intention, purpose, and meaning in most psychological
accounts of the ways in which people thrive or fail to thrive in their everyday lives.
All of our struggles—such as finding a mate or becoming a compassionate person—
can now be recast in terms of their supposed ‘advantages’ of leaving the greatest
number of offspring.
When people seek psychotherapeutic or other kinds of psychosocial help, they now
come with vague theories of biological determinism such as ‘I am depressed because
I inherited depression from my mother’s family’ or ‘I have an addiction because my
genetic history is loaded for substance abuse’ or ‘I have attention deficit disorder
because of my genetic background’ and so on. These people often continue to feel
hopeless even after they have taken the appropriate medications, and comforted
themselves with the company of their ancestors, because they do not understand why
they suffer. Of course, this can be addressed through effective psychotherapy, but for
those who never consider psychotherapy, and most people do not, these vague organic
explanations only block any desire to understand the personal motives and meanings
that lead to much or most of human suffering through our emotional habit patterns.
The belief that our own intentions and attitudes can change our actions, thoughts,
and moods is now considered outmoded in many training programs for psychiatrists
and psychologists in the US. Many of the psychiatric residents that I have supervised
in the past five years have no idea of how to talk with a patient about motivations
and intentions, whether conscious or unconscious. These residents learn only how
to diagnose symptoms and determine appropriate medications, and to conduct brief
symptom-oriented counseling. Moreover, the suffering people who come to the
offices of these newer psychiatrists are asked to believe that they will be cured by some
form of biological intervention, not through a change of awareness or attitude.
A great deal of harm has already occurred as a result of embracing biological
determinism as a fundamental explanation of human suffering. This is not to say that
we should disregard the important advances that genetics and biochemistry have
provided, both in understanding ourselves and in medicating serious psychiatric
conditions. And yet we need to become acutely aware of the consequences of
embracing a widespread ideology of biological determinism.
Unique among religions, Buddhism has developed systematic methods for
investigating the roots of suffering and other psychological responses in ways that are
valid and reliable. The methods of Buddhism are objective and empirical and do not
contradict the metaphysics of science. Buddhism also possesses an extensive
psychology of unconscious processes, as the paper by Okano in this volume illustrates.
Buddhism and depth psychology stand side by side in helping us to diagnose and
treat the spiritual problem that emerged wholecloth in the final decade of the
twentieth century: secular self-interest reinforced by the metaphysics of scientific
materialism. Biblical scholar Miles (1999) describes the problem this way:
Enlightened self-interest seems to hold as a necessary postulate that the world
is real and the world’s goods really worth acquiring. A stock portfolio, a law68 POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH