intertwining is very different from the therapist-patient relationship of working
through the projections of transference in the discovery of meaning. For the
therapist-patient dyad, appreciation of interdependence emerges especially from the
sense of being ‘only human’ in the context of difficult feeling states encountered, and
successfully understood and digested, during therapeutic sessions. In the case of Zen
teacher-student, the experience of interdependence arises in the student’s awakening
to the reality of impermanence and interdependence through eradicating the
delusions of a separate self.
ConclusionThrough the transformation of our suffering in long-term psychotherapy and
Buddhism, we learn that apparently negative experiences open our hearts. We cease
experiencing self and others as wholly separate, permanent, stable, and independent.
And we no longer experience ourselves simply as passive victims of circumstances we
did not create.
Through the methods of psychotherapy and Buddhism we encounter the paradigm
of our subjective world: the basis for our meanings and perceptions. Gradually we
come to see that as we shift our subjective perceptions, the perceived also changes.
Subject and object are joined in the ground of our perceptions. When we conceive
of the human self as wholly interdependent and impermanent, as a function rather
than a thing, then we appreciate more deeply the freedom that we have in this world.
It is the freedom of opening ourselves to our constraints and limitations, and exploring
these into the roots of our suffering. Our suffering has a purpose: it gives rise to our
deepest compassion when it is transformed. This is a discipline that cannot be
captured by any form of biological determinism and must be explored on its own
terms—personally, spiritually, and scientifically—in the new millennium.
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York: HarperCollins.
Dharmasiri, G. (1989) Buddhist Ethics, Antioch, CA: Golden Leaves.
Horne, M. (1998) ‘How does the transcendent function?’, The San Francisco Jung Institute
Library Journal 17:21–41.
Jung, C.G. (1969/1916) ‘The transcendent function’, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung,
vol. 8, trans. R.F.C.Hull, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C.G. (1992/1939) ‘Psychological commentary on The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation’,
in D.Meckel and R.Moore (eds), Self and Liberation: The Jung-Buddhism Dialogue, New
York: Paulist Press.
Kopf, G. (1998) ‘In the face of the other: psychic interwovenness in Dogen and Jung’, in A.
Molino (ed.), The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, New
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Lewontin, R. (1991) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, New York: HarperCollins.
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