Post/Modern Psychology

Post/Modern Psychology is concerned with an investigation of inter-subjectivity. It assumes the centrality of each person’s subjective experience as an ultimate and non-reducible characteristic of being human and conscious.

Every person constructs a unique, subjective version of reality, lives within it and enacts it in one’s inter-actions with others.

At the same time, however, it is acknowledged that each person’s subjective experience is always affected by an infinite number of physical, chemical, biological, cultural, interpersonal and psychological factors, many existing long before one was even conceived, only few of which we know and understand at this time. One “becomes”, eventually, that which one has been “subject-ed” to. Subjects and objects mutually co-construct each other and become, ultimately, impossible to separate. What one “was not yet” before, one “becomes” now by being infused with it. On the inter-subjective level every subject is always also an object, every object always a subject. Subjective reality, fundamentally, is not “owned” by any “one” – it is always co-constructed, possible only as an “inter-subject-hood” of one “Reality”.

Post/Modern Psychology brings the notion of inter-subjectivity to the intersection of science, mysticism and art. It can be viewed as a composite of psychoanalysis, cognitive science, quantum physics, experimental psychology, contemporary philosophy, art/literary criticism and Mahayana Buddhism. However, in spite of its interdisciplinary perspective, post/modern psychology is not theory-centered and it does not attempt to be eclectic or integrative theoretically. It can be best understood as being subject-centered in its assumption of the centrality of subjective experience co-constructed by inter-subjective “subject-objects”.

Buddhist Practice and Psychotherapy

Buddhism liberates, offers a glimpse into the absolute, a sense of transcendence in the realization of fundamental emptiness, realization of the emptiness of the present moment, the emptiness of existence and mind, psychotherapy gives one skills to unlock the mind, to diagnose the symptoms, unearth their causes and to heal them.

Buddhism’s “suffering” (dukkha) manifests itself as psychological, or psychiatric “dis-ease”, or symptoms, symptoms which are individual, private, mine, yours, even if the same ones in many, if not all of us.

Life is full of suffering because of a fundamental lack, not only a perception of a lack, but the actual lack of our absence. If the absence is lacking, then there is suffering. Of course there are moments of great joy, love, ecstasy, in fact there is the entire spectrum of human emotions arising from just being alive and human, but the lack of your absence – which is nothing but your life – is the source of your suffering. Our very existence originates from the lack of absence, so there is that actual experience of not being absent, of the lack, of not not-being there, and that lack, life itself, is causing suffering.

That fundamental suffering manifests itself as psychiatric and psychological symptoms so well described in the DSM system of psychopathology. Depression, suicide, panic attacks, anxiety, perversions, addictions, violence, psychosis, hundreds of other. They are real, they exist, we all do suffer in some way. And that suffering and symptoms is where Buddhism and psychotherapy meet. They both address the same aspect of life and being. One might say, that therapy then moves on to devise a system of healing, systems of alleviating of the suffering, of reducing, decreasing, eliminating or controlling the symptoms. Hundreds of systems have evolved to do just that – the major ones being psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, and psychopharmacology. 

Buddhism does not elaborate on the “how” of how symptoms develop, why depression and not anxiety, why obsessive rituals and not panic attacks. In Buddhism, all suffering is one suffering, the suffering of the Universe. And the Buddhist Eightfold Path is presented as a way out. Right understanding, right speech, right action, right life - what on the surface of it appears a uniform prescription for all, is, in its actual implementation, completely individualized. It is always, ultimately, my right speech, my right understanding, my action, my suffering, my life, and this is where psychotherapy and Buddhism overlap. It is a person attempting to change him/herself…and anything that pertains to changing mind, speech or behavior is, by definition, a realm of psychology. The same thing looked at from two different perspectives.  Not only two perspectives but two different methods. 

And it is  the methods where Buddhism and psychotherapy begin to diverge. Psychotherapy is codified in the psychoanalytic and the cognitive paradigms, psychopharmacology, inpatient crisis interventions, the entire “mental health” industry as we know it. Buddhism is different, with its meditation at the core, teacher / student matrix of interactions, its monasticism, Sangha, precepts, vows, mind-to-mind-transmission, Buddhism approaches a person completely differently.     

And there is the outcome, the end, or is there? What is the prescriptive outcome of Buddhist practice? The art of happiness? Compassion? Boddhisatva’s realized and actualized enlightenment? And what is the outcome of psychotherapy? At bare minimum, alleviation of symptoms, a lack of diagnosable mental disorder. Happiness? Health? Adjustment? Insight? Freud’s “ability to play, work and love”?

It is easy to see that there are similarities and differences here. Capacity for happiness and insight overlap for Buddhism and psychotherapy, enlightenment is clearly not even addressed in therapy, usually relegated, and rightly so, to the realm of religion. But what is “enlightenment” in Buddhism? Maybe it exists in psychology under different names? Mystical experience, peak experience? “Flow” in the “zone”? From James and Maslow to contemporary post- modernists, there has always been a great interest in the transcendental in psychology. Freud and Jung grappled with it. Is compassion similar to empathy? Altruism? What is health, happiness, compassion?

This area needs more clarification of those basic terms to sort through it, but just looking at it, it appears that even in the outcome, there are great similarities, or at least similar concepts which may, or may not, actually denote similar realities.

So, in summary, it looks that in Buddhism and psychotherapy the nature of  “the problem” is similar – suffering manifesting itself in psychological and psychiatric symptoms. The solutions are very different – psychotherapy vs. Buddhist practice; the outcomes may actually be more similar than not…when the terminology and concepts are clarified.  

And, fundamentally, there is only one soul, one mind, to treat and to save. Some say that we do not need to divide it into different conceptual fields of practice and treatment. There is only one person in front of a therapist or a Buddhist teacher. A person who seems to need some sort of help or liberation. So when we sit in front of each other, it is yet another Mysterium of a healing dialogue, because, somehow, words heal your suffering and my alienation from you. And, as we talk, as you reveal yourself even more to me, I don’t know if I am being Buddhist or just therapeutic. Actually, I forget myself in your story. What is psychotherapy anyway? Somehow people have realized that speaking heals, brings things out, to focus, focus of the mind, two minds. You and me, leaning over your illness, your pain, touching it with words, touching it with attention, feelings and our imagination, ourselves touched, as we discover the new and the old buried under the skin of our minds.

Your words flow, language flows, and we change the direction, telling, retelling, listening, hearing, till the pain dissolves. Even if life does not have a rewind button, we can change the past in the present of our dialogue. Living without a possibility of return is living in the Real, but there can also be the Imaginary transformed by the Symbolic…..

Attention [Middle English attenden, from Old French atendre, from Latin attendere, to heed : ad-, ad- + tendere, to stretch.]

Like sound reflected back as echo, or light reflected by a surface, like plants turning to sun for life, or organisms turning to a prey, a rival or a mate, our nervous system, our brains, our organisms, indeed, we, have a capacity to attend, to pay attention, which means not only letting something to get inside of the skin barrier but also to have an impact on us, to connect with something inside, to jolt, to activate, to capture.

It is also a way of dis-solving, not only re-solving, of dissolving, the question of who or what is attending, or paying attention, who is the attending subject, Because, what was a separate subject before now becomes one with the object of attention and in becoming one, subject and object merge, the subject is captured by the object, and also the object is captured by the subject, and in this capturing both appear and dis-appear, dis-solve, re-solve and solve themselves within each other.

 Awareness is a result of attending, reflecting,  of turning to, of resonating, in a word, of paying attention. Being aware is however a step back, a rift, a gap, created within a mind to cognize, to re-cognize, to cognize again in the awareness of it. 

Consciousness [From Latin conscius : com-, com- + scìre, to know.]

It adds subjectivity. Attention and awareness are often subject-less, subjectivity comes later.

In consciousness, the “me”, the “I” are constructed paving the way a sense of self-centrality of experience as being inside of the skin. The skin surface delimits me, it constructs and maintains me. The awareness, the realization that it is me, I, that is aware, and that subjectivity is central, because it delineates the boundaries of our experience.

I am looking

at you

the Universe condensed

in the I

of my gaze

the eye splits us in two,

the other

created,

we bring each other into being

without

and

in the moment of seeing

suddenly, 

I can’t find my/self

yet, no one still beholds

and no one is still aware

and

in the  moment

of not being

the I disappears into

being without

rivers and mountains

in you and me

God, Mind, Self and Reality

When God was creating the Universe where did his Mind come from?

What was his True Self at the moment of Creation?

Does God have Mind or Self?

If so, what, exactly, is the “Mind” and “Self” of God? And, where did they come from?

If no, how is Reality possible?

Of course the words “God”, “Mind” and “Self” are only exactly what they are…lines and dots on your screen, words in language and in speech, sounds and letters used in communication, used to convey something inherently human, maybe even exclusively human, an acknowledgement of our unknowing, of our limitations, of the infinite complexity of the Reality we live in and the fact that a singular human mind and brain will never grasp it in its entirety. It does not mean, however, that we can not be intimate with it, on contrary, one can only enter it in the moment of not-knowing, in the moment of not experiencing, in fact, in the very moment of non-being, which is exactly this very moment of your life.

One can not not be it even if it is beyond what we are and are not.

And entering it, always fragmentary and incomplete, because it happens in the realm of the Real not yet symbolized in cultural images / signs and letters,  is often easier then finding ways to communicate it to others.

This inquiry in to the most absolute and fundamental of all religions, all spiritual paths and all scientific psychologies converge in this very question. What is God, what is Mind, what is Self, how do we search for it and how do we express what we discover?

Are we to become monks and mystics? Should we contemplate, meditate, pray, recite, chant? Should we study the brain and mind scientifically and experimentally?

What is the path? Is there a path? Or maybe many paths?

The very fact that there is religion, art, and science only confirms the multiplicity and fragmentation of our (un)knowing. Or, maybe there are no truths and discoveries but only narratives and rhetorical / interpretative survivors?

These are important questions. What are your thoughts about it?

Where is your mind, your Self, your Reality and your God in this very moment?

Other psychological meditations:

Buddhism and Psychology 

Buddhist Practice and Psychotherapy 

Mind, God, Self & Reality 

Zen koan MU & the true text 

Summer  2000

Zen Master Dogen on "Existence"

What is Self?  

Mind, Meditation & Awareness