Mindfulness
Therapists' Curiosity About Buddhism Is Not a New Fad
Psychotherapists' interest in Buddhism is actually quite old.
Posted June 26, 2019 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
If you pick up an article on the use of therapeutic mindfulness practices or Buddhist meditation in psychotherapy, you are almost certain to find that article begin by introducing such activities as a new, popular fad. Popular they surely are: The so-called “mindfulness boom,” for example, just keeps on booming, unimpeded by the backlash that such popularity never fails to generate. But new? New, it is not.
As I describe in considerable detail in my book Prescribing the Dharma, psychotherapists and psychologists have investigated Buddhist teachings and practices for well over a century, going back to seminal figures like William James and Carl Jung. And, without looking all the way back to the early 1900s, one wonders how many decades it takes before something is no longer considered “new.” After all, the humanist(ic) psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s co-edited Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis was published in 1960, over a half a century ago. As far as the ubiquitous mindfulness practices go, as one example, it was more than 25 years ago that Marsha Linehan published her Dialectical Behavior Therapy manual incorporating “mindfulness skills.” If something is 50 years old, is it still new? 25?
My suspicion is that, despite this history, commentators so frequently label psychotherapists’ long-standing curiosity about Buddhist traditions as a new fad for two very different reasons. On the one hand, many seem to want readers/listeners to feel they are being granted special access, getting in on the ground floor of the latest up-to-date therapeutic methods. Here, newness and popularity are desirable and those who aren’t on board are in danger of catching a case of FOMO (fear of missing out). Therapeutic mindfulness practices, as again the most prominent example, start to look young and exciting when presented in this way — even as, interestingly, we are simultaneously told they are derived from ancient esoteric traditions.
On the other hand, critics may refer to these activities as “new and popular” because it makes them seem superficial and frivolous. Psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhist traditions becomes easily dismissed as “just a fad.” From this angle, authenticity is lost in conformity and only the critical-minded become serious and thoughtful about how (or whether) psychotherapists should experiment with Buddhist teachings and practices.
My response to these latter portrayals is that the psychotherapists I studied and interviewed for my research were far from frivolous about their interest in Buddhist traditions. Investigating whether certain meditation practices could be useful for depression relapse prevention was not a frivolous matter to Jon Teasdale and the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy team when they began work on designing their new modality back in the early 1990s. The psychiatrist Mark Epstein did not frivolously engage in comparing psychoanalytic theory and Buddhist doctrine when he published his formative book Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective in 1995. And, going back further to the 1970s, Fromm certainly did not frivolously conclude that the meditation practice he learned from the German-born Buddhist monk Nyanaponika Thera would be more effective for generating ethical transformation than the Zen practices D.T. Suzuki had previously introduced him to–he thought the health of our society absolutely depended on communities undergoing such ethical transformations.
All of the names I just listed, however, belong to people who were not only practicing clinicians, but writers and, at times, public speakers. It is difficult to, for example, “frivolously” write an entire book theorizing what feminist psychologists can learn from Tibetan Buddhist doctrine. While authors and researchers put considerable time and effort into working through how and why they approach Buddhist traditions the way they do, there are certainly practicing psychotherapists who casually take up a Buddhist teaching or practice without deep contemplation on the implications. A clinician might listen to a popular podcast on their way into work describing a Buddhist concept of “non-attachment to thought” and reference it later that day in a session focused on obsessive worry. Perhaps some critics might view this clinician as “superficial and frivolous” in their casual appropriation of a Buddhist element. But, one thing seems certain: The vast majority of such practitioners are not primarily motivated by a desire to be in on the new and the latest, but a desire to be of help to the people coming to see them for care. It is a desire to find the most effective means to care for others that pique therapists’ curiosity when they are told that certain Buddhist teachings and practices have healing capabilities.
And yet, when those clinicians experiment with the use of Buddhist traditions in psychotherapy, how many are aware of any of the above points in history? How many therapists who use Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy techniques, for example, know the history of how that methodology came to be developed?
Let’s go further: How many psychotherapists know of the history of any of the practices they draw from on a daily basis in their sessions with suffering people? How much of the history of psychotherapy as a whole are they aware of?
Most everyone’s heard of the founder of “talk therapy” as we know it, Sigmund Freud, and many know something of his most famous student, Jung. But how many know who, say, Franz Alexander is? (I’ll introduce him in a moment.) And yet, all of these questions probably resolve in a deeper one: How many practicing clinicians are actually even interested in learning any of this history? How curious are practitioners to learn exactly why Jung and Freud came to fall out and the impact their rupture had on the shape of psychotherapy for decades? How curious would a DBT practitioner be about when Jung first started writing about Buddhist teachings and what he said?
I’ve found myself asking these sorts of questions a lot of late. As a religious studies scholar, I do a great deal of historical research. In my previous life, when I was solely a practicing clinician, I must admit that I myself had the experience of being grateful for annual mandated continuing education units because, without them, I might not have made the time for learning. And I was very interested to discover who Franz Alexander really was. But it took starting down a whole new path as a religious studies scholar before I was able to make the time to find out. And since then, over the last decade, it has required a lot of intention to both engage in religious studies scholarship and maintain a full-time private practice.
Through my study, I have learned that there are indeed a number of practicing psychotherapists who have also heard of Franz Alexander. The man has become, for clinicians interested in Buddhist traditions, the representative example of how early psychoanalysts pathologized Buddhist experiences.
His paper on the subject (first given as a lecture in 1922 at what was the Seventh Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin) probably received a boost in attention after it was included in a relatively well-read volume called The Couch and the Tree, a collection of psychotherapists’ writings on Buddhist traditions going back to the early 20th-century, edited by psychotherapist Anthony Molino.
In his paper, Alexander used psychoanalytic theory to explain the psychological attraction of Buddhist meditative experiences, as he read them described by turn-of-the-20th-century Germans thinkers like Leopold Ziegler. He asserted that Buddhist practitioners were driven by an unconscious desire for “maternal union,” a yearning to recreate the experience of being in the womb as a fetus. To Alexander, this narcissistic drive was, to put it plainly, immature and unhealthy.
Because of his pathologizing take on Buddhist practice, Alexander has become (in)famous among psychotherapists interested in Buddhist traditions. For a few decades, Alexander has been raised up as an exemplar of a prejudiced past – a past, they say, that more “enlightened” contemporary clinicians have overcome by integrating Buddhist elements into their therapies. But how many of even those therapists know of Alexander’s other psychoanalytic theories — that he, for example, first theorized the “corrective emotional experience” or that he helped found the entire field of social psychology?
How many today know that, without Alexander, psychoanalysis (and, thus, “talk therapy” as we know it) might never have found a place in the United States, that he was indispensable to its importation and institutionalization in its new home? As I wrote Prescribing the Dharma, I wondered whether even those practicing therapists curious about Buddhist traditions would also be curious to learn these sorts of historical facts about who Alexander really was.
And if they weren’t curious to learn more about someone so vital to the very existence of our profession, how curious could they possibly be about the reaction of 5th-century Chinese communities to the then newly-introduced Buddhist concept of rebirth and how that reaction is relevant to psychotherapists’ investigation of Buddhist concepts today?
It has become one of my strongest commitments: To make the case that it is, in fact, tremendously important for us to know our history as psychotherapists. It is important not only as a matter of “correcting the record” when it comes to, for example, informing people that psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhist traditions is no new fad. Knowing our history can be indispensable to clinical practice itself. And the practical implications of knowing our history is especially clear in the case of psychotherapists’ surprisingly diverse approaches to Buddhist teachings and practices.
Next week, I will continue this post and explain exactly how this is the case.
