Object Relations Theory, Buddhism, and the Self: Synthesis of Eastern and Western Approaches Edward G. Muzika   INTRODUCTION WHAT IS THIS STRANGE ENTITY known as the "self," which is the object of investigation of most current psychoanalytic thinking? Object relations theory, ego, and self-psychology all suggest different concepts of the self, its development, and the developmental arrests leading to adult personality disorders. Each school presents different treatment modalities based on diagnos­tic and developmental considerations, as well as differing ideas about what cures in therapy. Other, non-analytic, therapies often avoid developmental issues, but have implicit or explicit models of the self embedded somewhere in their theories. This same self has also been a focal point of nearly 5,000 years of Eastern metaphysical and religious investigation. The Eastern effort emphasizes phenom­enological investigations of the self as present experience, followed by interpre­tations of that experience based on traditional metaphysical systems. The self's personal history and infantile origins are ignored. The Eastern approach lacks a clinical tradition as we know it, and "self" is often used to denote non-personal, special states of consciousness ordinarily regarded as mystical in the West. The Hindu self has two levels: Jiva, or the individual soul, and Atman, its universal and spiritual aspect, the experience of which is found in enlightenment. Buddha denied that either self existed, and maintained that the experience of Emptiness was the ultimate phenomenological substratum of both the self and the world. Buddhism attempts a radical resolution to all psychological illnesses by ending their source, the self, and expanding consciousness towards an identifica­tion with all of reality. Efforts have been made to integrate these fundamentally different concepts of self and their derivative therapies,' without a great deal of popular acceptance. Current transpersonal syntheses employ the notion of invariant stages of progres­sive ego development and suggest using different types of therapies for different levels of developmental arrest. This differs from psychoanalytic thinking only in the assumption of developmental stages far beyond the Oedipal stage (see table on pages 65-66). I will argue that an alternative synthesis, combining Eastern  introspective techniques within the conceptual frameworks offered by object relations theory, self psychology, humanistic therapy, and a Reichian emphasis on body experience, offers greater clinical value and acceptability. ________________________ 'Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1985); Wilber in K. Wilber, J. Engler, and D. Brown, Transformations of Consciousness (Boston: Shambhala, 1986); and J. Engler, "Vicissitudes of the Self According to Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: A Spectrum Model of Object Relations Development," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 6 (1983), 29-72.   INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY VOL XXX, No. 1 Issue No. 117 (March 1990)

THE BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF SELF   Buddhism originated 500 years before Christ within the context of an even older Hindu society with an oral spiritual tradition extending back before 3,000 B.C. With such a rich and complex set of systems, it is impossible to make accurate generalizations about Eastern philosophy. For purposes of accuracy, I will therefore limit my remarks about Eastern religion to the exposition of a few basic beliefs of Buddhism with a special emphasis on Zen, which in China alone consisted of five major and dozens of minor schools. One fundamental problem of Buddhism involves understanding the processes of identification, especially how they create and maintain the self in the here and now.2 How and why do we identify with objects, people, and ideas, and what is the structure of the resulting self? How real is the representational self and the representational systems that comprise our idea of the external world? What is the self and world after these representations have been removed? Buddhism places a heavy emphasis on the quality and existential priority of non-cognitive experience, unconditioned by images, memory, or thinking. In Buddhism the personal self, the "I," the "me," is generally considered pathological. The I, the ego, the self, and everything personal are all regarded as illusory and the source of all suffering. In Zen, the personal self is more ambivalently treated. Some masters say it has no value, and belief in the self is a result of ignorance. This seems to be the attitude conveyed in popular Zen books and is the substance of most Koan stories about ancient monks and their enlightened insights. There is little concern with the everyday problems and emotional issues that bring most people into psychotherapy, because in Zen ultimately there is no personal self. Most Zen masters spend little time discussing emotional problems and talk instead about the "real" nature of mind and the world.; One exception to this general disregard for the particulars of emotional suffer­ing is Buddhism's deep concern with the pain associated with becoming attached to others and objects in the external world, and then losing them. Abandonment anxiety lies at Buddhism's heart. The Theravadan Buddhist solution is to end the self along with its attachments to others (object relations). In the West we have an old and popular saying, used to urge others to enter romantic relationships despite their fear of them: "It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all." Buddhists disagree, saying it is better never to have loved than to suffer pain of loss of persons or objects. Buddha abandoned his family in order to seek his own escape from suffering. Love, for a Boddhisattva, is not attached, dependent, or romantic—it is non-attached but compassionate. Unlike most other forms of Buddhism, Zen does leave room for the idiosyn­cratic and the personal. Zen is not a single system or philosophy, but is comprised  of many individual masters with separate perspectives and experience. This is the gist of a famous Zen Koan in which a master claims that there is no Zen in China, only many great Zen teachers. In the higher forms of Samadhi and enlightenment, the individual is lost in universal merger experiences, but the "small" self always returns and its value is not forgotten by some masters. A few fill their Dharma talks with personal accounts of their own emotional problems from early life and in the present. Two such masters are Sasaki Roshi, whose talks were a constant source of delight for me through the 1970's, and Maezumi Roshi, who constantly emphasized the necessity of facing personal problems in the world. Buddhism does not have a developmental theory of the self nor does it deal with the commonly recognized disorders of the self, postulated by psychoanaly­sis, or their attending symptoms such as: 1) depression, inertia, and work inhibition; 2) shame and humiliation; 3) hypochondriacal and psychosomatic disorders; 4) feelings of worthlessnesss; 5) isolation and loneliness; 6) feelings of emptiness, void, panic at the enfeeblement or fragmentation of the self; and 7) feelings of hurt and rage at not having been understood, loved, appreciated, recognized, or taken seriously. These feelings, which presumably disappear with the disappearance of self, are rarely discussed in Zen. They are not recognized as evidence of any specific constellation of personality problems or disorders. Jack Engler4 claims Buddhist philosophy and practice presumes a normal, non-pathological level of self-development, and is directed towards attaining a trans-normal development of consciousness. Engler cites Freud's pessimistic appraisal that psychoanalysis aims at ending neurotic suffering and replaces it with ordinary human unhappiness. What psychoanalysis considers normal development, ac-cording to Engler, is just an advanced case of arrested object relations develop­ment which can be repaired by meditation practice. He and Brickmans claim that the existence of the ego itself is an illness and that Freud's normal unhappiness can be transcended through practices beyond psychotherapy. Other psychologists have suggested that Buddhist and other Eastern religions have origins in cultures and times with different levels of psychological develop­ment corresponding to a possibly less differentiated and definitely more tribal self.6 It is difficult to believe that Buddhism did not address the emotional needs of its original followers or that Buddha lived in a time of fully developed and differentiated selves. If the early Buddhists suffered from narcissistic disorders, these issues would certainly have been addressed—at least if they had been recognized as a diagnostic problem. But the diagnosis of the narcissistic and borderline characteristic is a recent Western phenomenon. Were there no narcis sistic disorders in fifth-century B.C. India, or were these problems not recog­nized, or did other character disorders overwhelm the narcissistic manifestations? Buddha either offered a new way of resolving the prevailing personality disor­ders of his time, or he offered better defenses against consciousness of their symptoms, such as abandonment anxiety and depression. If the latter, we can regard enlightenment not as a transcendence of normal object relations develop­ment, but as a defensive maneuver. The Buddhist emphasis on abandonment anxiety suggests that the emotional development of early Buddhists was not unlike that of people today, but perhaps emphasized more of what Melanie Klein called the depressive position and Fairbairn called the schizoid position. Western therapeutic research centers on the borderline and narcissistic characters and their symptomatic expressions revolving around maintaining the self, self-esteem, personal recognition, and attaining stable relationships, while the Eastern religions emphasized attachment and bonding issues and the abandonment anxiety associated with them. The latter de-emphasized the reflexive, self-preoccupation of the narcissist and the dread of dissolution of the self of the borderline personality. Buddhism, including Zen, adheres to Buddha's Fourfold Noble Truth: 1) Life is suffering. Birth, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, despair, and not getting what one wants are suffering. 2) The origin of this suffering lies in attachments, craving, and seeking pleasure, but most especially in the belief in the existence of a self that does the seeking and attaching (attachments are always ended, causing pain). 3) Suffering can be ended by ending attachments and ending the belief in the existence of a personal self. 4) This is done by practicing the eightfold path, especially the last step of which is the state of Samadhi, attained through meditation, which leads to enlightenment. In enlightenment, we see through the illusion of self and its attachments, desires, and suffering by attaining true emptiness in which every object, idea, emotion, and the self are seen to be transitory, non-coherent, and insubstantial.' There are several stages of enlightenment, depending on the tradition, and at each stage, a higher degree of detachment from the self and its "defilements" is attained. The illusion of self, according to Buddhism, arises because we do not examine our experience closely enough. We look only at the surface—the phenomena of life—to find desires, feelings, ideas, and memories which comprise the self. We also become identified with our resulting superficial viewpoints and cognitive mappings. But if we detach from immersion in feelings and in our illusory self, and watch these phenomena come and go, we begin to see "space" between them. These previously "dense" phenomena become "stretched out" into a spectrum of associated feelings, ideas, memories, and somatic sensations. This spaciousness, attained through a non-attached awareness, results in enlighten­ment in which all phenomena are seen to be unsatisfying, empty, and without meaning. We then awaken to Emptiness, which is consciousness itself, without 'These three theories comprise the range of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. A common element in them is that the self is considered to be a representation composed of image, idea, and memory. This idea of self and the associated ideas of others pass through stages of developmental structuralization. Buddhism shares this concept that self is an idea-image. the subjective content of thoughts, desires, the self, and we can identify with this new perspective. This is the Big Mind or the Original Self of Zen. The problems of self-esteem, depression, despair, fragmentation, worthless­ness, and loneliness, if examined as a clinical condition by Buddhists, would be considered a subset of the more general problem of having a self. Even having a strong positive self-esteem would be to suffer from the pain of birth, death, and loss. ___________________________  Concerning footnotes. The original text was scanned and turned into a Word document. When put in an HTML editor, the formating would not keep when made into a web page, and the footnotes suffered most. This will be rectified in the future when I have more time. PS: The HTML editor doesn't have a spell checker either. 2Private conversation with Maezumi Roshi during 1986. ;Engler in Transformations of Consciousness; S. Seung Sahn, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1976); and Abe, Zen and Western Thought. °Engler, "Vicissitudes of the Self ..." and in Transformations of Consciousness. 5H. Brickman, "Ordinary Human Unhappiness: the Reality Principles of Psychoanalysis and Zen." Pre-publication manuscript (1984) presented at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Society. 6E. Muzika, "The Enlightenment Maneuver," unpublished paper, Los Angeles, 1983; E. Muzika, The Enlightenment Maneuver: Psychology and Psychopathology of Religion (Los Angeles: self-published, 1986). In a recent conversation, Masao Abe explained that Zen is indeed concerned with the problem of psychopathology, but promised a resolution through ending its source—the self. He believes that Western therapies deal with symptomatic relief of basic human pain by strengthening the self. Abe suggested that these viewpoints are not conflicting, except in cases of simultaneous application. He repeated that we must possess both self and not-self equally.

WESTERN CONCEPTS OF SELF   There are over two hundred varieties of psychotherapy. Few of these believe that self is an illusion. Most work at strengthening the self and make it more able to bear pain and let in pleasure. For the purposes of this paper, I will describe five types of metapsychologies that fairly represent a wide range of Western psychotherapies.   1)  Ego psychology (Freud, Anna Freud, Hartmann, Horner) emphasizes the development of capabilities and attributes of the ego, such as Piaget's stages of thinking ability, the abilities to walk and talk, the self-organizing and regulating capabilities of the ego and superego, and Margaret Mahler's stages of self and object differentiation.   2)  Object relations theory (Melanie Klein, Winnicotts Guntrip, Jacobson, and Kernberg) focuses on the changes in the relations of the developing infant and client in therapy, with the objects of the world, especially other people.   3)  Self psychology (Kohut) emphasizes the development of the phenomenology of the self both in the infant and in therapy. It explores the self's experience of itself and of the other from the subjective viewpoint.   4)  Reichian (Reich) and bioenergetic developmental psychology (Lowen) main­tains a psychoanalytic theoretical orientation, but emphasizes that the self and feelings are primarily of the body. Character disorders, self-esteem problems, neuroses, etc., are caused by developmental deficiencies and trauma which fix development at pathological levels when the child learns to block out the painful feelings of neglect, hurt, lack of empathy, love, and recognition by blocking awareness of his body through muscle armoring. Therapy involves bringing feeling back into the body and feeling the original pain that led to its deadening.   5)  Cognitive-behavioral therapy deals with the cognitive aspects of inappropri­ate self ideas, images, and ideas about what we want out of life. Therapy works by changing attitudes about the self and becoming aware of self-destructive "scripts." Changes in the self-image can be attained through an Ericksonian reprograming, rationality, reframing of problems, or a hundred other techniques. With less strongly formed egos—psychotics and borderline individuals—which  are easily overwhelmed by rage, fear, hurt, and envy, these therapies do not try to deepen experience of feelings, but try to build up the defenses and ego structures in order to diminish them. Repression, suppression, emotional distanc­ing are encouraged while the therapist soothes the patient through emotional holding and offers metapsychological "teachings" (meaning) about the self and the world which help contain anxiety and bad feelings. The therapist can also serve as a role model in how he handles the patient's rage, hurt, and fear, teaching new ways of tolerating those feelings.   Most therapies try to strengthen the self until it reaches the point at which it can introspect and self-examine. Eventually, the self gets strong enough that it is not in constant pain, does not feel worthless, inadequate, and frightened, and therefore is not constantly self-reflexive. It can become a transparent self which can successfully love another and has a purpose in the world. Some therapists have suggested that the No-self of Buddhism is identical to the strong self of Western psychotherapy, a self that has become invisible to itself.8   Thus we see a basic conflict between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Buddhism aims at ending the self and considers it the source of all suffering, while psychotherapy attempts to rescue the lost and brutalized child-self through re-owning the pain and suffering and building a tolerance to it.