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Buddhism and psychoanalysis: two rather different “therapies of desire” fashioned for the relief of suffering

“How does Freud create a [new] science out of a self-analysis?” (John Forrester) is a question akin if not identical to asking, ”How did Siddhattha Gotama (of the Sākiyas)—the Buddha—create a spiritual and philosophical therapy (or new religion) out of meditation?” (a question posed by students of religion). While I think these are worthwhile queries for any number of reasons, I will not attempt to address them here, although even their cursory consideration may prove provocative and fruitful. These exemplary and creative historical endeavors are not of course instances of creation ex nihilo, for in both cases we situate their emergence within traditions, cultures, societies—their religious, philosophical, and scientific contexts and predecessors, for example—that serve as necessary yet not sufficient conditions for both Buddhism and psychoanalysis.* And in spite of their obvious historical, geographical, and cultural distances and thus differences from each other, both Buddhism and psychoanalysis proffer distinctive philosophies and methods of therapeutic healing with some overlap in methods, values, and even psychological insight.

A significant and growing body of literature now exists engaged in what we can loosely call cross-cultural interaction, examination, and dialogue between these two psychological therapies: there are Buddhists (more than a few being Western converts) and Buddhist communities (representing the three main ‘schools:’ Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna) in countries where Freudian psychology has (for motley reasons and for better and worse) created what John Forrester aptly terms “psychoanalytic cultures,” or what Auden memorably described as “a whole climate of opinion” suffused with the thoughts, values, and spirit of psychoanalytic psychology; and there are psychoanalytic traditions and institutions established in Asian countries, indeed, in many countries outside Europe and North America (in other words, both Buddhism and Freudian psychology are globally entrenched). There are psychoanalysts who are at the same time Buddhists (owing to psychoanalysts becoming Buddhists and, on occasion, Buddhist practitioners becoming psychoanalysts), and a few Buddhists like Padmasiri de Silva who have, with ardent interest and clear sympathy, examined Freudian psychology with due scholarly care and acumen.

Both of these therapeutic philosophies and regimens address existential and psychological questions and problems indissolubly linked to (avoidable) suffering with considerable intellectual sophistication and affective knowledge and awareness, each with perhaps something to offer their historical and cultural counterpart by way of enhancing the breadth and depth of their unique forms of healing (both overlap with, yet are different from, historic forms of ‘philosophy as therapeia’ like Stoicism, bearing in mind that the distinction between philosophy and religion in Asian worldviews is often difficult to make), possible respective contributions that need not be made at the expense of effacing their undoubtable interpersonal, psychological, and philosophical or spiritual differences.

From my vantage point however, and generally speaking (i.e., there are a few exceptions), the regnant assumption or presumption—at least if the extant literature is representative—is that psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts can learn or benefit from an acquaintance with Buddhism, not that Buddhists should be students of psychoanalytic philosophy and therapy. I would argue the former might indeed benefit from familiarity with intra-and inter-personal psychological phenomena identified during analytic treatment, in particular, and by way of but one example, transference and counter-transference as it occurs in the relationship between the analysand and analyst (consider the well-documented sexual and other scandals involving Buddhist teachers and their students). I say this not to insinuate the superiority of psychoanalysis over Buddhism but only by way of suggesting the possibility that we might engage in the aforementioned and ongoing cross-cultural interaction, examination, and dialogue in such a manner as to refrain from (pre)judging the superiority, as it were, of one or the other therapeutic tradition, even as we attempt to assay their respective merits and possible shortcomings. In other words, this dialogue might proceed without the interlocutors claiming or attempting to prove their form of healing as somehow superior to all others. This is, of course, extremely difficult to do when the participants often identify with one or the other therapeutic traditions although, as we hinted above, some practitioners may have already found a way of personally integrating—or complementing—Buddhism and psychoanalytic psychology within their individual worldviews and therapeutic praxes, regardless of possible or probable tensions, contradictions, or lack of intellectual consistency (which is not to claim that it is impossible to dialectically transcend same, thereby achieving some coherent form of theory and/or praxis on this score).

* An important difference here is that the Buddha’s teachings were exclusively oral, while Freud’s self-analysis achieved sufficient publicity through literary form (as ‘autobiographical writing’) in The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899). The structure and distinctive features of early Buddhist literature suggests these teachings were memorized by his disciples (monks who specialized in such memorization and recitation) and passed down for several centuries in oral form before being written down. Both Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars of Buddhism have argued that these oral teachings were adapted to the spiritual and psychological capacities or needs (or knowledge) of the audience, disciple(s) or interlocutor(s) of the Buddha, hence this is often an important factor in interpreting the precise meaning of the teachings in question. The psychoanalytic counterpart of this pedagogical adaptability exists in the process of analysis itself, which is characterized by its personal dimension and the corresponding therapeutic objective of the psychoanalytic dialogue (the principal reason, as Ilham Dilman reminds us, one cannot characterize psychoanalytic interpretations as either ‘descriptive statements’ or ‘explanatory hypotheses’). The analyst’s interpretation “speaks to the person ... about himself, and seeing its truth [in the form of self-knowledge] is very different from coming to see an ‘objective’ truth” (Dilman). All the same, I would depict the dialectic between objective and subjective truth a bit differently in the case of Buddhism insofar as it is not, generally speaking, individuated in quite the same manner or degree (Buddhist teachers do, however, attempt to identify general character or personality traits of their students, for such knowledge is indispensable for suggesting a particular type of meditation practice) as it is in psychoanalysis (in comments on this thread, I expressed thoughts to the contrary, or at least downplayed possible differences).

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Buddhism
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Emotions
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
  
• Human Nature and Personal Identity

The Republicans' War on Democracy

No collusion. If true, so what? The Trump campaign was happy to receive the help of the Russians. From its perspective, for a foreign power to influence the outcome of an American election was entirely welcome. Perhaps the Russians have something on Trump, but, if we have learned anything about him, we would know that in any event he would throw democracy under the bus if it would help him secure power. Trump’s conduct does not meet the legal definition of treason – so much the worse for the legal definition.

Leaving Russia to the side, his fellow Republicans have joined him in their privileging of power over democracy. In state after state, Republican leaders have done their best to suppress the votes of people of color. So too, in order to stay in power, Republicans have transferred massive amounts of money to the wealthy instead of focusing on the needs of the general citizenry.

So understood, it is no exaggeration to say that in the next election the voters will choose between corruption and democracy.

 

Recovering aspects of oneself as a necessary condition of “finding oneself:” therapeutic progress in psychoanalysis

Insight … combines the direct experience, or recovery in consciousness,¹ of aspects of oneself, so far deemed, with a perspective in the light of which their role in one’s patterns of behaviour and their consequences for one are understood. [….] But though this insight involves an inner change in which dissociated aspects of oneself are recovered, this is not the same thing as what is meant as ‘finding oneself.’ From the one inner change to the other there is much inner work to be done.

“The neurotic—and this, to some extent, applies to everyone—has reached certain solutions to his inner conflicts in early childhood. These solutions involve splitting off and denying certain aspects of himself, devoting some of his energies to maintaining this state of affairs. Consequently, he has confined himself to certain modes of response and closed himself to certain forms of interaction and experience. What he has thus become excludes what he could have been had he not rushed into these solutions and been able to tolerate pain, anxiety, and uncertainty a little more than he was able to. What he has missed in this process is ‘his best self’ [Freud], namely, ‘what he would have been under the most favourable conditions.’ Missing it implies a degree of inauthenticity and some curtailment of personal autonomy.

But what he has missed is not something that exists, albeit hidden or unconscious. The patient’s ‘best self,’ in the sense Freud meant it here is not his unconscious self. Finding it is not finding something ready-made awaiting discovery. ‘Finding’ here is used as in ‘finding one’s style.’ It means making, shaping, learning, growing into. When Leonardo da Vinci spoke of the sculptor finding the sculpture he was creating in the block of marble on which he was working, getting to it by removing parts of the block of marble on which he was working, getting to it by removing parts of the block which hid it, he was underplaying the part played by the artist’s creative vision in this process. His reason, I imagine, was to emphasize how much the artist’s creative vision is responsible to something outside him, something that exists independently of him, namely an artistic tradition, and he sees the possibilities in the material on which he sets off to create or realize come from that tradition, and he see the possibilities in the material on which he works, limited by its relevant characteristics—the size, shape and texture of the marble block. It is only in this sense that he finds the sculpture, the statue, in the block, only in this sense that the statue exists within it in advance.

It is in some ways the same with ‘finding oneself.’ What corresponds to the block in this case are, on the one hand, one’s past experiences and, on the other, those aspects of one’s character which make up one’s inauthenticity. What emerges ultimately, as one chips away the protective, defensive aspect of one’s character, giving up the pursuit of certain ambitions which one comes to see undermine what one cherishes, coming to terms with old injuries and forgiving those whom one held responsible for them, etc., has a great deal to do with the values and loyalties that are rooted in one’s past, the life and culture to which one belongs and the interests made possible by it which absorb one.

But for anyone whose growth has in some way been stunted to ‘find’ or ‘grow into’ himself, his ‘best self’ has to stop deceiving himself, face aspects of himself he has denied, feel the pain he has avoided in avoiding facing these, regain the resources he has deployed in keeping them at bay, as so find greater openness to new experiences. This is the part of the process which Freud used Leonardo da Vinci’s metaphor of per via di levare to highlight. However, he missed emphasizing the patient’s further positive contributions to which is ‘creative’ in character, and the part played in this by what comes to the patient from outside as he becomes more open and less rigid in himself.

Let me re-emphasize, this ‘best self’ that a person grows or would grow into, given the right circumstances, is not something predetermined—as in the case of a chrysalis which grows into a butterfly. On the contrary, what gives a person a ‘fixed’ character, so that what he comes to is to some extent predetermined, is what makes him, as it were a ‘closed system’ [cf. Wilhelm Reich’s notion of ‘character armour’]. [….] In finding himself a person loses this ‘fixity,’ he opens up, while at the same time finding a new stability. How he grows then depends on what he encounters in life, and this is not something fixed in advance. [….]

Psychoanalysis, one would say, enables the patient to find the conditions necessary for his arrested growth to pick up again by removing obstacles, by helping him to dispense with defences and to turn back from the road of repression. This can only be achieved with the patient’s collaboration. For the rest, the analyst leaves the patient on his own, refusing to guide or direct him.² It is true, of course, that the patient finds something of what he is like when he stops repressing those thoughts, inclinations and feelings which he has so far repressed. But ‘finding out what he is like’ is not the same as ‘finding himself.’ The way from the former to the latter is paved with integration and reconstruction. [….] It thus provides the patient with the opportunity to reconsider his own solutions in the light of his present knowledge of himself and to modify these with the help of his present resources. The idea that it aims to free the unconscious self or id (not the same thing) for it to take over so that the patient can find happiness in this new liberty is a popular misconception [emphasis added]. [….]

[This “popular misconception,” the converse, if you will, of neurotic unhappiness and misery, finds the analysand becoming the plaything of impulses which effectively destroy the possibility of his finding cohesion within himself.] [….] Compulsion and impulsiveness, repression and license, the super-ego and the id: these are two poles between which the ego has to negotiate in the course of the person’s struggles to find himself. [….] As aspects of the id and the super-ego are transformed into part of the patient’s ego, they change character and come under the domain of the patient’s will. Impulses he had repressed, compulsions that had ruled his life, now become inclinations that no longer overwhelm him. [….] These are changes in the self towards greater unity and autonomy, changes which liberate resources deployed to maintain divisions within the self, and they open the way to renewed contact with the outside world through which the self finds new growth. That is why they constitute a ‘healing of the self.’ They coincide with Freud’s therapeutic ideal: ‘where id and super-ego were, there ego shall be.’” – Ilham Dilman, Freud, Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988): 154-158 passim.

1. As Dilman explains: “Consciousness is not the stuff that constitutes the mental, but rather the person’s apprehension of what concerns or affects him. It may be explicit in his thoughts or implicit in his responses.”
2. Following Dilman, respect for the patient’s (or analysand’s) individuality or autonomy means “the patient must be allowed to find his own solutions to his problems and to be himself, he must equally be allowed to see the truth for himself, and even to find it for himself. [….] Thus the patient must not be forced to accept a truth even by cogent argument, for this will at best produce a theoretical or intellectual conviction: ‘Psychoanalysis is not an impartial scientific investigation [said Freud], but a therapeutic measure. Its essence is not to prove anything, but merely to alter something.’” [….] “The analyst avoids all falsity and deception in the analysis: in the way he is with the patient as well as in what he tells him. He never leads the patient away from the truth, but neither does he impose it on him. Nor does he try to persuade him to change either, to impose his own wishes or values on him. He avoids all forms of manipulation. [….] The patient must want to ‘get well,’ to be different, he must be prepared to give up something for it—something which protects him from pain, or compensates for some lack, or simply point him in the opposite direction. He must be prepared to put himself out, to face risk, to work, and he must have the inner resources to allocate to such work.” At this point, Dilman quotes Erich Fromm in a book he co-authored with D.T. Suzuki and Richard De Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960): “Neither the analyst nor any man can ‘save’ another human being. He can act as a guide, or as a mid-wife … but he can never do for the patient what only the patient can do for himself. He must make this perfectly clear to the patient, not only in his words, but by his whole attitude. His relation must be free from any interference of the analyst in the life of the patient, not even that of the demand that the patient gets well. If the patient wants to get well and to change, that is fine, and the analyst is willing to help him.”

Does Torture Work?

The most important issue about torture remains the moral issue of the deliberate infliction of pain, the suffering that results, the insult to dignity, and the demoralization and depravity that is almost always associated with this enterprise where it is legalized or not. — Jeremy Waldron

Apologists often assume that torture works, and all that is left is the moral [and/or legal] justification. If torture does not work, then their apology is irrelevant. Deciding whether one ought or ought not to drive a car is a pointless debate [or decision] if the car has no gas. — Darius Rejali

The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States has ratified, making it U.S. law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, contains an absolute ban on torture: ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.’ The prohibition of torture is so fundamental it is considered jus cogens, a peremptory norm of international law binding on all countries even if they have not ratified the Torture Convention.—Marjorie Cohn from her Introduction to the volume she edited, The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse (New York University Press, 2011)

Alas, at least 48% of Americans say there are some circumstances under which the use of “enhanced interrogation” (a euphemism for torture) is acceptable in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.* And not surprisingly, given the many unethical (e.g., racist, misogynist, inhumane), bizarre, paranoid, ill-considered, and delusional beliefs and fantasies (and phantasies) he holds, President Trump has proclaimed torture to be “effective” (his reticence on this topic of late may reflect one of the few occasions in which he has listened to and followed legal advice). His commitment to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp (last year he signed an executive order to keep the prison camp open indefinitely) suggests his views on torture have not changed.

As for intellectuals (‘pseudo-‘ and otherwise) and some philosophers, the endeavor to morally justify or rationalize torture is often crystallized in arguments based on hypothetical “ticking-time bomb” scenarios, “thought-experiments” which share the irreality, unreality, or surreality of the ethicist’s beloved “trolley problem” (there are several versions of the trolley problem which need not concern us). I concede that some philosophical benefit may result from its examination, albeit largely in the form of by-product effects through clarifying this or that concept, moral intuition or topic in ethics, but these might equally and more directly—if not timely fashion—be obtained by dealing with realistic or real-world ethical issues, problems and dilemmas. When it comes to attempts to morally justify torture, however, I see little or no benefit in focusing on “ticking-time bomb” scenarios because they only serve to detract from the urgency of the principal moral arguments and relevant empirical evidence (such as can be attained or reasonably inferred).

“The past two millennia are rich with examples that confirm, time and again, Ulpian’s dictum from the third century A.D.: the strong can resist torture and the weak will say anything to end their pain.” — Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

If torture, on occasion, has been found to be “effective,” it represents an exception to the general rule, and not a predictable (hence not reliable) one at that:

“ … [T]hree different sources of error … systematically and unavoidably corrupt information gathered through torture. These are deceptive, but actionable information given by uncooperative or innocent prisoners; the well-documented weakness of most interrogators for spotting deception; and mistaken, but high-confidence, information offered by cooperative prisoners after torture. [….]

For harvesting information, organized torture yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organizational capabilities, and destroys interrogators. Limited time during battle or emergency intensifies all these problems.” (Darius Rajali)

* Here, it is worth noting with Rejali in his indispensable tome, Torture and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2007), that belief in the interrogative value (i.e., ‘efficacy’) of torture and the corresponding moral and legal attempts to justify its use of torture in democratic legal regimes is not confined to anti-terrorism efforts: “One might think that the demand for torture in democracies arises mainly during national emergencies. It is easy to imagine that, in war or in the face of terrorism, an imminent threat might lead some to endorse torture and many others to turn a blind eye. This would explain why some democracies turned to torture, for instance the French in Algeria, the British in Northern Ireland, or the Israelis on the West Bank, It would not explain many cases where analysts have documented systematic torture in democracies when an objective or perceived national threat was absent. These cases include such places as Japan, Brazil, the Russian Federation, democratic South Africa, and some American cities, notably Chicago and New York.”

Thus, and relatedly, there are three principal reasons or purposes for torture in democracies: “to intimidate, to coerce false confessions, and to gather accurate security information.” As Rejali explains, coercive interrogation techniques (another euphemism for torture) can often work or be effective if the overarching aim is to intimidate or generate false confessions. However, it is generally, and as we read above, wrongly assumed in the war on terror that torture can “generate true and reliable intelligence, intelligence that is qualitatively superior to [that obtained by] standard police techniques.”

Please see this bibliography: Torture: moral, legal, and political dimensions

Addendum: It appears my “claims and citations are impotent,” if only because they are “without empirical foundations.”

Universal Basic Income (UBI): Theory and Praxis

The following is from the beginning of an extensive article, “Eyes on a city’s test of basic income,” found on the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times:

“Young, sincere and raised on the edge of poverty, Sukhi Samra has a mother who worked two minimum-wage jobs when she was a kid — days at a gas station and nights at a Subway. Her father is disabled. She knows what an extra $500 a month would have bought her family. ‘I spent a lot of 5^th and 6^th grade just, like, in those tables at Subway so that I could keep my mom some company and spend some time with her,’ Samra said. ‘Five hundred a month would have meant that my mom spent a couple more hours at home with us every night.’

At 23, Samra is now head of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, a pilot program to test a universal basic income. For the next year and a half, 130 residents of this struggling Central Valley city will get $500 every month, with no strings — such as employment or sobriety requirements — attached, in a social experiment that is as much public relations as rigorous research. Although its organizers have promised transparency, so far, much of the program has been a closely guarded secret. The identities of the recipients have remained confidential while organizers plan a media strategy. Multiple requests by The Times to conduct interviews were denied.

Still, what happens in Stockton is likely to inform the national political conversation in the years ahead. Universal basic income — also called guaranteed income — has become an unexpectedly hot topic among presidential candidates, as economic anxiety and income inequality continue to plague voters on both sides of the political spectrum. The pilot program also could create a road map for implementing future basic income policies in other cities or on a national scale.

‘We are in a moment where big ideas are important and politically people are ready for them,’ said Natalie Foster, co-chair of The Economic Security Project, a Silicon-Valley organization that provided $1 million in initial funding for the $3.1 million program. ‘The stories coming out of Stockton will put a real name and a face on what that economic insecurity looks like and what it looks like to make a different political decision.’” [….] The full article is here.

*           *           *

Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) proposals are not intended to address the entirety of anarchist and Marxist or socialist critiques of capitalism. Instead, UBI speaks to specific negative features of capitalism, such as the “proletarianization of labor,” and chronic if not extreme egalitarianism. With regard to the former, it is an expression and embodiment of the belief that the abstract property in capitalism known as “labor power” is not the constitutive or defining property of our humanity. In the words of Michael Luntley, “[W]hen we live in an economy organised under the aristocracy of Capital, our labour power must become our defining property on pain of failure of that economy.” UBI is but one of a large number of historical and creative Leftist endeavors to expand and deepen the meaning of democratic praxis so as to both build upon and transcend capitalism’s impressive historic achievements on behalf of human emancipation while remaining true to the triune character of French revolutionary motto: liberté, égalité, fraternité. The UBI also is also an urgent reminder of the principled desirability and concrete possibility of placing the values and interests of people (both as individuals and members of groups) beyond the interests of capital and capitalists (the ‘aristocracy of capital’). Finally, the UBI cannot alone displace the Welfare State of liberal democratic capitalism, although it is capable of significantly decreasing citizen and government reliance on same.

I had forgotten Robert Goodin’s elegant argument (Goodin himself describes it as ‘undeniably cheeky’) in favor of basic income schemes, having read it over twenty years ago. It runs as follows: “[S]chemes paying everyone an unconditional basic income are less presumptuous than more conditional programs of support [i.e., the two-tiered system—social insurance and social assistance—that characterizes our social security policies generally]. Not only are they less prying and intrusive, less demeaning and debasing…. [t]hey also make fewer assumptions and presumptions about those whom they are aiding. That in turn makes schemes of basic income support more efficient, in one important sense than more conditional schemes of support. [….] [Most conspicuously, basic income schemes are] less prone to sociological error and less vulnerable to social change than are alternative models of social security provision. [….] Efficiency as such is of no independent moral importance to us. So at root the reason we should cherish the target of efficiency of basic income strategies is simply that that guarantees we will, through them, be able to relieve human suffering as best as we can.” — Robert E. Goodin, “Basic Income,” in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1995): 228-243, reproducing material from “Toward a Minimally Presumptuous Social Welfare Policy,” in Arguing for Basic Income, ed. Philippe Van Parijs (Verso: 1992): 195-214.

The basic income experiment in the city of Stockton that is the subject of the article is quite modest as such things go, and should be examined in light of similar experiments around the world.

Suggested Reading:

• Ackerman, Bruce, Anne Alstott, Philippe van Parijs, et al. Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants as Cornerstones for an Egalitarian Capitalism. London: Verso, 2006.
• Birnbaum, Simon. Basic Income Reconsidered: Social Justice, Liberalism, and the Demands of Equality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• Goodin, Robert E. “Basic Income,” in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1995): 228-243. reproducing material from “Toward a Minimally Presumptuous Social Welfare Policy,” in Arguing for Basic Income, ed. Philippe Van Parijs (Verso: 1992): 195-214.
• Groot, L.F.M. Basic Income, Unemployment and Compensatory Justice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2010.
• Iyer, Raghavan. “An Unfinished Dream,” in Iyer’s Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979: 299-331. As Iyer writes, “It is hardly surprising that the utopian proposal of ensuring a guaranteed annual income to every adult should be a recurring topic of controversy since [Edward] Bellamy wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Whether or not this proposal is politically feasible at present, it would be worthwhile to consider some of the drastic implications of the proposal for social theory and contemporary values, and for a daring vision of the future. [....] The unprecedented divorce of basic income from work, and of involuntary work from survival, would have significant repercussions on the level of income distribution, attitudes to work, social differentiation, social stratification, occupational ranking, and even the definition of success and failure.” This essay is indispensable for clear and courageous thinking about the notion of a Guaranteed Basic Income.
• Robertson, James. Future Work: Jobs, self-employment and leisure after the industrial age. New York: Universe Books, 1985.*
• Rogers, Brishen. “Basic Income in a Just Society,” Boston Review, April 30, 2017.
• Rogers, Brishen, et al. “Work, Inequality, Basic Income,” Boston Review, Forum 2, April 25, 2017: 11-92.
• Sheahen, Allan. Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• van Parijs, Philippe, ed. Arguing for Basic Income. London: Verso, 1992.
• van Parijs, Philippe, et al. What’s Wrong With a Free Lunch? Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.
• van Parijs, Philippe and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
• White, Stuart. The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• White, Stuart, “Social Minimum,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/social-minimum/
• Widerquist, Karl. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No (Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• Widerquist, Karl, Michael Anthony Lewis, and Steven Pressman, eds. The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
• Widerquist, Karl and Michael W. Howard, eds. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model (Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• Widerquist, Karl, Jose Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere, eds. Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.
  

* An early argument for a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) based on the premise that structural (i.e., chronic and then permanent) unemployment in affluent, post-industrial societies, in others words, the likelihood that conventional full employment will never be restored, means there are too many people without a basic subsistence income, their basic needs no longer met by the traditional provision of social security in welfare-state capitalist societies (be they Liberal, Corporatist or Social Democratic). Robertson argues, among other things, that the GBI “will lead to a liberation of work, helping to remove the existing divisions between people who are employed and people who are unemployed, between people of working age and people who are retired, and between men and women’s work.”

Related Bibliographies:

• Anarchism: philosophy and praxis
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education — From Etiological Diagnosis to Therapeutic Regimen
• Democratic Theory
• Global Distributive Justice
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis

Young—school age—boy at home for summer vacation: “Momma, I’m bored.”

[The ‘title’ of the post does not assume that only mothers or women are caregivers (e.g., home during the summer because they don’t work, etc.). In other words, one can re-write this sentence in any number of ways so long as it contains the child expressing his (genuine?) feeling of boredom.]  

In ordinary states of boredom the child returns to the possibility of his own desire. That boredom is actually a precarious process in which the child is, as it were, both waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly negotiated; and in this sense boredom is akin to free-floating attention. In the muffled, sometimes irritable confusion of boredom the child is reaching to a recurrent sense of emptiness out of which his real desire can crystallize. [….] The child’s boredom starts as a regular crisis in the child’s developing capacity to be alone of the presence of the mother. In other words, the capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child. [….] Is it not, indeed revealing, what the child’s boredom evokes in the adult? Heard as a demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed to, simply acknowledged. How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval. The adult’s wish to distract him—as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must, or seem to be, endlessly interesting [or even entertaining!]. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take the time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.

While the child’s boredom is often recognized as an incapacity, it is usually denied as an opportunity.

If the bored child cannot sufficiently hold the mood, or use the adult as an unimpinging auxiliary ego, there is a premature flight from uncertainty, the familiar orgy of promiscuous agreements …. — Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Harvard University Press, 1993): 69-70.

The refusal here to moralize the experience of boredom while appreciating its developmental value or purpose(s) is refreshing (in the case of adults, however, such moralization may be warranted). It reminded me—assuming the veracity of the recollection—of similar scenarios from my childhood during hot and often humid summers in Irving, Texas. The few occasions in which I had the temerity to express my feelings of boredom to my mother she said curtly something along the lines of: “That’s not my problem.” While that response either angered or puzzled me at the time, it now seems rather appropriate, even if she may, indeed, likely did not have in mind “simple acknowledgement” or according me, as it were, space for “waiting and looking” or “taking my time.”

In a future post I will share what some philosophers (and perhaps a few non-philosophers) have said about boredom.

The heart and mind—or soul—of psychoanalysis

These finely if not exquisitely crafted thoughts about the nature of psychoanalysis are from the Preface to Adam Phillips’ Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (Basic Books, 2001)* [yours truly is responsible for the bracketed material, which I hope is not too intrusive]: 

“As a therapy, [psychoanalysis] investigates character in language in order to make people happier, and find their lives more interesting.”

“… [P]sychoanalytic writing (and practice) of every persuasion still sounds a bit like religion, a bit like metaphysics, a bit like anthropology, a bit like science. And a bit like what was still called in the earlier days of psychoanalysis, literature [and, I would add, at least on occasion, a bit like philosophy]. Indeed, it has been to literature that psychoanalysts [beginning with Freud himself] have turned when they grow weary of their supposed system, of their technological psychological sentences.”

“Psychoanalysis, at its best, should be a profession of popularizers of interesting ideas about the difficulties and exhilarations of living. And, as so-called treatment [‘therapy’ is more apt], it should be more about living day-to-day as oneself than about being initiated into a sophisticated or prestigious theoretical system. Listening to what people say, which is more or less what psychoanalysis consists of, should be above all a reminder of fellow feeling.”

A suitably modest “… psychoanalysis is more committed to happiness and inspiration (and the miscellaneous) than to self-knowledge, rigorous thinking, or the Depths of Being [although any one or more combination of these may come about as an unintended by-product or spillover effect]. It values truthfulness but not truth [or Truth]; and as a clinical practice it prefers small gains to revelations [for the analysand, some of these gains may, in the end as it were, turn out to be rather revelatory].”

“… I think that reading what used to be called Literature is probably a better preparation for the practice of psychoanalysis than the reading of anything else (political history would be a close second). The ethos of psychoanalysis would be greatly improved if was more widely acknowledge that one can no more institutionalize psychoanalysis than one can institutionalize poetry. You can teach poetry, but you cannot teach someone to be a poet. The same is true of psychoanalysis. More people are harmed, though, by bad psychoanalysis than by bad poetry.”

* Adam Phillips (b. 19 September 1954) “is a British psychotherapist and essayist. Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Death and Dying
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology

Preliminary musings on happiness

Whether one believes in religion or not, we are all seeking something better in life—the very notion of our life is toward happiness. — The Dalai Lama

Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves. — F. Emerson Andrews

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. — Margaret Lee Runbeck

Is happiness the satisfaction one obtains when one’s desires are satisfied? Or is it the capacity to be pleased with what one has and enjoy what one does? Is the happy person one who enjoys life or one who has attained inner peace? How far does happiness depend on his state of soul, his values and attitudes to things, and how far on his external circumstances? What can one do to be happy? Can the desire for happiness be anything other than a form of self-seeking? — Ilham Dilman

Most of us, I suspect, possess or cleave to a desire or wish to be happy. “Most of us” is the requisite qualification because, in the words of Nel Noddings, “there are some gloomy souls who deny that happiness in our chief concern and claim something else as a greater good ….”¹ We may even think our status as human beings or persons brings along with it (despite the awkwardness of the locution) a right to be happy, that the pursuit, as it were, of happiness is part and parcel of human nature or the human condition (and thus we may come to resent or at least get angry at those people or things we believe interfere with or are obstacles to our justified pursuit or just deserts). As for what happiness in fact is or consists of, we are not certain; at least we perhaps have only a dim conception, or a vaguely intuitive sense of what makes us happy. Happiness may embody or represent that which enhances our welfare and well-being, what makes life meaningful or brings self-fulfillment (or eudaimonia). We may want to define happiness so it is not circumscribed solely by “health, wealth, and the ups and downs of everyday life,” but the satisfaction of minimal criteria for material welfare and well-being may be a necessary yet not sufficient condition for happiness.² Or we may be content to see happiness as simply the converse of suffering, of the absence of suffering (of various kinds). We may believe happiness is an occasional, momentary, episodic, indeed occurrent emotion or affective state (arising from more or less familiar gratifications or either well-known simple pleasures or complex pleasures).³ Or, we may view it more along the lines of a disposition (i.e., with a potential to be actualized), one that takes either the form of a mood (e.g., ‘he’s been rather happy of late’) or a general affective or even character trait, as in, “He’s such a happy person.” It might be the case that what we entertain as the “stuff” of happiness—no matter how assiduously, passionately, or obsessively entertained—is an illusion, a fantasy, an impossible desire or wish. What is perhaps more disturbing or frightening is to consider the possibility that the conscious wish or desire for happiness, to be happy, is routinely or ritually undermined by our unconscious, the appreciation or awareness of which may come to us all too late in life. More transparently, and in the words of the Dalai Lama, it may merely be the case that “we often employ misguided means in our attempts to be happy and wind up creating more causes for misery instead.”

In any case, it is likely that the desire or wish or intention to “be happy” is not one that can be directly sought, in other words, it is one with that class of mental states or states of affairs that cannot be (directly) willed, indeed, the deliberate pursuit of such states represents the irrationality, performative contradiction, or sheer folly of “willing what cannot be willed” (the late psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leslie Farber). If that is true, and I lack sufficient reason to doubt it is not, then happiness is a welcome or unexpected by-product or side effect of some other action or activity, some other act or condition whose principal intention or motivation was not the desire or wish to be happy, even if happiness is somehow linked to or circuitously or indirectly caused by the original intention or primary motivation. Or it might be that we can only be happy when the desires or wish for happiness recedes, as it were, to the back of our minds, when we have forgotten the desire or wish to be happy, as we are no longer “self-conscious” about it, let alone obsessed with being happy (a Buddhist would put this in terms of not being ‘attached’ to happiness). Let’s assume for a moment that this is wrong, and thus that I’m able to deliberately pursue or perform or consume those (material or immaterial) things that bring me happiness, if only momentarily or episodically (this need not be simply the desire for instant gratification). In such cases, the happiness may itself be described as evanescent or degrading in intensity or quality over time, its character exemplifying what economists term “diminishing marginal utility,” its pleasures increasingly elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.

Whatever happiness is, it seems reasonable to hope that, at least in part, our happiness should be occasionally characterized as a consequence of seeing others happy, or of our ability to, as we say, make others happy. Put a bit differently, a portion of our happiness should be constituted by the joy or pleasure we find in witnessing the happiness of others, whether or not we have been complicit in or had anything to do with its outcome (which is verbally if not always honestly expressed when one says, ‘I’m so happy for you!’).

Notes

1. From her important book, Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. On the apparent paradox of a precipitous decline of happiness in the midst of increasing plenty (or the putative pleasures of ample and conspicuous consumption), please see Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
3. “Yet attempts to account for happiness’s value in purely hedonic terms seems to miss something. They do not account for the appeal of criticizing hedonism on the grounds that it is psychologically superficial. It seems important to note the psychological depth of happiness, the fact that it involves more of our psychologies than just their phenomenal surfaces. Why? The answer lies mainly in the connection that happiness makes with the self.” Daniel M. Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008): 182. We need not assume here any essentialist notion or independent identity of “the self.” As the Dalai Lama points out, “[the] ‘I’ is designated in dependence on our body and mind, yet when we search for a findable thing that that is ‘me,’ we can’t find it within the body or mind, the collection of the two, or separate from them.” Furthermore, “[a]lthough we cannot pinpoint anything that is the self, the existence of a person who creates causes and experiences effects is undeniable.” Please see, passim, The Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron (Bhikṣu Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Bhikṣuṇī Thubten Chodron) Approaching the Buddhist Path (The Library of Wisdom and Compassion, Vol. 1) (Wisdom Publications, 2017).

Further Reading: Chapter 15, “Caring about Oneself—Happiness and Sadness,” in Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000): 449-472.