It appears the great English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) had Yogic- and Buddhist-like sensibilities with regard to mental states or, in the Buddhist case, states of consciousness, specifically the role of saṃskāras (which, among other causes, produces memory) and kāma,* or more broadly, at least in Buddhism, tṛṣṇā.**
“Bion said that to be without memory or desire is the mental state which prepares the analyst best for the forthcoming clinical session.”
“The state of relaxation or reverie, to use Bion’s word, or free floating attention [or ‘free association’], to use Freud’s term, is that which best disposes the mind to make the transition from the sensual to the mental. To be attached to the sensual prevents that transition from one to the other and therefore blocks understanding. Bion makes it clear that it is not the memory as such that blocks understanding but rather the attachment [in Buddhism, upādāna, ‘attachment, clinging, grasping,’ and in Yoga, rāga, which also means ‘attachment,” with connotations of strong desire or passion]. What Bion recommends is that the analyst place on himself a discipline [cf. spiritual ‘exercises’ or practices, like concentration of the mind or meditation, in other words: ascesis, abhyāsa, sādhana, and vinaya in Buddhism] where he detaches himself from an addictive attachment to memory. Bion says that it is the psychological state of attachment to the sensual that needs to be relinquished. He says, for instance, that there can be just as injurious attachment to ‘forgetting:’ ‘I do not mean that ‘forgetting’ is enough [as when one, say, is self-conscious or aware that one is ‘forgetting’ or at least, more accurately, striving to forget]: what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.’ If, for instance, in the state of reverie a memory floats into the mind of the analyst, then that memory as a symbol of a psychic reality is extremely relevant. It is the state of mind which is extremely crucial here. What Bion is recommending is very closely allied to what Buddhists refer to as nirodha. Nirodha means the cessation of thirst for all this is transient [or impermanent]. The Buddha said we have to strive for the cessation of dukkha (in Pāli). Dukkha has often been translated as ‘suffering,’ but this is not correct [technically, it is indeed correct!]. Dukkha means rather that attachment to the transient aspects of this world that brings about suffering [here our authors are conflating what Buddhists rightly distinguish: the cause(s) of suffering from the condition or state of same that is the effect or result of the cause]. That attachment is known as tanha, which means ‘thirst’ for the sensual things of life [again, technically this ‘thirst’ or craving is of wider scope: it can entail a thirst for mental objects, or for continued existence, or even for non-existence; our authors proceed to acknowledge this, at least in part]. … [In psychoanalysis] it is also attachment to inner imaginative impressions and it is our clinical observation that these hidden attachments have a much greater pull over the psyche than outer physical things.” – This and the first quote above are from Joan and Neville Symington’s book, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion (Routledge, 1996).
In the words of Sara L. Weber, echoing Joan and Neville Symington, Bion believed that “the mind grows through exposure to the truth of, and acceptance of, suffering [this of course does not mean one need be content with this state of affairs, that one cannot work to eliminate the various kinds of suffering].” See her essay, “A clinical encounter: a mind without walls,” in Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion, edited by Axel Hoffer (Karnac Books, 2015): 115-133.
* kāma is translated as “’desire, wish, or longing’ in “Hindu and Buddhist literature,” and while it often connotes sexual desire and longing in contemporary literature, the concept can refer to any desire, wish, passion, longing, pleasure of the senses, affection or love (sans sexual connotations), and sensual and erotic desire.
** tṛṣṇā (taṇhā in Pāli) is often translated as “thirst, desire, greed, craving,” although I think craving is the best translation in the context of the “four truths [known by the spiritually] noble,” namely, their unique insight into the nature of reality, metaphysically speaking. The third of these truths is “cessation”/nirodha, meaning the suppression or cessation of kleśas or “mental afflictions” that disturb the mind and thus often lead to unwholesome deeds of the body, speech, and/or mind. Tṛṣṇā, which we might define as inordinate desire or craving, is one important such affliction (ignorance/avidya being another). Thus tṛṣṇā is among the causes of duhkha in Buddhism, that is, “suffering,” or an existential state of being “ill-at-ease,” or a psychological condition of “unsatisfactoriness,” or lack of contentment or the absence of fulfillment or eudaimonia.
Recent and related posts: (i) Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies; (ii) Buddhism and psychoanalysis: two rather different “therapies of desire” fashioned for the relief of suffering; and (iii) Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and therapy: an introduction to its therapeutic model and “science of subjectivity.”
Relevant Bibliographies
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