The Religion of Therapy — Zen, Psychoanalysis & The Counselor’s Secret Radicalism
Immersed, as many of us are, in a culture that frames regular therapy as part of a well-balanced self-care routine and inundated by therapy-speak reels on social media, I was shocked when a friend (who has never been to therapy and likely never will) asked curiously, “Why is it that people go to therapy, again?”
This innocent question reminded me, that in all its claims for evidence-based efficacy, and reports of increased use in recent years, therapy is still a culture-bound phenomenon, a construct peculiar to a secular, science-driven, progressive culture. Psychotherapy’s evolution has followed from the birth of psychology as a distinct discipline in the late 1800s, to the prominence of psychoanalysis in the early part of the 20th century, to the movement toward cognitive therapies of shorter duration (the “Cognitive Revolution”) in the latter part of the 20th, and finally to the destigmatization of mental illness and growing numbers seeking treatment in the post-COVID-19 era.
There is a paradox to this growing reliance on psychotherapy. An increase in the number of people diagnosed with depression and anxiety and treated with psychotherapy could mean that the world is getting sadder and more stressed out. Or the destigmatization of therapy could mean that individuals seek out therapy more readily, compelling therapists to diagnose psychiatric conditions more often (for insurance billing purposes), thus increasing the report rate of mental illness. On the other hand, if people feel better when they take psychopharmacological medication and speak to a therapist every day, an increase in the use of therapy and report of psychiatric illness could indicate a qualitative decrease in the subjective experience of distress in the average American. Then again, it could be that, as critics of the mental health awareness movement have highlighted, a cultural shift toward prioritizing emotional experience in subjective consciousness could be creating a generation of individuals who are hypersensitive to emotional discomfort and poorly equipped with the tools “to tough it out” (see my article on Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy [REBT] that incorporates some of this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps methodology). Surely, avoiding interpersonal friction and staring at one’s belly button (as one article puts it), can lead to a state of consciousness that, while perhaps advanced in the powers of subjective precision, can lack the distress tolerance required for social and professional gameplay.
So what is the purpose of therapy?
In past essays, often with my tongue in my cheek, I have spoken of therapists filling a spiritual role in the modern secular zeitgeist, suggesting that they perform a role similar to those filled in times past by the church confessional, magic man/woman, guru, or other healer designated by the community to handle issues of mental distress. And while we know that psychotherapy is effective at both a subjective level (across numerous studies, people report they feel better after undergoing treatment) and an objective level (their brains change, too) it operates in an epistemological gap between the evidence-based hard sciences and the mysteries of interpersonal healing across the social synapse.
Therapy is something more…Dare I say, something spiritual.
Eric Fromm & the Spirituality of Psychoanalysis
The German-American philosopher and psychologist, Eric Fromm (1900–1980) tackles this “something more” in his 1960 book Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis, wherein Fromm, who identifies himself as a Humanist Psychoanalyst, outlines the overarching ethics of his application of the art form and connects the goal of psychoanalysis with Zen Buddhism’s Satori — the fullest state of enlightened awareness.
Fromm does not shy away from articulating the spiritual dimension of psychoanalysis. While Fromm is clear that “psychoanalysis is a scientific method, nonreligious to its core” (Fromm, p. 77), he speaks to psychoanalysis’ role in addressing the lack of religiosity that he finds in Western culture, using the term “religious” in a way only a mid-century writer could — someone who had yet to experience the full force of Protestantism’s 1990s-2000s-era greed.
Psychoanalysis, of course, is rooted in the work of Freud, a man who was in no way ambiguous about his distaste for (particularly Abrahamic) religions. Freud doggedly refused to fall back on the crutch of supernaturalism in his work. This obsession led to the robust theory of human psychology that is still leveraged by numerous psychotherapeutic modalities today. Critics of psychoanalysis are partly correct in their accusations that it is not scientific. Freud did not have the neuroscientific tools that we have today to tie his work to materialist science and, although the behavioral aspects of psychology can be measured, theories of the intangible mind cannot. However, such criticism misses the philosophy of scientific positivism that Freud brought to each psychoanalytic session. In Freud’s view, the psychoanalyst acts as a scientist-in-the-moment, developing theories about the client’s mental landscape, creating hypotheses, and testing these against the body of data collected from the client through free association.
After asserting the scientificity of Freud’s work, Fromm proceeds to describe it with distinctly spiritual language. According to Fromm’s reading of Freud, an aspirational ethic at the heart of psychoanalysis transcends the clinical model. He puts it this way:
“If we look more closely, we find that behind this concept of a medical therapy for the cure of neurosis was an entirely different interest, rarely expressed by Freud, and probably rarely conscious even to himself. This hidden or only implicit concept did not primarily deal with the cure of mental illness, but with something which transcended the concept of illness and cure” (Fromm, p. 82).
Interestingly, Fromm calls out Freud on his unconscious shadow — in stark contrast to Freud’s stubbornly analytical and reality-bound exterior, Freud harbored a latent desire to see the client progress beyond the absence of clinically significant psychopathology to a heightened state of wellness. Call it transcending, thriving, self-actualization, or being “saved” — the implicit goal was aspirational.
By now, I’m sure, my reader’s culty red flags are beginning to flutter. So let’s address it.
In the past, Psychoanalysis has not gone uncriticized for occasions of groupthink resulting from narcissistic dynamics between supervisors and supervisees (Pepper et al, 1992). Additionally, it is not uncommon for psychotherapists to identify with their modality so strongly that they defend it as if they would a faith. Indeed, the intensity with which one studies a complex philosophical framework (such as those used in psychotherapy) inevitably leads to a dominant pattern of thinking and communication in a clinician. Whether it is psychodynamics, cognitive approaches, internal family systems theory, or the spiritual language of psychedelic practitioners, advanced studies make us who we are. Each practitioner operates in their distinct Khunian paradigm. The edged nuggets of rigorous but incomplete scientific research are buffed away and presented as glimmering gems of therapeutic wisdom at the level of the podcast and the undergraduate textbook.
My point is that the secularist ought not to imagine that there is a haven of objectivity and rationality in the psychological sciences. This may have been Freud’s blind spot. But it wasn’t Fromm’s. Shying not away from superlative language, Fromm articulates the philosophical position of psychoanalysis in the following:
“It is one in which not the negative aim of the absence of sickness, but the positive one of the presence of well-being is aimed at, and that well-being is conceived in terms of full union, the immediate and uncontaminated grasp of the world.” (Fromm, p. 136)
Satori
“Full union, the immediate and uncontaminated grasp of the world” — what Zen Buddhism might call Satori.
The art of Zen includes more than the contemplative practices that have been bastardized for inclusion in glossy Whole Foods check-out line magazines about mindfulness. Meditation is just one part of a set of cognitive exercises designed to induce the state of enlightened awareness known as Satori. One such device is the Koan, a riddle-like statement that confuses and challenges the mind such that it abandons repetitive and banal thought patterns and moves toward insight and intuitive understanding. (For an excellent example of how Koans can be incorporated into your meditation practice, I recommend Sam Harris’s Waking Up app). Another is the interaction between the disciple of Zen and the Zen master that Fromm compares to psychoanalysis. The Zen master’s paradoxical and evasive wit progressively exposes the disciple to their cognitive assumptions, prompting their deconstruction in consciousness and yielding fresh approaches to the challenges and potentials of everyday life.
Fromm elaborates on the shared goal of Zen and psychoanalysis in the following:
“To arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists — and yet to experience myself at the same time” (Fromm, 91).
In psychoanalytic terms, this state results from a greater awareness of the relationship between conscious and unconscious functions of the mind facilitated by psychoanalysis. Through the transference between analyst and patient and the analyst’s interpretations of the client’s psychological experiences, the filter of social experience by which we view the world dissolves (more on this in a bit in the section on parataxic distortion) leading to a more pure engagement with immediate experience. Psychoanalysis’ goal is to release the unconscious from repressive defense mechanisms such that a fluid interaction of unconscious and conscious processes provides the client with insights to navigate life decisions and moderate psychic disturbances.
The ever-demonized ego facilitates the interplay of conscious and unconscious material in the mind. A healthy ego, does this well. The higher state of union with the world that Fromm suggests is not a complete loss of self. To clarify this point, Fromm contrasts it with Christianity’s dying to oneself, explaining that surrendering one’s will and egoism in Zen or psychoanalysis does not carry the risk of later sacrificing it to an authoritarian father-god or (I will extend) a communal mother-god. The oneness Fromm describes includes both the subordination of individualism to the collective and the assertion toward the collective mind of the individual’s intuitive subjective truth. This more nuanced approach to the ego, balances the dangers of both the competitive self-interested will (narcissism) and the passivity of many meditative approaches that emphasize too heavily the negation of the self without adequately addressing the need to assert the intuitive will to reach productive and creative engagement with the world.
The goal of both psychoanalysis and Zen is freedom to experience and express the full potential of the individual. Removing repressive mechanisms frees an individual to their full potentiality. As the Lacanian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek states; “Psychoanalysts are possibly the most free” (Zizek, from a YouTube video somewhere). Or as Fromm puts it:
“Zen liberates all energies properly and naturally stored in each of us, which are in ordinary circumstances cramped and distorted so that they find no adequate channel of activity…giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts” (Fromm, 1960 p.114)
Fromm discusses three mechanisms that ‘cramp and distort’ and that, when removed, allow us to reach the spiritual goal of Satori:
- Parataxic Distortion
- False Consciousness
- Cerebration
Parataxic Distortion
The first of Fromm’s obstacles to enlightenment is parataxis. In object relations theory (the idea that we create internal representations of reality that function as objects in our psychic plane), parataxic distortion refers to the mind’s tendency to create distorted representations of reality based on childhood fantasies and early traumatic experiences. Parataxic distortion occurs in the object relations associated with the concepts and people with which we engage on the day-to-day.
Parataxic distortion also occurs in the therapy room, contributing to the answer to the introductory question of this article — “Why go to therapy?” This question is most accurately answered by the client themself. What does the client expect of “Therapist” in the object relations of their mind? The client appears to therapy with a self/socially created concept of the therapist, the object “Therapist” appearing as parataxic distortion in consciousness. The nature of this object relation will change based on the social and cultural understanding of the role of “Therapist”— doctor, healer, helper, friend, and of course (if only subconscious in the classic transference) the familial — father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter, romantic/sexual partner. The therapist allows this transference, playing the part of “Therapist” in the interaction. Therapy essentially concludes when the client realizes that not only is their conceptualization of “Therapist” distorted, a false construction of their own ego and the societal mind, so is “Client”.
Fromm states:
“Only when the patient gets in touch with his unconscious can he overcome the distortions produced by himself and see the person of the analyst, as well as his father or his mother, as it is.” (Fromm, 1960, p. 107).
When the client reaches the epiphany that they sit in a room alone with another human, engaging in a peculiar form of communication in an artificial relationship, when the psychic objects “Therapist” and “Client” cease to be distorted, so does the mediating concept “Therapy”. To repeat, when a client comes to the experiential insight that there is no difference between them and the therapist — that the therapist performs an interpersonal and communicative art form much in the way that the client must do outside of the therapeutic chamber to maintain their romantic, familial, and professional relationships — therapy has concluded.
I need to stop talking, I’ll put myself out of a job.
False Consciousness & the Social Filter
Fromm speaks about the impact of the social milieu on cognition. In Fromm’s language, cultural cognition creates a “social filter” (p. 99) that bars authentic experiencing of the subject’s interaction with the world.
Fromm explains that we naturally have this sort of unfiltered interaction with the world when we are children, but gradually lose it as we are compelled to comport our perspectives to those of primary attachment figures, peers, and the societal infrastructures into which we are absorbed over the lifespan (compare a child’s initial experiencing of a $100 bill to the layers of interpretation that will be gathered toward it as they grow). Social learning induces a false categorization of the world. Engagement with the world becomes engagement with the words and symbols the child has been taught to associate with their raw experience divorced from their unique perception and intuition.
“Most of what is in our consciousness is ‘false consciousness’ and it is essentially society that fill us up with these fictitious and unreal notions…the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent awareness of reality” (Fromm, p. 98).
The process of psychoanalysis and Zen is to attain reflexive awareness of the social filter and its accompanying defense mechanisms and affective distortions, and move to a more authentic engagement with the world — Satori.
Fromm is not unlike other counterculturists of his time, the call by the likes of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, and others to wake up to a socially programmed way of thinking. Interestingly, while movements such as this in Fromm’s era were from the left, they hail from the right in our time in the form of appeals to stand up to the dominance of intellectual movements over public discourse that has resulted from the shift in power from top-down authoritarian infrastructures of the pre-internet age to the seductive influence of aesthetics and social capital mediated by the Almighty Algorithm and the herd mind of viral internet activity — memes acting as memes in the Dawkinsian sense within the social filter.
Regardless of the dynamics of power that lead to the creation of the social filter, its stickiness results from the threat of ostracism at the violation of a taboo.
“The individual is so afraid of the implied danger of ostracism that he does not permit himself to be aware of the ‘forbidden’ impulses…unless he is to become insane, he has to relate himself in some ways to others. To be completely unrelated brings him to the frontier of insanity.” (Fromm, p. 104).
When not reckoned with explicitly as a raw affective sensation, the fear of ostracism (which, evolutionarily speaking, is a very legitimate biological fear of organismic danger resulting from separation from the herd) is channeled into repressive defense mechanisms. This fear meets a conflicting drive, what Fromm describes as an evolutionary ethic of the totality of man that drives us toward life, transcendence, and productive action in service of the universal aims of the species. In Fromm’s humanistic view, the enlightened individual balances these two drives— the fear of alienation and the ought of humanity.
Here’s Fromm again on the connection between fear of alienation and humanitarian interest:
“ To the degree to which a person — by his own intellectual and spiritual development — feels his solidarity with humanity, the more can he tolerate social ostracism, and vice versa. The ability to act according to one’s conscience depends on the degree to which one has transcended the limits of one’s society and has become a citizen of the world, a ‘cosmopolitan’” (Fromm, p.105).
With the support of the ontologically secure practitioner (or Zen master), the client reckons with the alienation of who they are as a whole person from who they are as a social person (p. 108), gains reflexive awareness of the social filter, and remove the repressive mechanisms that distort the intuitive truth of their unique subjective experience.
Cerebration
Cerebration refers to the human tendency to replace reality with symbols. Fromm captures the essence of the Dao in the following passage, demonstrating how the use of symbols to describe experiences (as in language) inevitably results in an alienation from the fullness and immediacy of subjective experience.
“As soon as I have expressed something in a word, an alienation takes place, and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience actually exists only up to the moment when it is expressed in language.” (Fromm, p.109)
According to Fromm, cerebration is exacerbated in the West because of our philosophical bent toward intellectual forms of knowledge that results from the popularity of scientific and technological progress in our era. We experience words and symbols and their effects in consciousness rather than the intuitive form of knowing central to Satori. Deeper insight into the function of the conscious and unconscious mind allows the client to bypass cerebration and access a more fundamental insight.
The Neurophilosophy of Insight
Since the days of Jung, psychoanalysts have pioneered the introduction of Eastern philosophical thought into the treatment of mental unwellness. Something about Eastern spiritual thought disrupts the neurotic Western mind and can be leveraged in the clinical setting. Fromm finds the therapeutic usefulness of Zen to the Western mind in the contrast between Aristotelean logic and paradoxical logic. The latter is prominent in Chinese and Indian thinking (from which Zen evolved) and in the dialectics of Hegel and Marx. Fromm explains that Aristotelean logic follows three discrete laws which form the foundation of the Western social filter (p. 101):
- The law of identity — “A is A”
- The law of contradiction — “A is not non-A”
- The law of the excluded middle — “A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A”
Paradoxical logic does not reject “A is non-A” by means of a connective characteristic binding them. For example, while black is not white by Aristotelian logic, paradoxical logical allows for the assertion that black is white — in that both are colors or, more correctly, that neither describes a place along the gradient of light frequencies between the full presence or full absence thereof (both are non-colors).
This sort of speach can initially feel like a riddle to the Western mind. Recall the image of the cheeky Zen master who frustrates and tempts his student by appearing to “know” something that the student does not. The Zen master’s use of paradoxical logic forces the student’s thought in alternative directions, bypassing banal connections (induced by repressive mechanisms) and interrupting a distressing pattern. Discovery of the mediating X may bring an unconscious defense mechanism into awareness and result in a flood of repressed emotion as the student is brought in touch with the drive that had been barred from consciousness. The client experiences an epiphany — a sudden moment of intuitive insight and understanding.
“The authentic psychoanalytic insight is sudden… It starts not in our brain but, to use a Japanese image, in our belly. It can not be adequately formulated in words and it eludes one if one tries to do so; yet it is real and conscious, and leaves the person who experiences it a changed person” (Fromm p.132)
The therapeutic benefit of the shift between Aristotelean logic and paradoxical logic induced by psychoanalysis or Zen could relate to movement in the brain associated with analytical v. intuitive problem-solving. Researchers Kounios & Beeman (2009) explored this relationship by priming test subjects with two sets of questions — some that could be answered analytically and some that would be solved with insight — and monitoring the brain areas involved. They found that “before the presentation of problems to be solved with insight, EEG revealed greater neural activity over the temporal lobes of both cerebral hemispheres (i.e. around the ears) and over the mid-frontal cortex. Before the presentation of problems to be solved analytically, there was more neural activity measured over the posterior (visual cortex)” (Kounios & Beeman, 2009).
Insight-based problem solving and analytical problem solving look different in the brain. Kounios and Beeman also found greater activation of the visual cortex in analytical problem-solving as the subjects prepared to look outwardly for the information needed to process the cognitive challenge. However for problems that would be solved with insight, activation in the anterior cingulate (a brain area that acts like a manager of cognitive attention, identifies conflicting information, and allocates attention to relevant information) indicated that the subjects were turning their attention inwardly to search for what the researchers call “weakly activated potential solutions” (Kounis & Beeman, 2009) which they connect to the subconscious in the following.
“We therefore hypothesized that, in this situation, the anterior cingulate may be involved in the readiness to detect weakly activated, subconscious solutions and to switch attention to them when they are detected” (Kounis & Beeman, 2009)
From this perspective, the shift from Aristotelian logic to paradoxical logic as induced by the art of Zen or psychoanalysis represents the movement from analytical problem-solving to more nuanced, insight-based, subconscious problem-solving, a shift managed by the anterior cingulate, as attention is drawn away from the visual cortex and toward the lexical-semantic processing areas above the temporal lobes of both cerebral hemispheres and the mid-frontal cortex (Kounis & Beeman, 2009).
The Psychotherapist’s Secret Radicalism
Fromm calls the overcoming of defense mechanism and repression a “radical aim” (p.137). If the therapist does not maintain this secret radicalism — the lofty goal of Satori for their client — they could curtail the positive effects of their art. The therapist operates within the gaps in the scientific and clinical paradigms, harnessing the seductive power of an unknown potential in the client by refusing to explicitly know it. Fromm says the limited aim of remission of symptoms cannot be reached as long as it is not fit within “a wider humanistic frame of reference” (p. 137), that of the life drive of the species toward the evolutionary progress of humanity as a whole.
It’s a “shoot-for-the-stars-land-on-the-moon” kind of situation, wherein the psychoanalyst holds the aspirational goal of guiding their client to Satori and contributing productively to the universal goals of humanity.
The intimacy of the therapeutic relationship is no less radical. Fromm repeatedly uses the concept of the “midwife” to explain how the psychoanalyst guides the client in rebirth and awakening to a new state of being. While the therapist must have professional boundaries, Fromm artfully expresses the limits of boundary setting:
“There are limitations in time and space. But there is no limitation in the here and now of the encounter between patient and analyst. When this encounter takes place…there is nothing more important in the world than their talking to each other — for the patient as well as for the analyst” (p.113)
Fromm, like Jung before him, discusses the possibility that the client heals the counselor in moments of mutual enlightenment and insight that become illuminating and changing for both client and therapist. As Fromm puts it, “the analyst not only cures the patient, but is also cured by him” (p.112) alluding to the clinical phenomenon wherein due to the intimate synchrony between the client and therapist, and the rupture and repair thereof, residual psychic objects of the therapist’s are left with the client — and those of the client with therapist. The therapist’s skill lies in their ability to engender these moments and tolerate their own alienation as they connect and disconnect in such an intimate way with client after client.
I can only imagine a psychotherapy clinic website promising its clients “full union and uncontaminated grasp of the world”. The therapist might just as soon promise that their client will be like God, knowing good and bad (Genesis 3:5), or perhaps to be born again, having their garments washed white with the blood of the lamb (Revelation 7:14).
So the radicalism remains a secret. We may be compelled to play the clinical game, to speak the language of the medical model with its delineation of disorders and symptoms.
But make no mistake the real goal, is nothing short of spiritual.
References:
Fromm, E. (2013). Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. Open Road Media.
Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2009). The Aha! moment: The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Current directions in psychological science, 18(4), 210–216.
Pepper, R. S. (1992). Psychoanalytic training institutes as cults: An example of entropy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 22(1), 35–42.
