Emptiness, Equanimity and the Selfobject Function

ABSTRACT

The article draws links between the selfobject function and two major Buddhist concepts, emptiness and equanimity. The selfobject function and these Buddhist concepts are based on a common belief, namely, that transformations of the mind occur within and are dependent on context. The selfobject function enhances transformations of archaic narcissism to mature narcissism through renunciation of personal desires and their transformation into concern for the wellbeing of others. This process derives from an ethical promise rather than from an emotional stance. The Buddhist tradition strives to obtain similar ideals while offering distinctive practices that promote these transformations. The article demonstrates how the Buddhist position contributes to the analytic process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Equanimity (known as upekkhā,) means learning to accept loss and gain, good-repute and ill-repute, praise and censure, sorrow and happiness, all with detachment, equally, for oneself and for others. It is a tranquil state of mind – not being overpowered by delusions, mental distress or agitation. Equanimity is the last of four mental positions that are defined in the brama -vihara. They are also known as the four immeasurables. They include: Loving kindness, compassion, empathic joy and equanimity.

² “The perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror – going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing..” Chuang Tzu (1968), The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. NY: Columbia University Press, p. 97. In another translation: “For the Perfect Man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep”. Ghent (2001), Teachings and Sayings of Chuang Tzu. NY: Dover Publications, p. 57.

³ Compare to Suzuki (1970) on Emptiness: “When you study Buddhism you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly. If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again. But if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them” (pp. 111-112). Compare also to Freud (1912), Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis: “As soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him. This however, is precisely what must not be done. In making this selection … he is in the danger of never finding anything but what he already knows” (pp. 111-112).

⁴ The last part of “Second Thoughts” (Bion, 1984), is called commentary. The discussion of thoughts without a thinker appears on p. 165.

⁵ “Call Me by my true names” a poem written By Thich Nhat Hahn, presents a helpful exposition of the notion of emptiness. In this powerful poem he presents the idea that nothing has one permanent essence; the self can be a frog swimming happily in a pond and it can be the snake who will feed itself with the frog; it can be the young girl who was raped by a pirate and it can be the pirate who raped the girl. All phenomena have nothing but a contextual transitory appearance.

⁶ A saying about the “no-self” is Master Dogen’s famous claim: “To study and learn the way of the Buddha, is to study and learn your own self. To study and learn your own self is to forget yourself. To forget yourself is to be realized by the myriad things of the universe” (Dogen, p. 370).

⁷ The metaphor of the Raft (Alagaddūpama Suttra) is given in the context of a discussion of the need of renunciation for the sake of emptiness: One needs a raft to cross the river, but once we have crossed the river, one can leave the raft behind. Holding on to the raft, after having crossed the river, signifies rigidity, attachment to fixed ideas, known patterns, blindness and therefore a hindrance to reach new solutions. The example refers to need not to be attached to the teachings of Dharma (Buddhist wisdom). One may use them and then let go of them.

⁸ Remark of the author.

⁹ Buddhism offers practices to cultivate equanimity: First, we concentrate on situations that evoke pleasant compassionate feelings, situations in which it is easy to experience empathy. Once this is accomplished, we try to maintain such feelings toward increasingly difficult subjects, including those with whom we are less familiar and subjects toward whom we have grievances, anger or even rage. We try to preserve our receptivity and to keep our openness to any subject or any topic that comes into mind.

¹⁰ The famous saying is: “When you sit, you sit. When you eat, you eat” (Suzuki, 1970, p. 42). He elaborates Dogan’s idea that form is form and emptiness is emptiness. We can be in situations, whether they are good or bad, without disturbance or without being annoyed by feeling.

¹¹ Prof. David Shulman, Personal communication.

¹² The Hindu tradition identifies eight elemental Rasas: love, happiness, sorrow, anger, energy, fear, disgust and astonishment. Each has a characteristic color. Later another rasa was added, the Shanta-Rasa which consists of stillness and tranquility. Its color is white. It was believed that Shanta -Rasa stems from feelings of despair. It is interesting to note that such feelings were transcended to an experience of tranquility.

¹³ In “The Place of Compassion in Political Conflict” (Mann, 2010), I described a situation that developed between a politically leftwing psychotherapist and a patient who was a settler from the West Bank, and extremely right wing. The supervision process, led to a transformation from initial dread, contempt and a wish not to know the patient, to a transcendental mode of interconnectedness. I emphasized how such mode consists of compassion and enables an expansion of the mind.

¹⁴ Hanh (2001) formulated this phenomena as follows: “Formations have the nature of interbeing. The one is produced by the all and the all is dependent on the one”. In different terms, current self psychologists wrote about Wholeness (Mann, 2013, 2015; Sucharov, 2013), System theories relate to a field, rather than differentiated subjects, that promotes transformation of motivations (Lichtenberg et al., 2011). Frie and Coburn (2011) described Complexity theory and this is certainly not the full list. All these thinkers – in different ways – convey the idea that broad changeability is induced by interconnected fields, not by the particular individuals. American psychoanalysts regard these transformations as relational, while this perspective regards the fields as non-dual entities.

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Gabriela Mann

Gabriela Mann, Ph.D., is Training Psychoanalyst and previous chair, Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Training Analyst, Human Spirit Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program; and Chair, Post-Graduate Studies in Self Psychology and the Study of Subjectivity Psychotherapy Program, Sackler Medical School, Tel-Aviv University.