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Psychodynamic Practice:
Individuals, Groups and
Organisations
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The Zen impulse and the

psychoanalytic encounter
a
Steve Nolan
a
Princess Alice Hospice, West End Lane, Esher , Surrey
KT10 8NA, UK
Published online: 22 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Steve Nolan (2012) The Zen impulse and the psychoanalytic
encounter, Psychodynamic Practice: Individuals, Groups and Organisations, 18:1,
144-149, DOI: 10.1080/14753634.2012.640170

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2012.640170

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 144 Book review
provoking papers. It is, though, necessary to say that not all papers were of
this standard and perhaps that reflects the conference beginnings. The paper
on treatment resistant depression disappointed me but I found myself
imagining how interesting the subsequent discussions may have been.
Perhaps it is inevitable in any book with multiple authors that some will
appeal more than others. Suffice to say, there is more than enough to justify
an exploratory read. The breadth of topics hold together in many different
ways, not least through the sense of a profession that for many external
reasons is required to be in transition, to find a place for itself in the modern
world. The creativity, flexibility and honesty that allows for this kind of
book to be written offers hope for the ongoing application of psychoanalysis
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in many different settings.

Reference
O’Shaughnessy, E. (1992). Enclaves and excursions. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 73, 603–611.

Joanne Stubley
British Psychoanalytic Society, Tavistock Society
of Psychotherapists, Association of Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapists, Tavistock Centre, 120 Belsize Lane,
London NW3 5BA, UK
jstubley@tavi-port.nhs.uk
Ó 2012, Joanne Stubley

The Zen impulse and the psychoanalytic encounter, by Paul C. Cooper, New
York and London, Routledge, 2010, 246 pp., £22.95 (paperback), £60.00
(hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-99765-2, ISBN 978-0-415-99764-5

The current psychotherapeutic fashion for Mindfulness, in its incarnations

as (among others) Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based
Cognitive Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, makes the
basic assumption that meditation can be uncoupled from its philosophical
and religious roots in Zen and put to work as a technique in the
psychological therapies. Cooper’s book challenges that assumption on the
grounds that mindfulness is first of all a technique of Buddhist meditation
and as such is only properly understood within that philosophical and
religious tradition. As he explains: ‘Successful practice necessitates an
emotional investment in a belief system that supports practice’ (p. 32).
Viewing ‘Zen as a religion’ (p. 3), Cooper’s argument that its practices
have salvational or soteriological intent invites a question about the basis on
 Psychodynamic Practice 145
which the religion of Zen can have any connection with psychoanalysis, a
practice that has taken a largely reductionist and pathologising attitude
towards all religions. In typical Zen-style, Cooper suggests that, ‘This is
not a question that requires a specific answer’ (p. 1), proposing instead
that when it comes to defining the shared territory the question should
rather be, ‘can we maintain a sense of wonder, spontaneity, and creativity
with regard to our work in the consulting room, the meditation hall, or
both?’ (p. 1).
Many potential readers could be frustrated by Cooper’s approach,
insofar as he avoids any carefully reasoned hermeneutic for bringing these
apparently contrasting practices into dialogue. But his rationale is clear:
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Cooper sees the ‘Zen impulse’, at least in part, as a way of resisting the
oppressive linearity of Western scientific epistemology. His point is that the
scientific discourse – in which he includes psychoanalytic discourse (p. 47) –
with its emphasis on ‘filling in gaps in knowledge, and defining what
ultimately remains ineffable’ (p. 11), is an unconscious resistance to the
fundamental or basic existential anxiety, a form of cultural psychopathology
if you will. As such, what he describes as ‘the current explosion of interest’ in
Buddhism ‘represents a reaction and critique of the modernist ego with its
imperialist agenda, and thus complements the growing postmodern
‘impulse’ among contemporary psychoanalysts’ (p. 11).
Cooper’s critique of the medical model and his challenge to psycho-
analysis to ‘find its way beyond a need to feel that things must always make
sense’ (p. 11) is not anti-intellectual; quite the opposite. And despite his
stated resistance to linear logic, he argues cogently for what could be
characterised as a holistic conception of human being that takes the radical
otherness of the unconscious seriously and that includes the mystical within
it. For this reason, Cooper resists the current trend towards ‘subsuming
religious practices such as mediation into the domain of technique’, where
they are devalued and ‘condemned to the shadow land of psychoanalytic
technique, and their radical religious [salvational] potential becomes safely
neutralized and defused’ (p. 105).
If anything offers a hermeneutical basis for finding the Zen impulse
within the psychoanalytic encounter, it is that both hold a radical
salvational intent. Seeking more than symptom relief, ‘both Zen and
psychoanalysis hold the potential to engender radical transformations that
are reflected in one’s mode of being in the world, which in turn reflects often
profound internal psychic changes morally, ethically, relationally and
spirituality, and which finds lived expression in an increased capacity for
compassionate living’ (p. 77). Mindfulness, therefore, is not to be reduced to
a mere technique for relaxation; it is to be understood as a practice that
trains the practitioner ‘to witness the flow of mental phenomena with
discernment. Its goal is an alteration of one’s way of being’ (p. 62) through
enlightenment, satori, literally, ‘self-realisation’ (p. 23) and conscious living.
 146 Book review
Cooper introduces these themes in Chapter 1, where he connects Zen’s
‘mindful aliveness’ with Winnicott’s notion of ‘going on being’ and Bion’s
concept of ‘beening’, and identifies the central experiential and existential
question for both Zen and psychoanalysis as: ‘Can we suffer our aliveness?’
(p. 27). As such, the practices of Zen are intended to develop ‘the capacity to
tolerate the ongoing impact of basic authentic aliveness’ – a position to
which many psychoanalysts would subscribe – ‘and engender a liberating
awareness of reality through an experiential alteration of perception that
mobilized intuited experiential knowing’ (p. 27). Cast in more existentialist
terms, Cooper’s Zen finds the lack of capacity to be alive to one’s own
experience (p. 29) to be rooted in ignorance, avidya, literally, ‘relentless
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‘‘not-knowing’’’, which is a defence against ‘a basic existential or ‘‘funda-

mental anxiety’’, an anxiety of being in the world’ (p. 29) and which
manifests in ‘the illusion of a solid, permanent and separate sense of self’
(p. 29), what psychoanalysts Stolorow and Atwood (1992) describe as ‘the
myth of the isolated mind’. Cooper sees the tendency, within certain forms
of psychoanalysis, towards undue stress on sense making as one more
instance of defensive ‘not-knowing’, particularly when it ‘operates at the
expense of a view of the infinite and creative potential of openings into the
unknown’ (p. 47). With approval, Cooper cites Grotstein (2007), who
describes psychoanalytic theories as: ‘manic defenses against the unknown,
unknowable, ineffable, inscrutable, ontological experience of ultimate being’
(p. 47). Zen presents psychoanalysis with the challenge to return to being
and not simply talking about.
Chapter 1 stands in place of a definition of Zen. Chapter 2 examines its
history, detailing its discovery and systematic misrepresentation by sixteenth
century, Roman Catholic missionaries, who distorted its philosophy –
particularly around the ideas of being and non-being – and impacted the
reception of Zen practice in the West up to the early years of twentieth
century. The following three chapters examine the enigmatic Zen koan
(Chapter 3), with detailed attention given to two particular koans: ‘Joshu’s
dog’ (Chapter 4) and ‘Joshu sees through the old lady’ (Chapter 5).
For me, Cooper’s most interesting discussion comes in Chapter 6, where
he considers the ‘unconscious and conscious in Zen and psychoanalysis’.
Cooper’s review of Freud’s discovery is not to convince psychoanalysts
about something they take as axiomatic. Rather, it is to lay the ground on
which to locate the mystical within the unconscious. Buddhists, like scientific
materialists, are non-dualistic or monist. Reality is ultimately unitary. For
Cooper, the tendency to reify ‘the unconscious’ and structure it in binary
opposition to ‘the conscious’ loses sight of the fluidity of the psyche (p. 130).
To overcome this tendency, Cooper draws on Matte-Blanco (1975, 1988),
who developed a ‘bimodal formulation [which] charts a multidirectional
movement that includes consciousness and unconsciousness as natural and
necessary aspects of an ongoing process’ (p. 133).
 Psychodynamic Practice 147
For Matte-Blanco, the term ‘the unconscious’ is misleading; for him
the relationship conscious/unconscious is but one among many aspects
that Freud discovered, aspects that include: ‘dimensions of time/time-
lessness, space/spacelessness, inside/outside, psychic/external reality and
the juxtaposition between them due to processes such as condensation and
displacement’ (p. 135). For this reason, Matte-Blanco describes modes of
being and explores the relationship between asymmetrical and symme-
trical modes of processing, which Grotstein terms ‘bi-logic’ (2007, p. 80).
In concise terms, Matte-Blanco regards all relations as triadic: subject,
object and the relation between, which may be asymmetrical or
symmetrical. The logic of asymmetrical relations is unidirectional: thus
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the statement, ‘Jane reads this paper’ is asymmetrical because it cannot be

reversed and retain its meaning: ‘This paper reads Jane’! Such
asymmetrical relations characterise everyday logic. In contrast, the logic
of symmetrical relations is equally valid in either direction. According to
Matte-Blanco, while both forms of ‘bi-logic’ operate in everyday thought
and the unconscious, asymmetrical relations predominate conscious
thinking and symmetrical relations characterise unconscious operations.
However, ‘Symmetrical being is the normal state of man. It is the colossal
base from which consciousness of asymmetrical being emerges. Con-
sciousness is a special attribute of man which looks upon the (infinite)
base and makes attempts at describing it . . . asymmetrical relations are
something that emerge from and come out of the sea of symmetry’ (Matte-
Blanco, 1975, p. 100).
So much is relatively unremarkable for psychoanalysts. However,
Cooper’s trialogue between Matte-Blanco and the insights of Bion and D.
T. Suzuki will attract the attention of those with an interest in spirituality,
particularly in its non-religious, humanist forms. For Matte-Blanco the
‘indivisible mode’ of being is the deepest level in his scheme; characterised
by ‘total symmetrisation’, in this mode of being ‘the endless number of
things tend to become, mysteriously, only one thing’ (Matte-Blanco, 1975,
p. 54). There are obvious resonances here with the Existential philosopher
and Hasidic mystic, Martin Buber (1958). According to Cooper, Suzuki’s
non-dualist understanding ‘moves away from distinctions, qualifications
and conditions, and towards unitive experiencing that parallels Matte-
Blanco’s ‘invisible indivisible’ unconscious, where . . . everything becomes
everything else’ (p. 137). For Suzuki, the enlightenment process ‘is
attainable only by transcending our everyday experience of sense-intellect,
i.e. by an existential leap’ (Suzuki, 1972, p. 48). This is because the
irrational topsy-turvy, symmetricised Alice Through the Looking Glass
world, is an ‘essential in most religious propositions’ (Suzuki, 1972, p. 23);
indeed, for Suzuki, ‘bifurcation is the work of the intellect, and inasmuch
as we cannot get along in our practical life without resorting to it, we
make full use of it, but we must not let it intrude into our spiritual realm’
 148 Book review
(Suzuki, 1972, pp. 29–30). For Buddhists, the goal of practice is ‘the
collapse of such dualities as sacred verses profane, psychological verses
spiritual, while recognising the relative truth of the distinctions them-
selves’ (Finn, 1992, p. 113). It seems the path to satori, or enlightenment,
appears experientially dependent on symmetrisation and Suzuki speaks of
the Zen ‘retreat to our inner self in which no bifurcation has yet taken
place . . . to reach the undifferentiated continuum itself’ (Suzuki, 1972,
p. 70).
From here Cooper gives an account of Zen meditation (Chapter 7),
which parallels the Freud’s (1912) description of ‘evenly hovering attention
and the Theravada Buddhist meditation technique of mindfulness, or ‘‘bare
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attention’’’ (p. 151), before discussing the concepts sense and no-sense
(Chapter 8), which is founded in and funded by his discussion of
unconscious and conscious. Cooper closes his book exploring the image
of gap in relation to the dynamics of being and knowing (Chapter 9),
providing a final chapter that details an 18-year psychoanalytic treatment of
a severely depressed Orthodox Jewish woman (Chapter 10).
Cooper’s book will not satisfy every reader. His basic proposition, that
a hybrid Buddhist and psychoanalytic discourse offers to restore non-
linear, intuitive and creative value lost to psychoanalysis (p. 163), will be
too mystical for some; others will object to his suggestion that their
therapeutic practice is itself an unconscious cultural psychopathology from
which Zen offers to deliver their modernist ego. However, his use of
Matte-Blanco to integrate the spiritual into humanistic phenomenology –
‘Transcendence is not other-worldly; rather, it is deeply rooted in the
immanence of everyday ordinary life’ (p. 37) – offers to ground much of
the otherwise ‘airy-fairy’ notions of spirituality presently circulating within
psychotherapy. The book has notable weaknesses and curiosities: Cooper
assumes (too much) knowledge of Bion; there is no mention of Jung,
which is odd since Jung contributed 30 pages of introductory comment to
Suzuki’s (1960) Introduction to Zen Buddhism. However, these are a
pedant’s criticisms of what I found to be a stimulating and provocative
book.

References
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Finn, M. (1992). Transitional space and Tibetan Buddhism: The object relations of
meditation. In M. Finn & J. Gartner (Eds.), Object relations theory and religion:
Clinical applications (pp. 109–118). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Grotstein, J. (2007). A beam of intense darkness: Wilfred Bion’s legacy to
psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.
Matte-Blanco, I. (1975). The unconscious as infinite sets. London: Duckworth.
Matte-Blanco, I. (1988). Thinking, feeling and being: Clinical reflections on the
fundamental antinomy of human beings and the world. London: Routledge.
 Psychodynamic Practice 149
Stolorow, R., & Atwood, G. (1992). Contexts of being: The intersubjective
foundations of psychological life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Suzuki, D.T. (1960). Introduction to Zen Buddhism. London: Rider & Co.
Suzuki, D.T. (1972). The Zen doctrine of no mind. York Beach, ME: Samuel
Weiser.

Steve Nolan
Princess Alice Hospice, West End Lane,
Esher, Surrey KT10 8NA, UK
chaplain@pah.org.uk
Ó 2012, Steve Nolan
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