TRANSFORMATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

CONVENTIONAL AND CONTEMPLATIVE

PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENT

by Ken Wilber, Jack Engler, and Daniel P. Brown With Chapters by John Chirban, Mark Epstein,
and Jonathan Lieff Foreword by Mardi J. Horowitz, M.D.

CHAPTER 1. THERAPEUTIC AIMS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY AND MEDITATION:

DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES IN THE REPRESENTATION OF SELF
by Jack Engler

Through its use of mindfulness Hakomi Therapy works on the border of the personal and the
transpersonal, of the self and the no-self. Jack Engler’s classic article on therapy and meditation
brings much-needed clarity to this topic. The article is reprinted by permission of The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, Volume 16, No. 1, pages 25-61, 1984, Jack Engler, “Therapeutic aims
in psychotherapy and meditation: Developmental stages in the representation of self.” Copyright,
Transpersonal Institute, PO Box 4437, Stanford, CA 94309. Jack Engler, Ph.D. is a supervising
psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Board of Directors of
the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts.

In the Introduction, we suggested three broad ranges of development — prepersonal, personal, and
transpersonal — each divided for convenience, into three stages. In this chapter, Jack Engler
focuses on the three general stages of object-relations development in the prepersonal realm, and
the corresponding types of psychopathology — psychotic, borderline, and psychoneurotic — that
may result due to developmental arrests or failures at a particular stage. He then carefully
distinguishes this entire range of development from the contemplative or transpersonal stages. He
sees two great arcs of human development: one leading up to a personal, substantially individuated
self-sense, and one leading beyond it. His conclusion is simple but profound: You have to be
somebody before you can be nobody.

What follows is an attempt to think through a set of clinical issues that have emerged for me in
recent years regarding the development of a sense of self. Questions about the nature and status of
the psychological structure we call the “self” have forced themselves on me from two sides. On
the one hand, my clinical work with schizophrenic and borderline patients, all of whom suffer
from pathological disturbances in their subjective sense of selfhood, had convinced me of the vital
importance of developing a sense of continuity, identity and ongoingness in existence. On the
other hand, my experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation has made it
equally clear that clinging to a sense of personal continuity and self-identity results in chronic
discontent and psychic conflict. Throughout every instant of our lives this clinging puts us in
opposition to a universe in which nothing lasts for more than a brief moment, in fact where there
are no “things” at all in any real sense, but only events on the order of milliseconds. As we now
know from psychophysics, this is true of our internal universe of images, thoughts, feelings and
sensations as well. As a clinician I do everything I can to help patients develop the sense of an
inner cohesiveness, unity and continuity which is so tragically lacking, with such fateful
consequences. As a meditation teacher, I work just as hard to help students see through the
perceptual illusion of continuity and sameness in their experience — in Zen terms, to realise there
is no-self. The issue I have been wrestling with then, as a psychologist practicing in both
traditions, is the importance of this sense of self and its fate. I have been particularly concerned
with the sense of self individuals bring to meditation, its vicissitudes during practice, and above all
the sense of self individuals bring away from meditation.

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The difficulty in thinking about this issue is not made any easier by the fact that key terms like
“ego” and “self” are used in psychodynamic and Buddhist psychology in very different contexts
and with very different values attributed to the development of an ego and the formation of a stable
self-structure. (A parallel discussion of these issues, with more emphasis on psychoanalytic
aspects, appears in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Engler, 1983a.) The two terms are
also unfortunately losing their anchorage in clearly defined conceptual and semantic traditions.
Once upon a time they had a precise meaning and significance. Now they are in danger of
becoming jargon, catchwords in clinical reports as well as in spiritual writing. All this makes it
more and more difficult to sort out the very issues concerning the psychological structure of the
self which our clinical experience and our spiritual practice both tell us in different ways are the
core issues in mental illness and health. “Transcending the ego,” for instance, which is often
proposed to students these days as a goal in meditation, has no meaning for a psychodynamically-
oriented clinician. To the clinician, the ego is a collective term designating the regulatory and
integrative functions. To “transcend the ego” in this frame of reference would mean to surrender
the very faculties which make us human — the psychological structures that make it possible to
think, to plan, to remember, to anticipate, to organize, to self-reflect, to distinguish reality from
fantasy, to exercise voluntary control over impulses and behavior, to love. It could only refer to a
condition of being a robot or a marionette, which is precisely the way very regressed,
fielddependent patients with impaired ego capacities experience themselves. From this point of
view it takes a fairly mature level of ego organization just to practice meditation, especially forms
of meditation based on observing the moment-to-moment mindbody process, and the fears,
anxieties, humiliations, rages, depression, despair, self-doubt and even ecstasies which self-
discovery entails. Clinically, meditation strengthens the ego rather than transcends it. On the other
hand, while ego psychologists might think the meditative goal of nonattachment and
disidentification from all selfrepresentations a bit odd if not impossible, they do understand the
principle that all psychological growth comes about by being able to renounce outworn, infantile
ties to objects and to give up or modify self-representations that have become restrictive,
maladaptive or outgrown.

In wrestling with these issues, I have found for myself that a developmental model seems to be the
most appropriate way of interpreting the clinical and meditative data. It also allows us to integrate
both perspectives and see them as complimentary instead of competitive. As a starting point for
this approach I turned to the developmental spectrum concept of psychopathology that is coming
to play such a central role in current clinical thinking and practice. The heart of this concept is the
notion that the pathogenesis of mental disorder follows a developmental chronology. It derives
from increasing evidence in psychodynamic-psychoanalytic research (Mahler, 1975; Masterson &
Rinsley, 1980) as well as in genetic-biological studies (Gottesmann & Schields, 1972; Kety et al.,
1968) that qualitatively different levels of personality organization and ego functioning are rooted
in failures, arrests or regressions in different stages of intrapsychic development, above all the
crucial line of object relations. This holds true whether the distal etiology is inborn vulnerability
(Stone, 1980), developmental traumata (Masterson & Rinsley, 1980) or some combination of both.
Its corollary is that different levels of personality organization require qualitatively different
approaches to treatment.

When I refer to meditation, I will be referring to Buddhist Vipassana or “insight” meditation,

socalled because its aim is insight into the nature of psychic functioning rather than the induction
of an altered state of consciousness. Though Vipassana derives from the Theravada tradition of
Buddhism, morphologically it is a pure form of one of the two modal types of meditation,
concentration and insight (Goleman, 1977). These are differentiated by technique and by state
effects. Concentration meditation is practiced by restricting attention to a single interoceptive or
exteroceptive object and holding it fixed on the object for long periods. Insight meditation expands
attention to as many mental and physical events as possible exactly as they occur over time.

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Concentration practice leads to a process of withdrawal from sensory input in progressive states of
one-pointedness (samadhi) or absorption (jhana) characterized by increasingly refined tranquility
and bliss. Insight practice leads to a process of observation of sensory input in progressive states of
“knowledge” (nana) of the impermanent, unsatisfactory and non-substantial nature of all
phenomena. From the Buddhist point of view, concentration meditation induces transient states of
happiness and conflict-free functioning by temporarily suppressing the operation of the drives and
the higher perceptual-intellectual functions;! but it is the insight form of practice alone which
liberates from suffering by bringing about enduring intrapsychic structural change (Nyanamoli,
1972).

In its contemporary form, Vipassana is described as training in mindfulness, choiceless awareness

or bare attention. This is the practice of a “clear and single-minded awareness of what actually
happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception” (Nyanaponika, 1973:30). Bare
attention is defined by two technical paradigms: a particular form of attention deployment and a
particular way of managing affect. Cognitively, attention is restricted to registering the mere
occurrence of any thought, feeling or sensation exactly as it occurs and enters awareness from
moment to moment, without further elaboration. The meditator notes only the succession of
thoughts, feelings and sensations as these arise and pass away. In contrast to conventional
psychotherapeutic work, no attention is paid to their individual content. Affectively, all stimuli are
attended to equally without selection or censorship. Again in contrast to conventional
psychotherapy, attention is kept “bare” of any reaction to what is perceived. The meditator
attempts to attend to any and all stimuli without preference, comment, judgment, reflection or
interpretation. If physical or mental reactions like these occur, they themselves are immediately
noted and made objects of bare attention. Even lapses in attention — distractions, fantasies,
reveries, internal dialogue — are made objects of bare attention as soon as the meditator becomes
aware of them. The aim is threefold: to come to know one’s own mental processes; in this way to
begin to have the power to shape or control them; and finally to gain freedom from the condition
where one’s psychic processes are unknown and uncontrolled (Nyanaponika, 1973).

THE ISSUE OF THE SELF IN OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY AND BUDDHISM

It may come as a surprise that though they value ego development differently, both Buddhist
psychology and psychoanalytic object relations theory define the essence of the ego ina similar
way: as a process of synthesis and adaptation between the inner life and outer reality which
produces a sense of personal continuity and sameness in the felt experience of being a “self,” a
feeling of being and ongoingness in existence. Object relations theory explains this experience of
personal continuity and selfhcod as the outcome of a gradual differentiation of internalized images
of a “self” as distinct from internalized images of objects and the eventual consolidation of these
images into a composit schema or self-representation (Jacobson, 1964; Mahler, 1975; Lichtenberg,
1975; Kernberg, 1976). Theravadin Buddhist Abhidhamma explains the emergence of the sense of
“I” in a similar way as the end product of a process of identification in which we learn to take one
or more of the various components (khandhas) which make up our experience of objects as “me”
or “myself” (Narada, 1975; Guenther, 1974; Govinda, 1974). It terms this sense of self “sakkaya-
ditthi” (lit., “personality-belief”), which is an exact equivalent of “self-representation” in object
relations theory.

In both psychologies then, the sense of “I,” of personal unity and continuity, of being the same
“self” in time, in place and across stages of consciousness, is conceived as something which is not
innate in personality, not inherent in our psychological or spiritual makeup, but is evolving
developmentally out of our experience of objects and the kinds of interactions we have with them.
In other words, the “self” is literally constructed out of our experience with the object world. This
“self” which we take to be “me” and which feels so present and real to us is actually an

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internalized image, a composite representation, constructed by a selective and imaginative
“remembering” of past encounters with significant objects in our world (Bruner, 1964). In fact, the
self is viewed in both psychologies as a representation which is actually being constructed anew
from moment to moment. Even as a representation, it is not a fixed entity or engram, but a
temporal succession of discrete images, each representing a new construction, a new synthesis, in
the present moment of experience. But both systems also agree that the self is not ordinarily
experienced this way. Our normal sense of self is characterized instead by a feeling of temporal
continuity and sameness over time, by a sense of consistency in interpersonal interactions, by
others’ recognition of this continuity and consistence, and by our own perception of their
confirm_ing recognition that Iam the same “me” (Erikson, 1959).

The fate of this self is the central clinical issue in both psychologies. Investigation into the doctrine
of anatta and the nature of selfhood has been the focus of Buddhist teaching and practice from its
origins in the sixth century B.C. In the history of psychoanalytic thought, the importance of the
sense of self has been a rather belated discovery. As long as classical psychoanalytic thinking was
dominated by a theory of development, conflict and treatment that was essentially derived from a
model of neurosis, the importance of the self-structure could not come into view (Tolpin, 1980).
Historically, negative therapeutic results with patients who did not suffer from a typical oedipal
neurosis (Freud, 1937) eventually led to the discovery of two distinct levels of object relations
development and psychopathology: (1) a failure in early object relations, especially in the
differentiation between self and others and integration of a cohesive sense of self; and (2) a later
defensive struggle of an already differentiated and integrated ego against repressed impulses and
their oedipal objects (Fairbairn, 1954; Guntrip, 1961, 1969; Winnicott, 1965, Kernberg, 1975,
1976; Blanck & Blanck, 1974, 1979; Horner, 1979). Guntrip has referred to this finding as
“perhaps the major discovery of research into personality problems in this century” (1971:147). In
the last ten years this finding has led to the notion of a developmental diagnostic spectrum
(Rinsley, 1981) according to which the various clinical syndromes are viewed as originating in
specific phases of development. The new understanding of what are now called the borderline
conditions and personality disorders, lying between psychotic and neurotic levels of functioning,
has in fact focused current clinical attention on the separation-individuation process in preoedipal
development, a stage in which the differentiation of an individuated, integrated and object-related
self is the primary task, and its success or failure the main determinant of a normal or abnormal
course of development.

As noted in the beginning, the fate of this self is an issue on which clinical and meditative
perspectives seem diametrically opposed. This is the nub of the problem. The deepest
psychopathological problem from the perspective of psychoanalytic object relations theory is the
lack of a sense of self. The most severe clinical syndromes — infantile autism, the symbiotic and
functional psychoses, the borderline conditions — are precisely failure, arrests or regressions in
establishing a cohesive, integrated self (Kohut, 1971, 1977) or self-concept (Kernberg, 1975,
1976). In varying degrees or severity, all represent disorders of the self (Goldberg, 1980), the
inability to feel real or cohesive or “in being” at all.

In contrast, the deepest psychopathological problem from the Buddhist perspective is the presence
of a self and the feeling of selfhood. According to Buddhist diagnosis, the deepest source of
suffering is the attempt to preserve a self, an attempt which is viewed as both futile and self-
defeating. The severest form of psychopathology is precisely attavadupadana, the “clinging to
personal existence” (Nyanamoli, 1976; Nyanatiloka, 1972).

The therapeutic issue in the clinical treatment of the severe disorders is how to “regrow” a basic
sense of self (Guntrip, 1969), or how to differentiate and integrate a stable, consistent an enduring
selfrepresentation (Kernberg, 1976). The therapeutic issue in Buddhist practice is how to “see

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through” the illusion or construct of the self (atta-ditthi), how to dis-identify from “those essential
identifications on which the experience of our personal identity is founded” (Jacobson, 1964:xii).
The two great developmental achievements in the all-important line of object relations according
to ego psychology — identity and object constancy — are seen by Buddhist analysis as the root of
mental suffering.

The fate of the self in processes of transformation therefore became a kind of test case for me.
Were the two therapeutic goals mutually exclusive, as they actually appeared to be? Or from a
wider perspective might they actually be compatible? Indeed, might one be a precondition of the
other? The latter is the view I eventually arrived at. Put very simply, you have to be somebody
before you can be nobody.

I once had the good fortune to overhear a fascinating discussion between a clinical psychologist
and an Asian meditation teacher concerning their respective treatments of an anorectic patient
which helped to point me in this direction. The meditation teacher was visiting the U.S. for the
first time and was very interested in Western psychotherapeutic approaches to mental illness. The
clinical psychologist was describing a very difficult case of an anorectic woman who was proving
refractory to treatment. The teacher became engrossed in the case and asked many questions about
the illness and the treatment. When the psychologist finished, I asked the teacher why he was so
interested. He said a woman had once come to the meditation center in Burma where he was
teaching with the same presenting problems. In addition she was suffering from chronic insomnia.
She wanted to learn to meditate, presumably believing that might bring some relief. I asked him if
he taught her. To my surprise, he said “No.” For six weeks he merely let her come each day and
pour out her complaints against her husband, her children, her parents and the injustices of life in
general. He mostly listened. He also talked with her but he did not describe precisely how. This
first part of her “treatment” then was conducted in effect through the medium of a special kind of
interpersonal relationship. He also encouraged her to sleep. Within a short time she began to sleep
4, 8, 12, 14, 16, and finally 18 hours a night — at which point she came to him and said, “I have
slept enough. I came here to learn meditation.” “Oh,” he replied, “you want to learn meditation.

Why didn’t you say so?” I interrupted to ask if he taught her Vipassana, the type of insight
meditation practiced in his Theravada lineage. “No,” he said to my surprise again, “no Vipassana.
Too much suffering.” What she needed was to experience some happiness, some joy, some
tranquility and relief from so much mental agitation first, before she would be able to tolerate the
deeper insight that all her psycho-physical states were characterized by change and were
associated with suffering, not simply the obvious vicissitudes in her personal life history. Since
concentration forms of meditation lead to one-pointedness, serenity and bliss, he instructed her in a
simple concentration exercise of following the breath instead. She began to sleep 16 hours a night,
then 14, 12, 8, 4 and finally two hours a night again, this time because two hours was all she
needed. Only at this point did he switch her over to Vipassana and have her observe the moment-
to-moment flux of mental and physical events, experiencing directly their radical impermanence,
unsatisfactoriness and the lack of any self of subject behind them. Within another three weeks her
mind opened and she experienced the first stage of enlightenment (sotapatti). The anorectic
symptoms disappeared. She has not been anorectic since.

This is hardly a clinical case study. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the principle that there are
different levels of psychopathology; that these are roots in distortions, failures and arrests at
different stages of psychological development; and that each level of pathology requires a different
treatment approach or a different type of therapy. Actually ego psychologists no longer think in
terms of stages of development in a global sense, but in terms of different “developmental lines”
(Anna Freud, 1963) for different psychological functions with the relationship between them
constituting the organisation of the psyche at any given point in time. Among the diverse

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developmental lines, there is good reason to believe that the line of object relations is the single
most important and reliable determinant of the level of development, mental health,
psychopathology and therapeutic potential (Mahler, 1975; Kernberg, 1976; Blanck & Blanck,
1974; Horner, 1979; Rinsley, 1981). Object relations refers to the sequence and quality of one’s
experiences with interpersonal objects, especially with primary caretakers; and the internalisation
of these interactions in a representation of “self” and a representation of the “object” which are
linked by an affect and coded in memory traces as “good” or “bad”. Multiple self and object
representations are gradually consolidated into composite schemas of the self and objects. It is
believed that these representations in turn become the basis for the development of intrapsychic
structures, above all for the development of a sense of self. I think that this developmental
perspective, particularly the development of object relations, provides a clue to positioning the
Buddhist and psychodynamic systems within an integrated model of therapeutic interventions. It
also explains the apparent contradiction in their methods and goals.

Let me start with several observations from my teaching experience about types of students drawn
to Buddhist practice and the course their practice often seems to follow.

CLINICAL FEATURES OF MEDITATION PRACTICE

Several features stand out. First, measured in terms of the classical stages (nanas) of insight
(Nyanamoli, 1976), progress is relatively slow. Dr. Dan Brown and I confirmed this in a
Rorschach study (see Chapter 6). After three months of continuous intensive daily Vipassana
practice, fully half of the N-group of 30 showed very little change on either the post-test or on
teacher ratings. This finding is further supported by my own research in India and Burma (Engler,
1983b) in which Asian practitioners progressed much more quickly, even though they spent
considerably less time in intensive practice in retreat settings. The majority had done only one or
two 2week retreats before experiencing First Enlightenment.(2) The rest of their practice was
carried on at home in the midst of daily activities.

Secondly, Western students appear to become fixated on what may be called a psychodynamic
level of experience (Brown & Engler, 1980). Their practice continues to be dominated by
primarily process thinking and “unrealistic experience” (Maupin, 1965), as well as by an increase
in fantasy, daydreaming, reverie, imagery, spontaneous recall of past memories, derepression of
conflictual material, incessant thinking and emotional lability, including dramatic swings in mood
(M. Sayadaw, 1973; Walsh, 1977, 1978; Kornfield, 1979; Kapleau, 1965). Thirdly, strong
transferences develop to teachers. These often seem to be of Kohut’s mirroring or idealizing types.
In the first, a need for a source of accepting and confirming “mirroring” is revived in the context
of the teacher-student relationship; in the second, a need for merger with a source of “idealized”
strength and calmness emerges (Kohut & Wolf, 1978). There is another kind of transference
sometimes encountered which is more chaotic in nature, subject to rapid and extreme oscillations
between omnipotence and devaluation.

What to make of these observations? How might they be explained? Meditation teachers generally
attribute them to several factors in the students’ psychology.

The first is usually the students’ inability to develop sufficient concentration. A specific degree of
concentration, characterized by non-distractibility and onepointed attention, is necessary before the
mind-body process can be observed closely enough to attain the type of insight at which Vipassana
meditation aims.

The ability to keep attention fixed and steady on each mental and physical event as it presents
itself to awareness, technically called “Access Concentration” (upacara-samadhi), was emphasized

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for instance by the head of this Theravada lineage, the Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw (1973), because it is
the prerequisite for entering the stages (nanas) of insight meditation proper (Vajiranana, 1975).

Teachers also point to the tendency to become absorbed in the content of awareness rather than
continuing to attend to its process. Students become preoccupied with individual thoughts, images,
memories, sensations, etc., rather than keeping their attention focused on the essential
characteristics of all psychophysical events, whatever the content: their impermanence, their
inability to satisfy even the simplest of desires, their lack of enduring substance, and their
dependence on conditions which also change from moment to moment. Dwelling on content is a
definite temptation in early stages of practice when the meditator is introduced, perhaps for the
first time, to the vast, strange, often frightening, but also enticing and seductive world of his inner
experience. In fact, it is probable that the beginning meditator’s introduction to his inner world is
not essentially different from that of the naive subject who begins exploration of other
hypoaroused states, e.g., self-hypnosis, reverie, and free association. For example, using the
Rorschach, a similar increase in primary process thinking has been reported for hypnotized
subjects (Fromm, Oberlander & Gruenewald, 1970) and for patients who had undergone
psychoanalysis (Rehyer, 1969). Adaptation to the internal milieu may be a common feature of any
hypoaroused state of consciousness and may have little to do with the “specificity” (Tart, 1975a)
of meditation per se. With the “triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff, 1966) in Western culture, there
is also a tendency to confuse meditation with psychotherapy and to analyze mental content instead
of simply observing it. This is a classical hindrance (nivarana) in all meditative traditions, East and
West. In addition, certain cultural factors may contribute to the tendency to become absorbed in
content. A longer period of adaptation to the flow of internal experience may be necessary as well
as anxietyproducing in a culture that lays so much stress on external adaptation and reality-
boundness at the expense of imaginative involvement (Hilgard, 1970). One possible explanation is
the Western students do not necessarily meditate in a formal sense when they are “meditating.” A
visiting Asian teacher of Vipassana was recently asked what they were doing. He replied, “Many
Western students do not meditate. They do therapy. They do not go deep with mindfulness.”

Third, in being transplanted to the West, meditation has been lifted out of its larger context of a
culture permeated by Buddhist perspectives and values where it is also part of a total system of
training (bhavana) and a way of life. When this therapeutic context is eliminated, meditation is
practiced as an isolated technique, with disregard for many other important behavioral,
motivational, intrapsychic and interpersonal factors such as right livelihood, right action, right
understanding and right intention. The Buddhist Eightfold Path of bhavana or development
includes the cultivation of conceptual understanding, proper motivation, ethical behavior,
appropriate livelihood and the correct type of effort in addition to the specifically meditative skills
of mindfulness and concentration. This was also cited as a contributing factor by the Burmese
sayadaws.

As a clinically trained teacher, however, I have been led to make a different kind of observation. In
many students I see a particular vulnerability and disturbance in their sense of identity and self-
esteem. At best, this appears to reflect stage- and age-appropriate developmental problems of
identity formation (Erikson, 1950, 1956). This is particularly true of two major groups who
become interested in Buddhism and appear at retreats: those in late adolescence and the period of
transition to early adulthood, and those entering or passing through the mid-life transition
(Levinson, 1978). Individuals in these two groups often seem attracted to Buddhist practice as a
short-cut solution to the developmental tasks appropriate and necessary to their stage of the life
cycle. The Buddhist teaching that I neither have nor am an enduring self is often misinterpreted to
mean that I do not need to struggle with the tasks of identity formation or with finding out who I
am, what my capabilities are, what my needs are, what my responsibilities are, how I am related to

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other selves, and what I should or could do with my life. The anatta (no-self) doctrine is taken to
justify their premature abandonment of essential psychosocial tasks.

At their worst, these vulnerabilities and disturbances of personal identity are pathological
disturbances in the subjective sense of self — what Kohut (1971, 1977) would call “self
pathology” or “structural deficit pathology.” Though it is necessary to be cautious in the absence
of formal clinical assessment, my suspicion is that many of these students function at or close to a
borderline level of ego organization. I am taking the “borderline” designation here in its
psychostructural sense to refer to a level of personality organization and functioning rather than
toa specific personality type or character disorder. It represents a group of “stably unstable”
(Schmiedeberg, 1947) personality trait disorders which are symptomatically and developmentally
transitional along a continuum between the psychoses and the psychoneuroses. This group of
disorders shares a core symptomatology, has similar internal object relations, and is believed by
many researchers to have a common etiology in deviations or arrests during the separation-
individuation process in early object relations development (Mahler, 1975, Masterson & Rinsley,
1980). The main feature of borderline personality organization according to one important school
of thought is identity diffusion (Kernberg, 1976).

Integration fails in borderline personality organization. Internalized object relations take the form
of a so-called “split object relations unit” (Masterson & Rinsley, 1980). One’s self, others and
outside events are perceived as either “all-good” or “all-bad” in accordance with the pleasure
principle: all-good if they appear to satisfy and provide; all-bad if they appear to withhold,
frustrate or deprive. The result is sharply contrasting, even contradictory attitudes toward
important aspects of oneself and others, which are actively dissociated from each other and held
apart by the primitive defense of splitting. This produces a confusing alternation of opposite ego
states and of experiences of self and the object world: now magically powerful, beneficent and
good; now frustrating, devouring, threatening and bad. This all-good, all-bad perceptual
dichotomy is accompanied by varying degrees of incomplete selfobject differentiation. Fluid
boundaries between self and world leave the borderline personality vulnerable to depersonalization
and estrangement, and to regressive refusions of self and objects, or what DSM-III terms “brief
reactive psychosis,” under conditions of stress. Failure of repression leads to similarly fluid
internal boundaries between parts of the person. Primitive drives, affects, and self and object
representations have ready access to consciousness. “Inside” and “outside” are therefore dealt with
by reliance on primitive defenses such as denial, projective identification, primitive idealization,
and especially splitting (Rinsley, 1981).

THE ATTRACTION OF BUDDHISM FOR PERSONS WITH SELF-PATHOLOGY

In my experience, Buddhism can exert a special attraction for individuals with borderline
organization. In part the attraction seems to be precisely the anatta or no-self doctrine. It helps
explain and rationalize, if not actually legitimate, their lack of self-integration, their feelings of
inner emptiness, of not having a cohesive self. I recall a student in one of my courses on Buddhism
at the University of California at Santa Cruz who could not understand any difference between his
own states and the states of enlightenment. Meditation was superfluous — he was already
enlightened. By his own description, he lived continually in a profound state of “egolessness.” Our
classes were as stormy as his oscillating perceptions of me. In one class I was the idealized and all-
knowing teacher who alone would appreciate the depth of his passion and the originality of his
mind and its pressured stream of insights; the next class I was angrily devalued for being
unappreciative of his suffering, for being like all the rest in not understanding his unique
contribution, and for being no help whatsoever. He either clung to me, or snubbed me with aloof
superiority, bent on demonstrating his total self-sufficiency. For these personalities, there is
something like Hartmann’s (1958) “preadaptive fit” between the psyche and its expectable

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environment, in this case between the Buddhist concept of no-self (anatta) and their actual self-
concept. The teaching of non-attachment is also heard by these individuals as rationalizing their
inability to form stable, lasting, satisfying relationships.

Alternating omnipotence and devaluation are further derivatives of such splitting operations which
affect self and object representations in the absence of a cohesive and integrated self. The
character defense of omnipotence/ devaluation does not necessarily indicate the presence of a
narcissistic personality disorder. It is common throughout the borderline spectrum because of the
characterological inability to integrate all-good and all-bad self and object representations. So once
again there is a need for caution in labelling students whom we have not clinically assessed. My
impression nevertheless is that narcissistic personalities represent a sizable subgroup of those
individuals with borderline levels of ego organization who are drawn to meditation. Buddhism
seems to have two unique attractions for this type of personality structure, as well as for
individuals in the borderline range generally. The first is the enlightenment ideal itself. This is
cathected as the acme of personal perfection with eradication of all mental defilements (kilesas)
and fetters (samyojanas). In other words it represents a purified state of complete and invulnerable
selfsufficiency from which all badness has been expelled, the aim of all narcissistic strivings. For
this kind of personality, “perfection” often unconsciously means freedom from symptoms so they
can be superior to everyone else. The second attraction is the possibility of establishing a mirroring
or idealizing type of narcissistic transference with spiritual teachers who are perceived as
powerful, admirable beings of special worth in whose halo they can participate. The fact that those
types of transference relationships appear so frequently strongly suggests that meditation often
attracts personalities at this level of functioning.

From a clinical point of view then, I have come to believe that the explanation for some of the
special difficulties some students have in meditation practice is to be found, not in the usual
struggle with the classical “hindrances” (nivaranas) or in the unique features of our cultural
situation, but in the level of personality organization and ego functioning these students bring to
practice. Paradoxically, it is precisely their self-pathology, the structural deficits in the formation
of whole self and object representations and their consequent lack of a cohesive, integrated sense
of self, that makes meditation practice based on self-detachment difficult, if not impossible.

It is important to recognize that self-pathology does not depend on personality or character type,
and still less on symptoms or symptom clusters. Almost all the commonly recognized personality
types can occur at any level of personality organization: healthy, neurotic, borderline or psychotic.
Even the more pathological character types — schizoid, paranoid, infantile — can occur within a
neurotic structure (Stone, 1980). Stone has suggested that it is clinically more useful to think in
terms of a continuum for each character or personality type as it varies from most to least
pathological. He has accordingly proposed a promising three-dimensional model of personality
typology which crosses personality type, level of personality organization and degree of
constitutional or genetic loading. This distinction between structure and character is only
beginning to become clear in psychodiagnostic understanding. The classical meditation traditions
have always taken personality into account when they have prescribed a specific type of practice
fora specific type of individual. The classical example perhaps is the system of the Four Yogis in
Hinduism — jnan, bhakti, karma and raj — for intellectual, devotional, active and experimental
temperaments respectively (Vivekananda, 1953). But these typologies, like some earlier Western
psychiatric diagnostic categories and classification systems, are specifications of personality type,
not level of personality organization. The latter cuts across character, behavior and temperament. If
Buddhism were attracting a number of students with borderline or narcissistic personality
organization, its traditional ways of thinking about personality in terms of types would not allow
teachers or students to recognize it.

9
Given recent trends in clinical practice, this attraction is not surprising. There has been a marked
shift in the prevailing psychiatric symptomatology in recent years. In contrast to the previous
prevalence of neurotic and psychotic disorders, borderline and character disorders are being
clinically encountered and diagnosed with increasing frequency. As more of these individuals are
now presenting themselves for psychiatric treatment, so I suspect more are also attempting to use
the newer so-called “innovative therapies” (Walsh, 1980a), like meditation, to get help.

A PREREQUISITE LEVEL OF PERSONALITY ORGANIZATION

Buddhist psychology does not have much to say about this level of ego functioning and personality
organization, or about this range of psychopathology. It does not take explicit account of self-
pathology with structural deficits in the ego stemming from faulty early object relations
development.
Buddhist psychology never elaborated a developmental psychology in the Western sense. It has no
theory of child development. Unlike Hinduism, it has not even elaborated a conception of the
human life cycle. Nor does it have a developmental view of psychopathology. That is, it does not
explicitly place different levels of mental disorder along a developmental continuum according to
etiology. What Buddhist psychology and practice appear to do instead is presuppose a more or less
normal course of development and an intact or “normal” ego. For its practices, it assumes a level of
personality organization where object relations development, especially a cohesive and integrated
sense of self, is already complete. There is an obvious danger if this assumption of normal selfhood
is not understood, either by students or teachers. Students may mistake subjective feelings of
emptiness for “sunyata” or voidness; and the experience of not feeling inwardly cohesive or
integrated for anatta or selflessness. Teachers may instruct students in techniques which are
designed for a different level of personality organization and these may have adverse effects in
some students. Like psychodynamic therapies, insight meditation is an “uncovering” technique
(Blanck & Blanck, 1974). As an uncovering technique, it employs technical procedures which
resemble those used in psychoanalysis and cognate systems.
1. Technical neutrality. Attention is kept “bare,” that is, restricted to a bare registration of mental
and physical events as they are observed without reaction (Nyanaponika, 1973; Kornfield, 1977;
Goldstein, 1976). Any reactions or further elaborations are themselves immediately made the object
of bare attention and are neither suppressed nor pursued.
2. Removal of censorship. Any and all thoughts, feelings and sensations are allowed into
awareness, without discrimination or selection. This of course remains to some extent a goal and
outcome rather than a technique which can be practiced from the outset, much as the ability to free
associate is said to be the result of a successful analysis. Like free association, it must be learned.
This is also equivalent to the “basic rule” of free association in psychoanalysis: to impose no
principle of censorship. Analysts have been right to point to the extraordinary uniqueness of this
situation. However, it is not unique to analysis as is commonly thought. The “basic rule” has guided
this and other meditative traditions for at least two and a half millennia.
3. Abstinence. The goal is observation rather than gratification of wishes, impulses, desires and
strivings. Like psychoanalysis, Vipassana discourages mere discharge, abreaction, catharsis or
acting out. Both practices depend upon a capacity for delay of gratification for the sake of eventual
insight and deeper understanding.
4. A “therapeutic split” in the ego. The meditator is instructed to become a “witness” to his own
experience. This depends upon the capacity of the ego to be subject and object of its experience at
the same time (Sterba, 1934), or in non-technical terms, the capacity to step back and observe
objectively what you are experiencing while you are experiencing it.

All four procedures presuppose certain ego capacities which define a normal or neurotic level of
functioning and personality organization. For the borderline personality organization, these
capacities which most of us take for granted either are lacking or are seriously impaired. Persons

10
with poorly differentiated and weakly integrated representations of themselves and others cannot
tolerate uncovering techniques. Uncovering and interpretation cannot succeed with such persons
because with faulty self-object differentiation the observing ego cannot take distance from what it
observes. Reliance on primitive defense like projective identification, with its vicious circle of
projection and reintrojection of bad self and object images, also makes it difficult to distinguish
between fantasy and reality and leads to a severely diminished capacity for detached observation
(Kernberg, 1972). The ability to distinguish reality from transference is easily lost and this ability is
the main prerequisite for all methods of insight therapy (Zetzel, 1971). Persons with these deficits
usually can’t tolerate for long the painful affects which emerge in transference reactions. Abstinence
and delay also become intolerable since contradictory affects and impulses lie close to
consciousness and tend to be expressed and acted on. Since love and hate, desire and fear, remain
dissociated and neither polar ego state has a mitigating influence on the raw force of the other, the
ego is often overwhelmed by imperious impulses and affects with which it cannot cope. In the
absence of a strong integrative capacity, free association tends to become contaminated by primary
process thinking which is not subject to rational review and easily leads the person to being
engulfed by primitive affects and drives. Unlike the controlled regression in the service of the ego
which organized personalities can endure, regression in persons with borderline personality often
proves difficult to reverse (Blanck & Blanck, 1979).

As an insight-directed therapy (Dewald, 1972) then, Vipassana presents serious risks to students
with this level of functioning. All intensive and/or unstructured therapies present significant dangers
to these students (Zetzel, 1971) and run the risk of further fragmenting their already fragile and
vulnerable sense of self.

The “basic rule” in Vipassana to attend to all thoughts, feelings and sensations without selection or
discrimination has the effect of creating just such an unstructured situation intrapsychically by
plunging this kind of student into an inner world he may be ill-equipped to cope with. Fragile ego
boundaries can become further blurred and self and object representations can de-differentiate. The
upsurge of primitive drives and affects can then be managed only by still greater reliance on
disavowal and splitting mechanisms to keep the good and the bad apart. In their practice these
students will tend to oscillate between states of great rage, emptiness and depression at one extreme,
and states of great euphoria, bliss or pseudomystical feelings of unity counterfeiting a genuine
experience of self-transcendence at the other. These oscillations further weaken the ego and become
an even stronger source of resistance to integrating their contradictory experiences of themselves
and others. The narcissistic pathology of some of these students also induces them to form
mirroring or idealizing transferences based on their primitive need for idealization and for
alternatively seeing self and others as omnipotent and worthless. When the teacher refuses to meet
their expectations and they no longer experience the relationship as gratifying, negative transference
reactions can emerge which always threaten regression (Kernberg, 1972).

Every teacher has encountered this, and has probably been somewhat bewildered by it, not knowing
its origins. When interpersonal relations have not yet reached the level of object constancy where
the same object can be experienced as both bad and good, frustrating and gratifying, every negative
self or object experience is a threat to the stability and structure of the ego and further weakens the
person’s ability to maintain a relationship with objects on which he depends physically and
emotionally, even when they are being experienced as depriving or punitive. Meditation teachers
tend not to pay much attention to transference aspects of the teacher-student relationship as it is in
conventional psychotherapy. However, a price is often paid for this. It is a repeated observation, for
instance in the Psychotherapy Research Project at the Menninger Foundation (Kernberg, Burnstein,
Coyne et al., 1972), that when the therapist tries to avoid the latent transference relationship, the
result is a chronically shallow therapeutic relationship. Patients act out their problems, keeping the
treatment setting rigidly split off from the transference with the therapist. (This might partially
account for a phenomenon sometimes encountered after and between meditation retreats: a
11
prolonged orgy [the word is not too strong] of sensual gratification quite at variance with the
behavior and values espoused during practice. For some this may well be a form of acting out
“outside the treatment,” as it were, instead of simply a resurgence of suppressed impulses and
desires and their explosive discharge.) They engage in psuedosubmission to the therapist which
leads to therapeutic stalemate: no change despite years of treatment. At worst then, in borderline
conditions the very type of meditation designed to see through the illusion of selfhood may actually
contribute to self-pathology. Fortunately, I suspect that the stringent prerequisites of the practice
make it too difficult if not impossible for these students to sustain their training. To some extent a
self-selective and self-protective mechanism is probably built in.

Differences in ego structure dictate differences in therapeutic goals and techniques. The goal in the
treatment of borderline conditions is building structure, not uncovering repression: facilitating the
integration of contradictory self-images, objectimages and affects into a cohesive and stable sense
of self able to maintain constant relationships with objects even in the face of disappointment,
frustration and loss. Since the developmental deficits in these personalities are best understood in
terms of those ego structures and functions which are established in early one-to-one relationships,
the best treatment is probably through the medium of a new and different kind of dyadic
relationship than they were able to achieve during earlier periods of developmental crisis (Zetzel,
1971); not through an introspective and predominantly intrapsychic activity like meditation. It is
questionable whether mere observation of contradictory ego states alone will help integrate the
dissociated aspects of self, objects and affects. It is questionable whether selfobservation in this
sense is even possible. What is required is confrontation and interpretive exposure of the split-off
object relations units as they occur within a transference relationship (Rinsley, 1977). Meditation is
designed for a different type of problem and a different level of ego structure.

My observation is that in order to practice an “uncovering” technique like Vipassana and to achieve
the structural changes at which the practice aims, it is developmentally necessary to acquire a
cohesive and integrated self first, one that is differentiated from others and has a degree of
autonomy. If such a self is not established, there is a clear sequence of pathological consequences.
In fact, its absence forms the most severe clinical syndromes. Failures in early attachment and
bonding lead to autistic and psychopathic personality structures (Bowlby, 1969) and the
presymbiotic psychoses (Mahler, 1968). Failure in self-differentiation leads to schizophrenic and
psychotic syndromes (Mahler, 1968). Failure in self and object integration lead to the borderline
conditions and the personality disorders (Mahler, 1975; Kernberg, 1975; Horner, 1979; Masterson
& Rinsley, 1980; Masterson, 1972). All are states of intense suffering for which meditation does not
appear to be a viable or even possible remedy. Insight meditation, i.e., Vipassana, does not address
this range of psychopathology, is not designed for it, and is probably contraindicated, though certain
preliminary practices and concentrative forms of meditation may be of some incidental help in
lowering chronic tension states and inducing a greater internal locus of control.

A FURTHER RANGE OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

AND OBJECT RELATIONS DEVELOPMENT

Given the developmental necessity of a cohesive and integrated sense of self, we can still ask if
such a self-structure represents the culmination of object relations development or the final possible
outcome of a therapeutic process. Of course in a certain sense the process of identity formation is
never complete. Mahler (1975) herself describes the outcome of the separation-individuation
subphases as “on-the-way-to-object-constancy.” Peter Blos (1967) speaks of a “second
individuation process” at adolescence. Erikson (1950) projects a life-long identity journey.
Nevertheless, in most persons a consolidation of overall intrapsychic structures takes place around
the end of the Oedipal period when the repression barrier becomes more or less firmly established.
Thereafter identification becomes increasingly selective (Kernberg, 1976). What is ego-dystonic
and inconsistent with one’s sense of self becomes repressed, a process essential to maintaining
12
selfcohesion. But precisely because of such repression, a new type of psychopathology can emerge
at this level of personality organization: the psychoneuroses. The core problem is no longer the lack
of self-differentiation and integration but conflict between the ego and instinctual wishes which are
unacceptable to the newly consolidated self and are therefore repressed or otherwise defended
against. The “qualitative difference” (Blanck & Blanck, 1974) in ego structure and consequently in
type of pathology requires a qualitatively different type of therapeutic approach. At this level the
task is not to build intrapsychic structure but to integrate repressed aspects of the self, to “reunite
with the conscious ego the contents ... which have been withheld from consciousness by repression”
(Fenichel, 1945:570).

However, according to Buddhist psychology a still deeper level of human suffering comes into view
at this level of personality organization. This kind of suffering constitutes yet another structural
level of psychopathology which is qualitatively different from the preceding two and is not included
in the developmental diagnostic spectrum of contemporary Western psychiatry. Evidently it can
come into view and be addressed therapeutically only after identity and object constancy have been
attained.

Suppose I am capable of technical neutrality or “bare” attention, non-selective awareness,

abstinence and the capacity for self-observation. Suppose further that I don’t become absorbed in
the content of my inner world and don’t pause to analyse or interpret it. Suppose instead that I
continue to train my attention to merely observe the flow of psychophysical events in their moment-
to-moment manifestation without preference or reaction. Finally, suppose that I can hold my
attention absolutely steady without any sort of distraction for extended periods of time. What more
will I then discover about the nature of the self and objects?

THE STAGES OF INSIGHT MEDITATION

The first thing to occur is what the classical Theravada meditation texts call “dispelling the illusion
of compactness” (Vajiranana, 1975; Nyanamoli, 1976). My sense of being an independent observer
disappears. The normal sense that I am a fixed, continuous point of observation from which I regard
now this object, now that, is dispelled. Like the tachistoscopic flicker-fusion phenomenon which
produces the illusion of an “object” when discrete and discontinuous images are flashed too quickly
for normal perception to distinguish them, my sense of being a separate observer or experiencer
behind my observation or experience is revealed to be the result of a perceptual illusion, of my not
being normally able to perceive a more microscopic level of events. When my attention is
sufficiently refined through training and kept bare of secondary reactions and elaboration of stimuli,
all that is actually apparent to me from moment to moment is a mental or physical event and an
awareness of that event. In each moment, there is simply a process of knowing (nama) and its object
(rupa). Each arises separately and simultaneously in each moment of awareness. No enduring or
substantial entity or observer or experiencer or agent no self — can be found behind or apart from
these moment-to-moment events to which they could be attributed (an-atta = no-self).

In other words, the individual “frames” appear which had previously fused in normal perception in
a tachistoscopic manner to produce an apparently solid and fixed image of a “self” of an “object.”
The only observable reality at this level is the flow of mental and physical events themselves. There
is no awareness of an observer. There are just individual moments of observation.

Once attention is stabilised at this level of perception, a further refinement of this insight into the
underlying nature of self and object representation becomes apparent. I observe how a self-
representation is constructed in each moment as a result of an interaction with an object? and only
as a result of such an interaction; and conversely, how an object appears not in itself (whatever that
might mean) but always relative to my state of observation. I see how each moment conditions the
next moment. In this way I begin to perceive that there are strictly speaking no constant end-
13
products of representation; there is only a continual process of representing. I discover that there are
actually no enduring entities or schemas at all; only momentary constructions are taking place.

As I become still more practiced in non-reactive and unbroken observation, I next observe the
stream of consciousness literally break up into a series of discrete events which are discontinuous in
space and time. Each mental and physical event is seen to have an absolute beginning, a brief
duration, and an absolute end. Each arises only after the one preceding it has passed away.
Representation and reality construction are therefore discovered to be discontinuous processes. In
terms of information-processing theory, what the meditator is actually experiencing is the temporal
nature of perception prior to pattern recognition, before stimuli are built up into the recognizable
percepts of ordinary experience (Brown, 1977). He is experiencing the original packet of stimulus
information which has been preattentively segregated into a figural unit separate from the
background of other incoming stimuli and which has a real and absolute duration in time. He can
distinguish the individual “psychological moments” in which those stimuli which arrive
concurrently with relatively equal intensity are grouped into the same energy packet. His
phenomenological experience at this stage of practice, that one event occurs only after the
preceding one has totally ceased, reflects the fact that at the level of preattentive synthesis (Neisser,
1967) stimuli are processed and segregated in a temporally discrete and discontinuous fashion.
From this point of view, what the meditator has actually done is reverse retraverse — the key stages
in the representational process, which yields individual self and object representations only as the
end-products of a very long and complex reworking of stimulus information.

When this total moment-to-moment “coming to be and passing away” (udayabbaya) is experienced,
there is a profound understanding of the radical impermanence (anicca) of all events. Not only do I
no longer perceive any durable “objects,” but even the processes of thinking, feeling, perceiving
and sensing themselves come to be and pass away without remainder. In this experience of
perpetual and discontinuous change, such notions as a solid body, a durable perceptual object, an
internal representation, or even a fixed point of observation no longer appear tenable. I come to
understand the lack of any intrinsic durability anywhere; I become aware of the selflessness (anatta)
of mind, body, external objects and internal representations. Not only does everything change all the
time; there are no “things” which change.

A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

At this point, an entirely different level of psychopathology comes into view. First, at this level of
perception, the normal affective and motivational bases of behavior are experienced as pathogenic
and sources of great suffering. This becomes particularly clear in observing the painful effect of
normal reactive tendencies in this state of awareness. Any affective reaction, even the simplest and
seemingly innate responses of attraction and aversion, liking and disliking, preferring the pleasant
and avoiding the unpleasant, wanting this and not wanting that irrespective of their particular aims
and objects — is experienced as an extraordinarily painful and misguided effort to block the flow of
events. Such desires are now seen to be futile attempts to deny and resist the process of change —
to hold onto this and push that away. Secondly, any attempt to constellate enduring self and object
representations, or to preferentially identify with some self-representations as “me” and expel
(psychotic, borderline) or repress (neurotic, normal) others as “not-me,” is experienced as an
equally futile attempt to interrupt, undo or alter self and object representations as a flow of moment-
to-moment constructions.

According to classical psychoanalytic metapsychology, the most primitive and enduring law of
psychic life is the pleasure principle: the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
According to more recent object relations theory, even more basic is the principle of object
relatedness. Both are considered part of our constitutional endowment. In the meditative perspective
however, the striving for sense gratification and for selfhood, which have been the basis of mental
14
life up to and including the stages of identity and object constancy, are seen as the next potential
point of arrest and source of suffering. Both strivings are included in the Buddhist diagnostic
category of “tanha” or “desire.” Buddhist psychology ranks them in the same order. “Kama-tanha,”
for instance, is the “thirst” for sense gratification and includes both attraction to pleasure
(sukhakama) and aversion to pain (dukkhapatikkula). “Bhava-tanha” describes the “thirst” for
existence and becoming. This refers to the desire to perpetuate life and self and to avoid death. In
one form, it is the desire for self-preservation and self-perpetuation; in another form, the desire for
rebirth; in still another form, the desire for immortality; in yet another, the desire for continued
differentiation and new experience. “Vibhava-tanha” denotes the “thirst” for non-existence. Again,
this term denotes a range of motivations: the desire to end life and becoming; the desire for states of
inertia and homeostasis; the desire to de-differentiate, ward off and regress. These latter two
together constitute both sides of the object-seeking propensity in Fairbairn’s (1952) sense: (a) the
desire for continuity of the self and its relationships to the object; and (b) the defensive withdrawal
of the self from object relations and the object world. Precisely these strivings are now experienced
as the immediate cause of psychic suffering.

But according to meditative experience, these strivings are not innate. The precondition of “desire”
is another aspect of affect, “feeling” (vedana). Buddhist psychology de-links two components of
affect in a way psychoanalytic theory and contemporary theories of emotion still do not: (1) the
purely spontaneous sensation of pleasure or unpleasure which accompanies every experience of an
object;* and (2) the tendency to respond to or act on that sensation with approach or avoidance
(tanha). This distinction has been confirmed by empirical findings in contemporary studies of
motivation and the phenomenology of the emotions (Arnold, 1970a, 1970b; Young, 1969; Pribram,
1970; Schachter, 1970; Leeper, 1970). Normally the experience of pleasure /unpleasure leads to an
“action tendency” (Arnold, 1970b) to approach the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. Ordinarily
this sequence is experienced as having drive-characteristics and is thus conceptualized in
psychoanalytic theory as being innate, automatic, spontaneous, natural; as an automatic nervous
system response-sequence beyond voluntary control. In contrast, trained meditative observation
shows that the motivational component of affect (i.e., the tendency to act on pleasant or unpleasant
experience, which is the origin of all psychic drives states; cf. Kernberg, 1976) is a volitional
activity and in principle subject to self-regulation. De-linking vedana and tanha, the experience of
pleasure or unpleasure (vedana) and the tendency to act on these central state affect dispositions
(tanha), is a fulcrum point in meditation training. It returns a previously conditioned response to
voluntary control and introduces an important principle of delay.

What, in turn, accounts for the operation of the pleasure principle — this impulsive tendency to
cling to pleasure and avoid pain — and for objectseeking behavior, especially if these are regarded
as ego functions subject to self-regulation and not as instinctual drives? According to Buddhist
analysis, the cause of pleasure principle dominance is faulty reality testing. Desire (tanha) is
conditioned by “ignorance” (avijja). Like desire, ignorance refers to an ego function: the capacity
for reality testing. Ordinary reality testing is not only faulty; it is based on a particular type of
misperception which inverts (vipallasa) the real order of things. We misperceive what is
impermanent (anicca) as permanent; what is incapable of satisfying (dukkha) as satisfactory; and
what is without substance or enduring selfhood (anatta) as substantial and having selfhood. In other
words, owing to faulty reality testing we ordinarily perceive and experience ourselves and objects to
be just the opposite of the way they really are (vipallasa = “inverted view”). In this sense the critical
diagnostic question in Buddhist meditation practice is the same as in Western clinical practice: is
reality testing intact? Clinically, this criterion differentiates normality and neurosis from psychosis
(Kernberg, 1977).

But in the meditative perspective, normal as well as abnormal conditions are deficient in reality
testing. This is the reason why Buddhist psychology can describe the normal state of ego
functioning as “deranged” (ummattaka) and give the term the same technical meaning it has in
15
clinical usage: the construction of a delusional system, or a world of nonveridical percepts of self,
others and the physical world. Meditation reality-tests this representational world; clinical
psychiatry takes it for granted in a commonsense manner.

THREE LEVELS OF MENTAL DISORDER

Though Buddhist psychology is not developmental, there is a classical diagnostic paradigm in the
Abhidhamma which seems to suggest that it does in fact distinguish between three different levels
of suffering which spring from different levels of object relations experience. (1) Dukkha-dukkha or
“ordinary suffering” corresponds to neurotic conflict between impulse and prohibition within a
stable selfstructure and whole-object relations, as well as to “ordinary human unhappiness,” which
Freud once said was the exchange for resolution of neurotic suffering. (2) Dukkha-viparinama or
“suffering caused by change” corresponds to the borderline conditions and the functional psychoses
where disturbance in the sense of self-continuity, fluctuating drives and affects, contradictory and
dissociated ego States, lack of a stable self-structure, and lack of constant relations with the object
world are the core problem. At this level of personality organization, prior to identity formations
and object constancy, change is the deepest and most pervasive threat to the fragile self. Every
experience of separation and loss threatens the reality and cohesion of the self, which still depends
for its felt existence on the immediate presence and benevolent regard of its objects. (3) Samkhara-
dukkha or “suffering as conditioned states” represents, to Western psychiatry, an entirely new
category of psychopathology which is pervasive. At this level, object-seeking as such is experienced
as pathogenic, contradictory as that may sound in terms of normal developmental theory. The very
attempt to constellate a self and objects which will have some constancy and continuity in time,
space and across states (Lichtenberg, 1975) emerges as the therapeutic problem. The two great
achievements in the all-important line of object relations development — identity and object
constancy — still represent a point of fixation or arrest. A cohesive and integrated sense of self, like
the earlier paranoid and depressive part-object positions (M. Klein, 1946; Fairbairn, 1952), is seen
as a developmental “position won in order to be moved beyond” (Guntrip, 1969:118f). From this
perspective, what we take as “normality” is a state of arrested development. Moreover it can be
viewed as a pathological condition insofar as it is based on faulty reality testing, inadequate
neutralization of the drives, lack of impulse control, and incomplete integration of the self and the
object world.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROVINCE OF MEDITATION

This is the level of personality organization and psychopathology that insight meditation appears to
be specifically designed to address. Buddhist psychopathology and diagnosis seem to acknowledge,
presuppose and even partially address the first two kinds of suffering. But as a system of therapy, its
major and proper concern is the third. I believe much of the confusion has arisen because this has
not been clearly understood by either Buddhist or psychodynamic psychology, nor by current
research paradigms. These two systems sometimes have been viewed as either competing at worst,
or as alternative treatment modalities at best, for the same range of problems. One tendency, for
example, is to contrast respective treatments and outcomes as mutually exclusive and to view them
as a forced choice: psychotherapy or meditation, the attainment of a cohesive sense of self or
liberation from it. Clinical psychiatry tends to view meditation as an invitation to a psychotic de-
differentiation of hard-won ego boundaries. Buddhist psychology critiques the notion of “self” or
“ego,” points out how it leads to suffering, and sees psychotherapy as perpetuating and reinforcing
the illusory selfconcept and making enlightenment that much more difficult. And the two systems
also have been seen as vaguely complementary but without a clear awareness of the differences in
their respective methods, aims, outcomes and the problems they seek to remedy. Thus the
phenomenon, which seems peculiar to traditional Buddhists, of the socalled “adjunctive” use of
meditation in psychotherapy (Naranjo, 1971; Assagioli, 1971; Luthe, 1970; Carrington & Ephron,
1975). In actual fact, techniques from all the major meditative traditions have either been
16
incorporated intact or adapted for use in both in-patient and out-patient psychiatric treatment
settings with reported success (Deatherage, 1975; Glueck & Stroebel, 1975; Bloomfield, 1977;
Carrington & Ephron, 1975; Candelent & Candelent, 1975; Reynolds, 1976; Shapiro, 1976; Vahia
et al., 1973; Kabat-Zinn, 1982; Boorstein, 1983).

Insight meditation, like psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is an intervention

designed to set ego and object relations development in motion again from a point of relative arrest
(Loewald, 1960; Fleming, 1972). As in psychoanalysis, the process of “separating from outgrown
levels of self-object ties” (Calef, 1972) is brought about by a controlled and partial return to more
elemental ways of perceiving, conceptualizing, feeling and behaving. In psychoanalysis, this is a
regression which takes form in an interpersonal relationship, the transference. The “return” that
occurs in the classical stages of insight meditation, however, does not take the form of transference.
It is not a re-living or re-experiencing of past stages of internalized object relations. It is a controlled
retracing of the stages in the representational process itself as this occurs in each present moment.

Viewed forward, the meditator is observing the perceptual-cognitive-affective pathways by which

the “self” and “object” and an entire object relational world (which is the only world we ordinarily
know) are constructed and come into being as a result of object-seeking and the operation of the
pleasure principle. Viewed backward, the meditator is watching the de-construction or
decomposition of “self” and “object” into their elementary components, processed or events
(dharmas). Insight meditation “reverses the way the world appears” (Eliade, 1969).

A FULL-SPECTRUM MODEL OF OBJECT RELATIONS DEVELOPMENT

But you have to be somebody before you can be nobody. The issue in personal development as I
have come to understand it is not self or no-self, but self and no-self. Both a sense of self and
insight into the ultimate illusoriness of its apparent continuity and substantiality are necessary
achievements. Sanity and complete psychological well-being include both, but in a phase-
appropriate developmental sequence at different stages of object relations development. The attempt
to bypass the developmental tasks of identity formation and object constancy through a misguided
spiritual attempt to “annihilate the ego” has fateful and pathological consequences. This is what
many students who are drawn to meditation practice and even some teachers seem to be attempting
to do.

What I think is needed, and what has been missing from both clinical and meditative perspectives,
is a developmental psychology that includes the full developmental spectrum. From a clinical point
of view, Buddhist psychology lacks this. It has little to say about the earlier stages of personality
organization and the types of suffering that result from a failure to negotiate them. There are
dangers when this is not understood. As in the classical period of psychoanalysis, before the self-
disorders were properly understood, the prerequisites and limitations of the treatment will not be
clearly recognized. There will be similar therapeutic failures, including “interminable” treatments
(Freud, 1937), which will bewilder and frustrate and sadden teacher and student alike.

Western psychology in general and psychoanalytic theory in particular do not address the other end
of the developmental spectrum. Their definitions of maturity and health reach no further than
psychosocial identity, object constancy, mutuality in object relations, and more adaptive, less
conflicted rearrangements of impulse and defense.

According to current clinical thinking, therapy does not treat a disease entity in the older
Kraepelinian medical model, but reinstitutes a derailed, arrested or distorted developmental process.
Vipassana addresses the developmental process which it views as arrested at the level of identity
and object constancy, and sets it in motion once again to reach a more ultimate view of the self and
reality. There is no term “meditation” in Buddhist psychology. The term used instead for this body
17
of practices and their outcomes is “bhavana” or “development” (Vajiranana, 1975). These practices
can be, and were probably meant to be, in the service of effecting a continuation of object relations
development. For Mahler as for other object relations theorists, the separationindividuation process
is “never finished; it can always become reactivated; new phases of the life cycle witness new
derivatives of the earliest process still at work” (1972:333). If, however, it is seen that both “self”
and “objects” are functions of a certain level or stage of object relations development, and that in a
more inclusive perspective there are no objects whose loss need be mourned and no self to mourn
them, if all self-object ties have finally been “outgrown,” then perhaps not only object relations
development but mental suffering itself comes to an end (Engler, 1983b).

CONCLUSION

That, at any rate, is the conclusion I have come to at this point. My hope is that as Buddhist,
Western and other ethnopsychiatric systems of clinical practice confront each other in our culture,
often for the first time, a more integrated, full-spectrum model of human development, its
vulnerabilities and the therapeutic interventions necessary to repair them, may result. From Freud’s
psychosexual stage-theory to Erikson’s life cycle theory to Mahlerian object relations theory, this
has been the thrust and aspiration of psychodynamic thought. Part of this thrust has been implicit
but not articulated in Buddhist thought. The one tradition has emphasized the importance of
becoming somebody, the other, the importance of becoming nobody. As I have come to understand
it as a psychologist in both traditions, both a sense of self and a sense of no-self seem to be
necessary — in that order — to realize that state of optimal psychological well-being which Freud
once described as an “ideal fiction” and the Buddha long before him had already described as “the
end of suffering” (Cula-Malunkya-sutta, M.63) and the one thing he taught.

FOOTNOTES

1 All the meditative and yogic traditions are extremely sophisticated in differentiating genuine
extinction of the causes of suffering from its counterfiet forms, suppression and repression, and
designate each psychic process by a different technical term. They recognize that functioning can be
experienced subjectively as conflict-free in states of intense concentration, for instance, though the
latent sources of conflict will become reactivated when concentration falls below a specified level.

2 In Theravadin Buddhist psychology (Abidhamma), intrapsychic changes have been catalogued

with great care in traditional lists of reported outcomes following the different stages of
enlightenment. These changes are classified differently in different lists, but the lists are remarkably
specific and internally consistent. They have also remained stable and uniform over the long course
of Abidhamma development. They can be consulted in Narada (1975) and Nyanamoli (1976).

3 This issue has been obscured by the structuralist language of object relations theory and
traditional psychoanalytic metpsychology with its tendency to reify functions and treat self and
object representations as fixed, discrete entities with powers of their own (Schafer, 1976).
Representations are actually memorial processes of representing which only occur in the present
(Rizzuto, 1978).

4 The only differences were a slight decrease in productivity across subjects and a noticable
increase in drivedominated responses for some subjects.

5 The remaining half acheived some proficiency in concentration but only three mastered “access
level” concentration (upacara-samadhi) and progressed through some sort of the formal stages of
insight. Only one of these advanced to the stage of Equanimity (Sankharupekka-nana), the stage
prior to enlightenment.

18
6 There are four distinct stages of enlightenment in insight meditation practice. Each is entered on
through a momentary cessation of experience (magga-phala) as the culmination of a preceding
series of discrete and invariant stages of practice. In each of these four movements, specific sets of
pathogenic mental factors and behavoirs are said to be sequentially and irreversibly “extinguished”
(nirodha), until by the fourth stage (Arahatta) all the possible sources of mental conflict (kilesas) are
said to be entirely removed (see Nyanamoli, 1976; M. Saydaw, 1973).

7 Interviews with the head of this teaching lineage, the Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw, and with his associate
sayadaws (teachers) at the Thathana Yeiktha center in Rangoon, also revealed a rather remarkable
difference in rate of progress between students there and students in this culture. Though there is
reason to believe that [hathana Yeiktha may be a somewhat exceptional case even among the Asian
Buddhist centers (Jack Kornfield, personal communication), a more rapid rate of progress in Asian
centers generally seems to be a widespread finding based on interview with their reident teachers
and with Western students who have studied in them.

8 This was reflected in the increased evidence of the drive-dominated content as well as significant
changes in the formal aspects of S’s verbalizations in our Rorschach study (Brown & Engler, 1980).
Likewise, Davidson, Goleman & Schwartz, (1976) report an increase in stateanxiety for the
beginning meditator, in contrast to a decrease for the advanced meditator. These results are
consistent with Maupin’s (1965) finding that an increase in primary process thinking and tolerance
for unrealistic experience predicted successful response to meditation, while attentional measures
did not. Maupin apparently was not aware, however, that this finding is specific to the early stages
of practice only.

9 The development of the transference relationship would have to be observed over time before
concluding that these narcissistic transference manifestations indicated the presence of a narcissistic
personality disorder. I have not yet been in a position to do this myself; nor have other teachers
systematically monitored transference manifestations in practice since Vipassana as a technique
does not work through the medium of a transference relationship. This is an important area for
future research.

10 That is, as it is understood for instance in DSM-I, and by psychiatric researchers such as Klein
(1975) and Akiskal (1978) who are not psychoanalytically oriented.
The concept is used by Kohut (1971) and his school of psychoanalysis (Goldberg, 1980) in still a
third sense as a designation for non-analyzable patients who are nevertheless not delusional.

11 In a strict sense, a therpeutic split between observing and experienceing in the way that is usually
meant occurs only in the preliminary but not in the final stages of meditation practice. Beginning
with the formal stages of insight (the “nanas” or “ knowledges”) which constitute insight meditation
proper, the illusion of the observer or witness is seen through and observation is experienced now as
merely a mental process or function instead of an activity of an agent “self”. The observer is no
longer seperate from the thing observed, but in quantum mechanical terms experiences “himself” as
part of the observation as well as the object observed.

12 Because of its similarities to psychoanalysis as a technique, repression will be lifted to varying

degress in the earlier stage of Vipassana practice. To what extent psychodynamic insight and
conflict resolution occur in insight meditation depends ona number of factors, some of them
cultural. Classically, however, this stage of the meditative process is considered preliminary and
transitional. It is hardly attended to as the practice is cultivated in the traditional centers of South
and Southeast Asia because the lifting of repression and psychodynamic insight is not specific to
meditation and is not the level of insight aimed at. The far greater attention given to this
phenomenon in Western practice is attributable in part to our greater psychologicalmindedness and
cultural predisposition to attend to psychodynamics, but perhaps especially to our confusion about
19
the proper goals of meditation, since our currently dominant spiritual and therapeutic systems do
not include this range of experience and psychological functioning in their models of health and
development.

13 Tachistoscopic research on advanced Vipassana practitioners is currently being undertaken by

Dr. Daniel P. Brown of Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, to empirically test this very
point. Preliminary findings confirm a perceptual discrimination capacity well beyond hitherto
reported norms, and tend to support the hypothesis that meditators are actually discriminating
temporal stages in high-speed processing prior to the build-up of stimuli into durable precepts (D.P.
Brown, personal communication).

14 The technical term for this is “nama-rupa-pariccedanana”, or “analytical knowledge of the

distinction between form (rupa) and mind (nama)”. The term “mind and form” (nama-rupa) is
meant to exclude any ontological assumption of matter existing as a substance behind perceptible
forms. Aristotelian and Newtownian physics contrast matter, form and mind: mind gives form to
preexisting matter. Buddhist physics, like twentieth century quantum physics, eliminates the notion
of “matter” or substance altogether, except as a non-verdical percept on a macro-level of
observation. Instead it contrasts mind (nama) and form (rupa) only, where “form” denotes the
percept constructed out of sense data, not hypothesized “matter” existing independently of
perception and its constructive activity. “Form” (rupa) designates appearance only, without
postulating any principle of substance behind appearances.

15 This tends to confirm Kernberg’s controversial assumption, which is otherwise difficult to

substantiate on the level of clinical observation, that internalization is an ongoing process. The
present moment of experience is always being internalized in the form of linked self and object
representation, not merely significant events or the cumulative impact of events as most other object
relations theorists imply.

16 The technical term for this stage of practice is “paccaya-pariggaha-nana”, or “knowledge and
conditionality”. The central Buddhist docterine of Co-Dependent Origination has its origin at this
level of practice.

17 The technical term for this stage of practice is “sammasana-nana”, or “knowledge by

comprehension”. This perception that each individual form is ultimately void of substance and ,
further, that the uniqueness of each form arises from the fact that it exists, and only exists, in
relation to every other form is systematically formulated in the most central of all Buddhist
teachings in both Theravada and Mahayana, the docterine of CoDependent Origination. This is the
quantum mechanical vision of the universe which underlies modern physics (see also Whitehead’s
ontological notion of “actual occasion” ).

18 Kama-tanha corresponds to the libido and aggression and the dynamics of the Pleasure Principle
in the older metapsychology based on dual instinct theory. In object relational terms, it corresponds
to the wish to possess the exciting (Fairbairn), gratifying (Kernberg) or good (Jacobson) object; and
the desire to expel the rejecting (Fairbairn), frustrating (Kernberg) or bad (Jacobson) object.

19 Neurophysiological and experimental psychological research supports a conception of affects as

primarily “central state” phenomena; that is , primarily subjective states of pleasure /unpleasure
which are crucially involved in psychic motivational systems rather than “peripheral” discharge
phenomena. Kernberg (1976) has recently made the most ambitious attempt yet to integrate this
view of affect into psychoanalytic theory.

20
20 This has mislead psychoanalytic metapsychology in general and object relations theory in
particular—as well as common sense psychology— into conceptualizing these behavoirs as innate
“drives”.

21 Though this is a novel idea in terms of traditional psychoanalytic thinking, Kernberg’s (1976)
recent integration of a central state theory of affect and biological systems thinking with
psychoanalytic dual instinct theory allows this possiblity in principle. It explains the drives not as
blind, innate forces pressing for discharge but as psychic motivational systems which are actually
built up and organized developmentally on the basis of central state affects of pleasure and
unpleasure in response to experience. By accepting the distinction between hedonic appraisal and
hedonic impulse as the two components of affect, it also admits of the possibility, at least in
principle, of de-conditioning the automaticity of the usual stimulus-response relationship between
them. Neither psychoanalysis nor other contemporary therapies train for that, so Kernberg, like
experimental researchers, does not consider the possibility. The meditation traditions do, because
they have developed appropriate techniques to decondition this response sequence.

22 Analysts would not disagree with this as a description of the course of psychoanalytic therapy.
An analagous “reversal of appearances” at the level of whole object relations results from
interpreting and resolving the transference, which is precisely not “yathabhutam” or “in accordance
with reality”, i.e., with the way the therapist really is.

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