The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2009, 69, (93–105)

© 2009 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/09

www.palgrave-journals.com/ajp/

DEEPENING PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING:

THE MARRIAGE OF BUDDHA AND FREUD

Jeffrey B. Rubin

Freud (1912) delineated the ideal state of mind for therapists to listen, what he called “evenly
hovering” or “evenly suspended attention.” No one has ever offered positive recommendations
for how to cultivate this elusive yet eminently trainable state of mind. This leaves an important
gap in training and technique. What Buddhism terms meditation—non-judgmental attention to
what is happening moment-to-moment—cultivates exactly the extraordinary, yet accessible,
state of mind Freud was depicting. But genuine analytic listening requires one other quality:
the capacity to decode or translate what we hear on the latent and metaphoric level—which
meditation does not do. This is a crucial weakness of meditation. In this chapter I will draw
on the best of the Western psychoanalytic and Eastern meditative traditions to illuminate how
therapists could use meditation to cultivate “evenly hovering attention” and how a psycho-
analytic understanding of the language and logic of the unconscious complements and
enriches meditative attention.

KEY WORDS: psychoanalytic listening; meditation; the language and logic of the
unconscious; how psychoanalysis enriches meditative listening.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2009.1

INTRODUCTION
“My, the lights are bright in here,” a client said to me in her first session
many years ago.
Where are lights bright, I wondered to myself?
As she discussed what brought her to therapy and what she was struggling
with in her life—a feeling of self-contempt and never being “good-
enough”—I listened on two channels, focusing on what she was consciously
saying and on her suggestive image.
Lights are bright in a police station, I eventually thought to myself. When
I asked her if coming to therapy made her feel “grilled under the lights by
the ‘cops’,” she smiled nervously and told me about her fears of being
judged in therapy. Since she always judged herself, she assumed that a

Jeffrey B. Rubin, Ph.D., Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis.

Address correspondence to Jeffrey B. Rubin, Ph.D., 1841 Broadway, Suite 711, New York, NY
10023; e-mail: jeffreyrubin@optonline.net
94 RUBIN

stranger would have to judge her. After my question she noticeably relaxed
and spoke more freely and openly.
Listening is an essential component of the psychotherapeutic process.
It is indispensable to all that the therapist does, whether she/he is a psycho-
analyst or a Rodgerian. In either case, careful listening aids the therapist
in decoding the client’s unconscious communications and empathetically
understanding his or her life. An equally important aspect of listening is
the therapist’s awareness of his or her own internal emotional and physical
reactions to the client. In addition, therapeutic listening is infinitely enhanced
when the therapist can access his or her own imaginative capacities.
“In all our vast [therapeutic] literature,” notes Coltart (1992), “very little
attention has been paid to attention” (p. 180). Psychotherapeutic listening, like
Poe’s “purloined letter,” may be neglected because it is right in front of us.
Freud (1912) delineated the ideal state of mind for therapists to listen,
what he called “evenly hovering” or “evenly suspended attention.” This is
a state in which the therapist is alert and receptive and attentive to both
what the client is saying and his or her own reactions. It aids the therapist
in being both grounded and flexible. Without evenly hovering attention,
the therapist, writes Freud (1912), “is in danger of never finding anything
but what he already knows” (pp. 111–112).
No one in the therapeutic literature has critiqued, amended or revised
Freud’s seminal recommendations. Yet, neither Freud nor his contemporaries
or successors who explored this territory (e.g. Horney,1987, Bion,1970,
1994 and Langs, 1978) offered positive recommendations for how to culti-
vate this elusive yet eminently trainable state of mind. Freud (1900) and
Bion, for example, focused on the obstructions to facilitating it—what not
to do (Rubin, 1996). The former indicated that the analyst should neither
try too hard to prematurely figure out the meaning of the patient’s commu-
nications—a state of mind he called “reflection”—nor should the analyst
attempt to formulate or write about a case prematurely. Bion (1970) encour-
aged therapists to listen without “memory, desire or understanding” (p.
46)—that is, without preconceptions about who the client is or expectations
for what should happen in the treatment.
The fact that no one in the psychotherapeutic literature has formulated
how one actually cultivates “evenly hovering attention” leaves an important
gap in therapy training and technique. If therapists were trained to really
listen in this way to each client, not only would the clinical data
more readily challenge and expand their own most cherished formulations,
but they would find it more difficult to maintain allegiance to single
schools of psychotherapeutic thought. And our understanding of our own
counter-transference—those emotional factors that interfere with our
capacity to understand and help our clients—would be enhanced.
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 95

What Buddhism terms meditation—non-judgmental attention to what is

happening moment-to-moment—cultivates exactly the extraordinary, yet
accessible, state of mind Freud was depicting. Meditation fosters heightened
attentiveness and equanimity, self-awareness and tolerance of feeling. In
training one’s capacity to notice ordinarily obscure phenomena—ranging
from fleeting somatic sensations to subliminal thoughts, feelings and fanta-
sies, to emergent and inchoate, creative images and insights—meditation
offers user-friendly techniques for accessing “evenly hovering attention,”
which could facilitate psychotherapeutic listening. In quieting the mind and
illuminating our hidden assumptions and deepening our attunement
to other people, meditation can improve the listening skills of therapists.
And the therapist would also have greater access to her own creativity and
capacity for inner wisdom.
Not only does meditation short-circuit the deeply ingrained tendency of
most of us to excessively criticize ourselves, but it increases access to our
capacity for empathy, creativity and intuition. This is an extraordinary—and
relatively untapped—resource for therapists, providing the foundation for
genuine psychotherapeutic listening.
But genuine psychotherapeutic listening—listening to the latent and
metaphoric as well as the manifest and literal meaning—requires one
other quality: the capacity to decode or translate what we hear on various
channels or levels at once—which meditation does not do. That is a crucial
weakness of meditation.
A college student tells me of a conversation with her Buddhist teacher
during which they talk about her wish to deepen her study of Buddhism
by going to a monastery in Asia for a retreat.
She doesn’t sound very enthusiastic. And I’m not sure why.
“Tell me more about what you both actually said,” I say.
“It’s funny you ask that,” she says, shifting on my couch. “I told him
‘I don’t want to go, I mean I want to go.’” She pauses. “Is that a Freudian
slip?” she asks, with a look suggesting she doesn’t need an answer.
“What comes to mind about not wanting to go?” I ask. “I’m not sure,”
she says. “I may be pushing myself, doing it for the wrong reasons—because
my boyfriend wants me to. And he may have other motives beside
my well-being. Like wanting to justify what he’s into. And my teacher
didn’t ask me if I had any hesitation—he just assumed that I wanted
to go.”
It is tempting to hear only the surface of what the student said to her
Buddhist teacher, just as the teacher did. But then we might miss what is
underneath.
“Don’t get me wrong—I love Buddhism, and it’s changed my life,” she
continues. “But it is not a panacea and I sense certain problems with it.
96 RUBIN

It can be too detached, anti-emotional, and as I’ve told you—I have

had quite enough of that with my intellectual parents to last several
lifetimes.”
“I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost
limits, so that we may learn what they are …,” writes William James in a
letter of September 28, 1909 to Théodore Flournoy, “obviously ‘symbolism’
is a most dangerous method” (James, 1920, pp. 327–328).
Why is it so dangerous? Because it reveals that we often say more than
we know.
Without attention to the symbolic aspect of listening my client’s ambiv-
alence about studying Buddhism abroad would go unnoticed.
In this paper I will draw on the best of the Western psychotherapeutic
and Eastern meditative traditions to delineate the two ingredients of optimal
listening. I will attempt to illuminate how therapists could use meditation
to cultivate “evenly hovering attention” and deepen their ability to under-
stand themselves and their clients. Then I will examine how a psychoana-
lytic understanding of the language and logic of the unconscious
complements and enriches meditative attention. While I will focus on
perspectives and insights gleaned from classical and post-Freudian psycho-
analysis, my remarks are applicable, with the appropriate changes, to other
schools of psychotherapeutic thought.
Coltart (1992) claims that the practice of paying attention is the same
whether taught by a Buddhist meditation master or an experienced analyst.
But they are actually very different. Psychoanalysis lacks an appreciation
for cultivating two qualities that meditation fosters, namely concentration
and equanimity. These are heightened states of focus and acceptance
that are not even mapped in Western psychologies. Explaining the
meditative process in some detail—what it is and how to do it—will
illuminate this.
Misunderstandings about meditation abound. It has been viewed as
everything from a “self-improvement technique” to a “passive withdrawal
from the world” (Welwood, 2000, p. 75). “Meditation” is not one thing
such as a technique to lower stress or blood pressure or quiet the mind. In
the classical Buddhist Visudhimagga: The Path of Purification, for example, there
are at least 40 potential objects of meditation (Buddhaghosa, 1976, p. 99).
There are many kinds of meditation ranging from classical Theravadin
Buddhist techniques of concentrating and focusing the mind and
deconstructing take-for-granted conceptions of self, to the emphasis in Zen
on being-this-moment, to Tibetan Buddhist strategies for transforming
emotions. In this chapter I will focus on Vipassana meditation, a core tech-
nique of classical Buddhism. Vipassana is a Pali word meaning separating
things into their component parts, seeing into them and gaining insight.
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 97

Take several moments to “turn your eyes inward” and look into your
own depths and observe your mind … . Perhaps the first thing you noticed
was how difficult it was to pay attention in any sustained way. Your mind
was probably filled with endless chatter: wandering thoughts, fleeting
images and fantasies, transient somatic sensations. You invariably lost track
of what was occurring and wandered off and were emotionally hijacked
by such things as criticisms of yourself, anticipations of the future, or regrets
from the past. Close inspection of your actual experience reveals that your
typical mode of perception is, to an unrecognized extent, selective, distorted
and outside voluntary control. You often operate on automatic pilot, reacting
to a conscious and unconscious blend of fallacious associations, anticipa-
tory fantasies and habitual fears that make you unaware of the actual texture
of your experience. Your mind is often foggy, seldom clear and serene.
Buddhism likens the mind to a monkey endlessly jumping from branch to
branch. It is difficult to see or think clearly when monkey mind prevails.
Since ordinary consciousness is usually too turbulent, preoccupied and
constricted to be attentive and focused, the mind must be trained to focus.
Meditation1 is one deeply powerful way of doing that. Meditation is the
training of moment-to-moment attentiveness—awareness without judgment
of what actually happens to us instant-by-instant. Meditation involves
greeting life—here and now—with focus, care and respect. In a meditative
state we perform each task with whole-heartedness.
The Mahā satipatthā na Sutra: The Greater Discourse on the Foundations
of Mindfulness (Buddha, 1987) is the core Buddhist text on the meditative
process. There are four “foundations to mindfulness,” according to the
Buddha:

(1) awareness of the body in four positions (walking, standing, sitting and
lying down);
(2) awareness of “feelings” (vedanā )—which refers to physical (or emotional)
sensations of pleasantness, unpleasantness or neutrality rather than what
we call emotions;
(3) awareness of states of mind—for example, whether we are clear or
distracted, angry or calm, contracted or spacious;
(4) awareness of “mind-objects”—which ranges from Buddhist notions
about the hindrances to meditation (sense desire, ill-will, sloth and
torpor, worry, and doubt) to the five “aggregates” or elements that make
up every moment of experience (form, feeling, perception, mental-
formation and consciousness) to the Seven Factors of Enlightenment
(mindfulness, investigation, energy, delight, tranquility, concentration
and equanimity) to the Four Noble Truths (the reality and pervasiveness
of suffering, the cause of it, the solution and the path to end it).
98 RUBIN

The meditative process, according to classical Buddhism, consists

of two steps or stages: concentration and insight. In concentrative medita-
tion we focus on a single object, such as the breath at the nostrils
or abdomen with wholehearted attentiveness. It is an exclusive state
of mind—it excludes everything but the single object we are focusing
on. We sit physically still either in a lotus (or half lotus or an upright)
position and pay attention to the immediate flow of moment-to-moment
experience—attending to the breathing process, silently noting the experi-
ence of inhalation and exhalation at the nostrils or abdomen. The effort
is not to control the breathing but to be attentive to it. Concentrative
meditation cultivates mental focus. In traditional Buddhist practice devel-
oped by the Buddha, we often begin with concentrative meditation.
When attentiveness is developed and stabilized, then insight meditation
is practiced.
Insight meditation involves an inclusive state of mind in which we attend
to the changing objects of our experience—non-judgmentally noting and
then silently labeling whatever thoughts, feelings, fantasies or somatic
sensations that we experience moment-by-moment such as “planning,”
“judging,” “regretting” and so forth. If we feel lost or confused, unable
to label the thoughts, feelings, sensation or fantasies that arise, then that
experience is labeled “confusion.” If we judge our inattentiveness or
thinking, we label that “judging.”
As attentiveness increases and becomes more refined, we can use the
developing capacity to focus the mind to observe the nature of our
consciousness. Like a movie that is slowed down, we can see how one
frame of our consciousness leads to another—how particular feelings
condition specific reactions. We might become aware, for example, that
we are making expansive plans after feeling diminished. Or we might
realize that we get angry at a loved one when we feel scared about his or
her safety.
As our awareness becomes clearer and more focused, we experience a
sense of psychological spaciousness: we do not become as entangled in
reactive patterns of feeling and thinking. When praised, we might allow
ourselves to bask in its warm glow instead of automatically devaluing the
person who praised us. Psychological resilience is cultivated: when we are
unsettled or distracted, we regain clarity more quickly. We can begin to
notice within the first few seconds that we are unthinkingly attacking
ourselves—thus avoiding getting emotionally hijacked and caught in a
downward spiral of self-contempt and self-destructive behavior.
Shinzen Young (2004, 2006a), a contemporary teacher of Buddhist
meditation, suggests that meditation cultivates two predominant traits:
clarity and equanimity. Clarity regarding the components of your sensory
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 99

experience—physical sensations or emotions in the body, visual thinking

or internal images and verbal thinking or internal talk—as they emerge
moment-after-moment alone or in various combinations. Equanimity is
an acceptance of whatever happens—the ability to meet whatever life
brings—from strife to joyfulness—with calm acceptance.
Meditation lessens distractedness, quiets the inner pandemonium,
reduces self-criticism and cultivates the capacity to tolerate a greater
range of emotions. It also helps you appreciate your life and miss less life.
And it enables you respond to pain without suffering and to fully
experience and derive fulfillment from emotional and physical pleasure
(Young, 2006b, p. 1).
In summary, these are the ways meditation can help heighten therapeutic
presence:

(1) Meditation increases your concentration so you can be more fully

present.
(2) Meditation lessens self-criticism so that you listen less judgmentally.
(3) Meditation decreases a sense of separateness—which helps you be
more connected to patients.

INTEGRATING MEDITATION AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC UNCONSCIOUS

Meditation provides an operationalizable technique for cultivating evenly
hovering attention and thus deepening psychoanalytic listening. But one
additional element is indispensable for ideal listening: understanding the
language—and logic—of the unconscious, which Buddhism neglects
and doesn’t understand. Without an understanding of the complexity
and richness of unconscious communication, one is hampered in one’s
understanding, as I mentioned earlier.
Two aspects of the meditative method interfere with listening in this way.
Meditation focuses on deconstructing experience into its component parts,
rather than decoding its meaning. And meditators without exposure to
psychotherapy lack an understanding of the language—and logic—of the
unconscious; what lies outside awareness.
The Buddhist tradition contains a conception of the unconscious.2 It is
alert, in other words, to the way traces of old experiences and feelings
shape—and sometimes limit—one in the present. But the psychoanalytic
understanding of the unconscious—particularly the notion of the primary
process—offers something more: namely a fertile and revolutionary concep-
tion of unconscious communication. This Buddhism lacks.
In the 1932 revised edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote
that the book “contains the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been
100 RUBIN

my good fortune to make. Insights such as this falls to one’s lot but once
in a lifetime” (Freud, 1932). One of the most revolutionary ideas in The
Interpretation of Dreams was that the mind is capable of thinking in two
different ways or logics. There are, to use the title of one of Freud’s papers,
“two principles of mental functioning,” which he called the primary and
secondary process.
The secondary process, which Freud (1900) claimed was characteristic
of conscious thought in waking life, is adapted to the realities of the external
world. It is our ordinary rational and conventionally accepted way of
thinking and speaking. You are using it as you think about and reflect on
what you are now reading. The secondary process obeys the laws of
grammar and formal logic, respects the differences between images, and
acknowledges opposites and the categories (i.e. ordering principles) of
space and time. My client’s conscious wish to study meditation illustrates
this type of thinking.
The primary process, on the other hand, is characteristic of unconscious
mental activity and emerges in dreaming, artistic creations, neurotic
symptom-formation, slips of the tongue (like my client made) and schizo-
phrenic mentation. Opposites can—and often do—co-exist in primary
process communications. One can, for example, love and hate the same
person or wish for and fear the same thing—like my client. The primary
process is oblivious to the categories of time and space—significant facets
of our psychological past are, for example, very much “alive” in the present.
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in “Requiem for a Nun,”
“It’s not even past.”
The primary process is governed by processes Freud (1900) called
condensation and displacement. In the former, one image in a dream or
work of art or a patient’s communications may stand for several different
things, while in the latter, a person or image of lesser emotional significance
can replace and symbolize another one of greater importance.
A client dreams, for example, that she is sitting at the end of her
bed, which is on the roof of a building. She sees her dog, who is her pal,
jump from the building and plunge to the ground. As her dog plummets,
she doesn’t look like a dog—she resembles a blob. My client feels power-
less and is devastated. We explore her associations to the images in
the dream. Sitting on the edge of her bed on a roof has three meanings
to her:
(1) She feels that her personal life is “on edge”—in a precarious state;
(2) She fears her bed will soon be “empty” if her husband takes a job
abroad; (3) She is “falling” at work—losing the secure ground she used to
have. The multiple meanings concentrated within one image illustrate the
process of condensation.
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 101

Displacement—the process of putting something of greater emotional

meaning and intensity in a less important place—is illustrated in her
associations to the dog plummeting. As she describes this horrific sight, she
says that as the dog fell toward the ground it no longer resembled itself.
She sheepishly indicated that she felt that she was changing shape and
feeling like a “blob”—aging and losing something vital; particularly an
athleticism that was an important part of her former identity.
Even a meditatively trained mind that is highly concentrated, attentive
and focused is greatly handicapped in deciphering the dense and fertile
texture of what it is attempting to understand without comprehending the
language and logic of the unconscious. In a letter/poem to Thomas Butts
on November 22, 1802, William Blake writes: “And a double vision is
always with me/With my inward Eye ’tis an old man Man grey/With my
outward a Thistle across my way/…May God us keep/From Single vision
and Newton’s sleep” (quoted in Bentley, 2001, pp. 219–220). Blake was
not only challenging an exclusively rationalistic view of the universe,
but he was pointing toward a more inclusive kind of perception. To truly
understand what Freud called the “overdetermination,” of internal and
interpersonal experiences—the way the “same” thought, feeling, fantasy
or action, may be motivated by various unconscious factors and have
multiple unconscious meanings and functions—we need to have “double
vision,” to listen stereophonically, on at least two channels at once, to
the manifest and the hidden meaning.
The Thirty-Seventh Zen Patriarch, Ling-yu of the Mazu lineage, lived in
the 9th century. He was sitting up in bed with his eyes wide open one
morning when his secretary entered the room and asked him why he had
such a strange look on his face. “I’ve just had a dream,” the Master said.
“Why don’t you try to interpret it?” The secretary bowed respectfully and
left the room. Moments later, Ling-yu’s assistant came in and was asked
the same question. The assistant bowed and walked out. The secretary soon
returned with a tub of hot water for the Master’s bath, and the assistant
brought a cup of tea. Seeing that neither disciple was lured into the world
of dreams, Ling-yu praised them (Taylor, 1999).
One way of interpreting this story is that the secretary and the assistant
were devoted to what Zen might call life-as-it-is and were not “side-tracked”
by phantoms or dreams.3 “Dreams, in Buddhism, can refer to deluded
thoughts … especially becoming ensnared in the trance of everyday self-
absorbed thinking” (Bobrow, personal communication, January 15, 2007).4
I suspect many centuries of Buddhists might agree. “All things at all times
teach,” says the Buddhist Avantamsaka Sutra (Tongxuan, 1989). “A dream
unanalyzed is like a letter unopened,” it says in the Talmud. If everything
is real5—if dreams teach—then perhaps the secretary and the assistant, like
102 RUBIN

the Master, missed an opportunity to learn when they listened on one

channel instead of two.
Freud presented the primary and secondary process as inherently anti-
thetical to each other. He believed that the primary process was develop-
mentally more archaic and maladaptive than the secondary process and
that in healthy development it would be outgrown or mastered. While
Freud’s bilingual logic of the mind is a profound contribution to human
self-understanding, there are several serious defects with it—especially the
fact that it is underwritten by an increasingly beleaguered mechanistic
model of the mind as a mental apparatus within which impersonal and
unruly instinctual drives circulate, press for discharge, get dammed up and
assault the besieged individual. Fewer contemporary analysts find this a
compelling view of the mind, because it has been devastatingly critiqued
over the last several decades by Schafer (1976), Stolorow and Atwood
(1979), and Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), among many others.
Freud’s theory also pathologizes the primary process and makes it more
primitive than the secondary process. Later analysts such as Rycroft (1956,
1962) and Loewald (1977) did not believe that primary process and
secondary process were mutually antagonistic or that the primary process
was inevitably neurotic. In fact, they viewed them as mutually enriching.
Aware of both the breathtaking insights and the difficulties in Freud’s concep-
tualizations, both Rycroft and Loewald attempt to reformulate the primary
and secondary process in such a way as to throw out the bathwater of the
theoretical problems without eliminating the baby of the seminal insights.6
The philosopher Suzanne Langer (1942) describes two modes of commu-
nication, what she termed discursive and non-discursive symbolism—or
conscious, rational thought in words presented successively in accordance
with accepted rules of grammar and logic and visual or auditory images
appearing in a single instance rather than in a successive sequence. Drawing
on this distinction, Rycroft unlinks the theory of the primary and secondary
process from the mechanistic assumptions of Freud’s defective drive model,
while retaining the wisdom embedded in Freud’s two principles of mental
functioning. Rycroft then uses Langer to synthesize the two facets of mental
functioning that Freud’s theory depicts, suggesting that they are potentially
cross-pollinating. In other words, we need to operate in both modes to lead
a full and rich life.
Loewald (1977) reconceptualizes primary and secondary process while
also disconnecting them from their original usage as modes of energetic
regulation. Instead of dichotomizing these aspects of experience and
privileging one over the other, he recommends integration, balance and
cross-pollination. If one lives too much in the primary process mode, then
one drowns in a dysfunctional, phantasmagorical world of metaphors and
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 103

images. If one resides too exclusively in a hyper-rational world of the

secondary process then one lives a more emotionally shallow and impoverished
life devoid of the creative and vitalizing aspects of the primary process.
Optimal listening, in my view, involves two stages: (1) quieting and
focusing the mind through meditation and then (2) examining and investi-
gating whatever arises with an abiding interest in the meaning of what you
hear and a sensitivity to the language—and logic—of the unconscious.
Attempting to listen to someone without developing heightened attentive-
ness is like taking a photograph with a wonderful lens held by an unsteady
hand—the picture will be blurred. Psychoanalysis falls into this trap because
it lacks a method for cultivating the deep concentration and equanimity
trained by Buddhist meditation.
Deep inner concentration and quietude increase our capacity for
self-awareness and tolerance of feeling. When we still the normally
turbulent waters of our minds we have greater access to our emotional
depths. We can literally notice more of what is occurring as well as sit
through a greater range of feelings without the need to either identify with
them, act on them or push them away.
The “meditative photographer” holds the camera completely still but uses
a narrower lens and doesn’t “develop” the picture. The picture will be clear,
but restricted—neglecting various aspects of unconscious communication
such as dreams and slips of the tongue. Listening stereophonically—on two
channels at once—is a crucial aspect of a wide-angle lens. Stereophonic
listening enables us to hear symptoms—traces of old, undigested experience
that constrict us in the present—and creative symbols, which are often
intimations, if not harbingers, of new, inchoate and constructive directions
in one’s life. Comfort with the primary process encourages us to stay with
and eventually translate or decode the meaning of unconscious communi-
cation. We literally have more access to it and greater adeptness in handling
it. For optimal psychotherapeutic listening we need to hold the camera
steady—concentrate the mind—and use a wide-angle lens. Then the picture
will be both clear and more comprehensive. This is, I believe, one of the
unsung gifts that the marriage of Buddha and Freud bequeaths to us.7

NOTES

1. There are many kinds of meditation including Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Sufi, Taoist, Yogic,
Hindu and Buddhist types. In this paper I focus on Buddhist meditation. Goleman’s (1988)
The Meditative Mind offers a clear and comprehensive overview of the main kinds of
meditation. Shinzen Young’s (2007) “Five Ways to Know Yourself as a Spiritual Being” gives
a suggestive flavor of five types within the Buddhist tradition.
2. There actually seem to be at least three conceptions of the unconscious in Buddhism—the
classical Buddhist skandhas, or subconscious aggregate of previous conditioning (Narada,
104 RUBIN

1975, pp. 349 and 351); the alaya-vijnana or “store-house” consciousness of Mahayana
Buddhism—the “subjectless flow of mutually conditioning events that momentarily
constitute at the surface level of consciousness something akin to an ego that experiences
and reflects” (Unno, 2006, p. 7); and “mushin,” that state of complete un-self-consciousness
and optimal responsiveness that Zen terms “no mind” (Suzuki, 1959, pp. 110–111).
3. “Reality,” for Freud, referred to internal psychic experience such as dreams and the external
world—with the former taking precedence over the latter. Buddhism, on the other hand,
argues that our ordinary conception of reality—including what Freud termed “secondary
process” as well as the taken-for-granted assumption of an autonomous, isolated, solid,
me “in here” and a separate you “out there”—is an illusion. “The fundamental delusion
of humanity,” Zen master Yasutani Roshi once said, “is to suppose that I am here and you
are out there” (cf. www.cise.ufl.edu).
4. “There’s another view of dream in Zen, the evanescence of each moment and every
phenomena (in the Diamond Sutra): a source of delusion if we attach blindly to it, a source
of play and liberation if we do not (row row row your boat)” (Bobrow, personal commu-
nication, January 15, 2007).
5. Zen master Dogen is the exception that suggests the generalization—treating everything
(including dreams)—as real (cf. Cook, 1978; Kim, 2004).
6. One can appreciate the profound value of the primary process as an exquisite means of
unconscious communication without subscribing to—or endorsing—every aspect of Freud’s
immense body of work. One can, for example, challenge his mechanistic model of the
mind (or his pessimistic model of health) without eliminating his stunning insights about
the way we often communicate more than we know.
7. The feedback of Joe Bobrow, Marianne Horney Eckhardt, Jefferson Fish, Uwe Gielen, Ellen
Luborsky, Mitsunen Lou Nordstrom, Erika Cacsire, Mary Traina, Gail White and Shinzen
Young was helpful in the completion of this essay.

REFERENCES

Bentley, G.E. (2001). The stranger from paradise: A biography of William Blake.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bion, W. (1970). Opacity of memory and desire. Attention and interpretation
(pp. 41–54). London: Maresfield Library.
Bion, W. (1994). Notes on memory and desire. In Cogitations (ext. ed). London,
UK: Karnac.
Buddha (1987). Mahāsatipatthāna sutra: The greater discourse on the foundations
of mindfulness. Thus have I heard: The long discourses of the Buddha
(pp. 335–350). London, UK: Wisdom Publications.
Buddhaghosa, B. (1976). Visudhimagga: The path of purification. Berkeley, CA:
Shambhala.
Coltart, N. (1992). The practice of psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Slouching toward
Bethlehem (pp. 164–175). New York: The Guilford Press.
Cook, F. (1978). How to raise an Ox: Zen practice as taught in Zen master Dogen’s
Shobogenzo. Los Angeles: Center Publication.
Freud, S. (1900). The Dream Work and the Primary and Secondary Process.
Interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition, 5. London: Hogarth Press,
pp. 599–609, 277–281; 305–309.
Freud, S. (1912). Recommendations to Physicians on Practicing Psycho-analysis.
Standard Edition, 12. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 111–120.
 PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING: BUDDHA AND FREUD 105

Freud, S. (1932). Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition of The Interpretation
of Dreams. Standard Edition, 4. London: Hogarth Press, p. 32.
Goleman, D. (1988). The meditative mind: Varieties of the meditative experience.
Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy Tarcher.
Greenberg, J. & Mitchell, S. (1983). Object relations in psychoanalytic theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Horney, K. (1987) Final Lectures, D. Ingram (Ed.), New York: W.W. Norton &
Company.
James, W. (1920) In H. James (Ed.), The letters of William James. Boston: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Kim, H.-J. (2004). Eihei Dogen: Mystical realist. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Langer, S. (1942). Discursive and presentational forms. Philosophy in a new key
(pp. 75–94). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Langs, R. (1978). The listening process. New York: Jason Aronson.
Loewald, H. (1977). Primary process, secondary process and language. Papers on
psychoanalysis (pp. 178–206). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Narada, M. (1975). A manual of Abhidhamma: An outline of Buddhist philosophy.
Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.
Rubin, J.B. (1996). Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an integration. New York:
Plenum Press.
Rycroft, C. (1956). Symbolism and its relation to the primary and secondary process.
Imagination and reality: Psycho-analytical essays 1951–1961 (pp. 42–60).
London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Rycroft, C. (1962). Beyond the reality principle. Imagination and reality: Psycho-
analytical essays 1951–1961 (pp. 102–113). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Schafer, R. (1976). A new language for psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Stolorow, R. & Atwood, G. (1979). Faces in a cloud: Subjectivity in personality
theory. New York: Jason Aronson.
Suzuki, D.T. (1959). Zen swordsmanship. Zen and Japanese culture (pp. 87–136).
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, J.P. (1999). Koans of silence: The teaching not taught. Parobola: Myth, Tradi-
tion and the Search for Meaning, 24(2), 6–11.
Tongxuan Li, T.C. (trans.) (1989). Entry into the realm of reality: The guide and
commentary on the Gandavyuha, the final book of the Avatansaka Sutra. Boston:
Shambhala.
Unno, M. (2006). Introduction. In M. Unno (Ed.), Buddhism and psychotherapy:
Essays on theories and practices (pp. 87–104). Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Welwood, J. (2000). Toward a psychology of awakening: Buddhism, psychotherapy,
and the path of personal and spiritual transformation. Boston: Shambhala.
Young, S. (2004). Break through pain. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Young, S. (2006a). What is mindfulness? Retrieved on Shinzen.org.
Young, S. (2006b). Why practice mindfulness? Retrieved on Shinzen.org.
Young, S. (2007). Five ways to know yourself as a spiritual being. Retrieved on
Shinzen.org.