Presence Of Mind: On Mentalization, Mindfulness and No-Mind

"....I do not think that the mind really exists as an entity -- possibly a startling thing for a psychologist to say."

Ernest Jones [1946]

Dwelling nowhere, bring forth that mind.

The Diamond Sutra

In this essay, I explore the interplay of psychoanalysis and Buddhism, their practices, theories and world views. They are different of course -- psychoanalysis is concerned with personal integration while Buddhism involves a quest for direct knowledge of the meaning of our living and dying (our essential nature). I do not make an amalgam, and I consider divergences as instructive as areas of overlap. I describe how elements of each are already in dialogue that is catalyzing a cross-fertilization of theories of mind and their impacts on what we do in the analytic encounter. The ideas I explore cluster around mentalization, mindfulness, and no-mind.

Mentalization, or reflective function (Fonagy, 2000) refers to our capacity to reflect on mental states and to understand and interpret human conduct in terms of the states of mind that underlie it. Mindfulness refers to Buddhist mindfulness meditation, a core practice in the Theravada school of Buddhism ('Teachings of the Elders') whose classical approach emphasizes bare awareness of mental, emotional and somatic states as the path to see into, unhitch and de-condition from desires and attachments and liberate oneself from the delusive self-structures and suffering they engender. It originated in India with the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, and reached prominence in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and Burma. "No-mind" refers to a teaching of the Mahayana school ['Great Vehicle'] which developed in India and tended to emphasize practices that facilitate direct experience of our essential nature, beyond dualistic concepts such as self and no-self, and the embodiment of this realization in daily living. Personal liberation is seen here as arising in concert with, and for the benefit of, all beings. Mahayana Buddhism spread throughout China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan and Tibet, reaching particular form in Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism. Teachings and practices from both Theravada and Mahayana schools have taken root in the West where they are co-mingling, creating a pluralism analogous to the current psychoanalytic scene.

Convergence

The convergence between Buddhist meditation and psychoanalytic research may be succinctly expressed as follows: it is not primarily what we experience, painful or pleasurable as it may be, that determines our well-being. Rather, it is the extent to which we are able to attend to that experience and make it meaningful. As Fonagy has pointed out, the capacity to reflect fruitfully on experience is correlated with the quality of primary attachment relationships. The more secure, the more possible to reflect upon, bear and learn from even the most painful experience. This capacity is shaped in turn by the caregiver's ability to mentalize or reflect on his own states of mind. A key ingredient in this intergenerational process is the caregiver's ability to hold the baby in mind as someone with a mind of her or his own, someone with intentions, mental states (coalescing bundles of emotions, thoughts and bodily sensations) beliefs and desires. This appears to be at the heart of the ability to recognize, attune and respond in a transformational way to the infant's mental, emotional and somatic states. Schore (2003) details how neurobiological development, attachment and human emotional and attentional capacities evolve in concert. Bion's notions of containment, reverie, and alpha function, which lead to the capacity to "think," Winnicott's holding environment and Sandler's concept of safety are analogous though not identical to reflective function.

When we think of presence we tend to think of the "relationship" side of what the analyst provides, general factors such as empathy, concern, and interest, in contrast to his interpretive activity. When we think of the phrase presence of mind, we imagine someone who's cool under pressure, not driven by blind impulse, able to tolerate complexity and uncertainty without jumping to conclusions, a good person to have around in a crisis. Or perhaps a state of mind, receptive yet durable, that reflects equanimity and patience, a state from which we respond in accord with circumstances. It implies a container of sorts - presence - and a substance or contained - mind.

However, it is less a thing than the absence of reactivity. Does presence derive its benefits, even its very meaning, from a certain absence? What about the homonym, 'presents?' Is it something that bestows a growthful influence on those who come into contact with it? Is it implicit in the process of giving? Although we may talk about something, say ultimate reality in Zen or a troubling affect in analysis, each process places value on the muffin fresh out of the oven, embodied, "presented" in living form, not simply talked about abstractly.

The capacity for attentiveness that is enduring, pliable, and able to recognize and respond flexibly in accord with changing [even traumatic] circumstances is a quality that cuts across child development, and the relationship and attentional field between patient and analyst (Schore, 2003) and, not surprisingly, meditator and spiritual teacher. It is an aim of psychoanalysis as well as the means to the aim. Presence of mind reflects not only a way of being and communicating with others but also a way of regarding the processes and contents of one's own mind. It isn't just instrumental or problem-solving; it has -- in and of itself – healing, enlivening or, in Buddhist parlance, awakening properties. It conveys love and insight, compassion and wisdom. It represents not just the content of consciousness but the quality of consciousness at play. Perhaps it can't be "given" after all, because that would make the receiver quite self-conscious, but it can be lived together and retrospectively feels like a gift.

Let's look at some implications of this convergence. Dissatisfaction, pain, loss, and trauma are inherent in living. However, whether these result in anguish, torment, disability, or are transmuted and integrated into a life of growth and creativity depends on particular attentional capacities and their deployment. We are what we make of the cards we're dealt, but what we construct is contingent on a particular aspect of what we are dealt, namely provision of conditions for developing the ability to attend. To grow this capacity, to develop a mind of our own, we paradoxically need access to the mind of a "other." In Fonagy's view, the infant finds himself in the mind of the other, as in Winnicott the infant finds himself in the eyes and expression of the other. A self (or we might say a mind) is "born of illusion because mother and father believe that a self is there and call it into being by their own responsiveness" (Sanville, 1991). The ingredients necessary for the growth of mind privileged by these thinkers are a safe, protective and responsive environment in which the play of illusion and metaphor can develop (Schore, 2003). Another key ingredient, privileged more in Bion's account and in Freud's, is the capacity to tolerate frustration and endure emotional pain. “Standing” (affect regulation) and under-standing painful mental states and the self that experiences and suffers them (liberating insight) develop hand in hand.

Mindfulness

The equivalent among Buddhist meditators of the psychoanalytic idea of "thinking about" disturbing mental-emotional-somatic states is learning to "sit with" them. Whether or not one is motivated by bodhicitta, the aspiration for liberation, most contemporary Buddhist practitioners spend significant periods of time "sitting with" painful, confusing, conflictual or not-as-yet-represented affective experience.

In classical mindfulness meditation we cultivate bare attention to the moment to moment flux of our mental, emotional and somatic experience - thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, how these interact to produce all variety of states and how we pursue some states and are aversive to others. We take note of our reactions to the texture and rhythms of bare experience, as it is - as it arises and passes, how it bundles together into repetitive versions of "I," versions which usually include representations of "other" as well. Practitioners cultivate welcoming, non-judgmental awareness of how they constellate and maintain repetitive, affectively charged narratives featuring "me" and "mine" front and center, in positive and negative versions, and how they selectively "attach to" and identify with -- indeed construct -- these narratives, generating dissatisfaction and suffering, The "I" that is so constellated is seen into and is gradually shed, as a more fluid, less ensnared way of being in the world grows.

If reflective function implies the capacity to understand human behavior in terms of states of mind, then mindfulness practice is quite in accord. This practice, and the growing freedom to observe implicit in it is not just a mental affair; In her seminal 1960 paper British psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1987) described what she called the “concentration of the body,” a way of attending deeply to her bodily sensations while also listening to the content of the patient’s narrative. This was more helpful in generating capacities for symbolization than clever interpretations. From a neuropsychoanalytic perspective, Schore (2003) writes that “…the therapist’s ability to ... self-regulate … the stressful alterations in his/her bodily state evoked by the patient’s transferential communication” is key. Citing Freedman and Lavendar, Schore (p. 30) describes the analyst’s “’…reparative withdrawal,’ a self-regulating maneuver that allows continued access to a state in which a symbolizing process can take place…” It is the therapist’s awareness of his/her “…bodily signals and his/her capacity to auto-regulate the disruption in state … that literally determines whether the countertransference is destructive or constructive, ‘symbolizing’ or ‘desymbolizing.’” In the most troubling moments, willful attempts to change our state of mind by wriggling free from what is only seems to make things worse and even tightens the vise.

We don't "sit with it" in a vacuum., Meditating silently together, relationships with fellow practitioners, with the teacher, tradition and the practice itself -- these help us self-regulate as we explore more deeply. The ability develops in the doing, and it is simultaneously instrumental -- a way to reach an aim such as liberation from suffering -- beneficial in and of itself, irrespective of aim or content, and presentational, that is expressive of intrinsic meaning and value (Bobrow, 1997).

It is not just the technique of attention that is at play but how and to what ends it is used. "Noting" feelings in mindfulness meditation can be done in a mechanical, detached, even obsessional manner, without engaging them at all. To reap the harvest of our experience we have to suffer "properly." Not masochistically but by allowing [one of the meanings of suffering] in a simultaneously wholehearted and attentive way. This reflects an unconscious choice in Symington, an unconscious decision in Rangell, zich zu ubergebin or surrendering to the drift of the unconscious in Freud, and a turning toward truth or teshuvah in mystical Judaism.

From process let's move to bedrock. In classical Buddhism, life is examined through the dukkha, annica and annata, suffering, impermanence and no-self. "There is suffering" is the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths. Suffering is caused by attachment or clinging to misguided views of who one is and the way things are. Contemporary students of Buddhism frequently confound the term attachment, as meaning clinging to formulations [constructions] of "me" and "mine," with attachment as the life-giving process of connection so necessary for the growth of the very reflective capacities necessary for meditation practice and inquiry! One way to understand the different uses of the term is to think of the classical Buddhist use as referring to breakdown products and processes of not good-enough attachment and development [we might say that emotional experience becomes unprocessable trauma because of not good enough "othering"], in reaction to which we construct and maintain, often to our detriment, protective and obstructive structures (Bobrow 2002). It is these reactively generated structures of mind, entrenched, usually unconscious, often in conflict with one another, and sometimes destructive [and therefore the cause of real anguish and guilt], that are the object of Buddhist meditative practice, not the human need for living attachments, which lasts throughout life in evolving forms (Schore, 2003).

Likewise, some Buddhist teachers see therapists and analysts as maintaining and shoring up the "ego," considered the key factor of delusion and suffering. A confusion of tongues is also at play here. They are referring to reactively constructed or precociously developed and cathected mental structures, what Buddhists might call "ego-centered attachments,” not to developed ego capacities or functions which have no need for a self-conscious, rigid "I" in order to function with vigor and creativity.

In the classical Buddhist view too, then, we cannot escape suffering. Rather it is how we meet and engage with suffering, the attentional quality of the encounter, that is key. What contemporary developmental psychology calls rupture is inevitable – so the capacity for repair or transformation is essential. Whether we unwittingly create anguish for ourselves and others or find value and meaning, even transformation and insight, is contingent on how we approach suffering. "Suffering is inevitable, anguish is optional," is a saying that may seem to trivialize the agonies humans are subject to, but the idea is analogous to the understandings emerging from infant and neurobiological research (Schore, 2003). The capacity to bear affective experience, pleasurable and painful, is a prerequisite for, and a by-product of, understanding, and is front and center in contemporary Buddhism and psychoanalysis alike.

No-mind

There is a paradox at the heart of human experience. We must develop a "feeler" to feel, a "thinker" to think, a "dreamer" to dream -- in short, a mind with which to bear and attend fruitfully to the states of mind we encounter and become capable of learning from them. Yet, when this process is moving along well, there is no thinker, feeler or dreamer -- no mind -- apart from the living experience. The subject of mind, a mind of one's own, is critical, yet we only become awareof it when it doesn't work well. We could say that the subject is a background function whose concretization is a breakdown product. This is reflected in the quote by Jones, ".... I do not think that the mind really exists as an entity..." Winnicott [1949] writes of the tendency to localize the mind in the head or elsewhere and describes how the mental apparatus can become an end in itself, a mind object, when the reciprocal caregiver-infant mutuality goes awry and the mentalcapacities of the infant have to take over prematurely to ensure survival.

The mind that 'cannot be grasped' is, in Winnicott's words. not 'localized' in time or space. The meaning of the word sesshin [a Zen retreat] is to touch the mind, to perceive and convey the mind. In Zen mind is empty. Not vacuous but void of absolute or permanent material; a field of potentiality. Our conceptions about reality form a discursive veil that obscures it. Although the mind has no thing in it, it breathes, sits down, stands up, goes to sleep, shops, gets sick, laughs and weeps. When we look closely we can't find a static entity, we can't find an agent. If such is found, there has been a de-railment or, in Zen terms, we have fallen into ignorance or delusion.

A mind that is empty is, by virtue of this very quality, interconnected. Minds 'interare.' This is in accord with Fonagy's model and Bion's reformulation of Klein's ideas on projective identification to reflect an unconscious communicational field, function and motive (see Schore, 2003). The Buddhist image is the Jewel Net of Indra (Cleary, 1983). Each being, sentient or not, is a point in a vast net in which there are mirrors at each knot. Each point reflects and contains every other point of the web, not unlike the hologram. It is precisely because the self and the mind have no absolute substance that we are interconnected and multicentered selves. We cannot say "wrapping paper" without saying tree, branches, rain, sun, earth, lumberjack, storekeeper. This is because that is. The Buddha called this paticca samuppada, mutual causality, or dependent co-arising. To come alive is to realize this interpenetration. In realizing our own essential nature, we realize the nature of all things.

This field, the fundamental ground of Hua-Yen Buddhism, is described in lyrical detail in the Avatamsaka Sutra written about two thousand years ago doesn't function in the abstract. Analysts will recognize it in the unconscious emotional field. This field has deep roots in our neurobiology and so it puts human flesh on Indra’s existential net. The “formless field of benefaction” of Zen, has echoes in the contemporary interactive dyadic field of synchrony with its reciprocal, mutual regulation (Schore, 2003).

In Zen, emptiness and interdependence co-arise with intimacy. This is at once the mind essence, the aim of practice, and the way to its realization. Yet none of these distinctions are required for its presence. It characterizes the spontaneous and illuminating dialogues between Zen teacher and student,

Jizo asked Hogen, Where are you going?" Hogen replied, "I am wandering at

random." Jizo asked, "What do you think of wandering?" "I don't know," Hogen

replied. Jizo said, "Not-knowing is most intimate." At this Hogen awakened suddenly.

Freud's distinction between psychical and material reality set the stage for psychoanalysis, and remains central. But what intimacy did Hogen become suddenly aware of? Was it inner? Outer? Sacred? Profane? Empty? Full? Self? Other? Fantasy? Reality? From a Zen perspective we can say that it arose as a fertile field of empty interconnection where he found himself unsnared by any of these dualities. For purposes of discussion, we call it non-dualistic. Hogen's realization wasn't conceptual however, nor was it “mystical.” Yet he could have presented it very simply and with vivid particularity. Another Zen teacher said, "Morning to evening, I am always intimate with it." Preoccupation with clinging and "attachment," or with their resolution, the classical factors of suffering, are absent here.

When self-preoccupation and the small self-centeredness that congeals around it fall away, we can know directly the intersection and the identity of the personal and the sacred. No longer a container for our anxieties, a projection screen for unbearable aspects of self-experience, or even a facilitating environment, the "other" is none other than the self. Particularity is not sacrificed; things are vividly distinctive. Searching for something "outside," even meaning, ceases; the "aim" is closer than our own nose. Wallace Stevens (1972) captures this human mystery in his poem "Tea at the Palace of Hoon."

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The apparent paradox is that, only with “forgetting the self" [the reactive structures of mind whose narratives we identify with and mistake for who we are] can we come to ourselves and find intimacy with others. Observation, the bread and butter of classical mindfulness meditation and psychoanalytic exploration, gives way to non-dualistic immersion. Are we breathing or are we being breathed? When the actor, the action and that which is acted upon fall away, we may come alive to a reality referred to as "suchness" that is not conveyed adequately by the terms dualism, non-duality or any category.

If a patient or analyst is practicing mindfulness alongside psychotherapy, cultivating a wide, welcoming, non-judgmental, awareness of bodily states and how these interact with emotional experience, this can deepen, extend and energize what might otherwise be a dry, intellectual treatment. It can deepen, extend and “flesh out” the verbal associational capacities traditionally fostered in analysis. It is not only what this makes me think of - the associational chain - that is important, but the sound, look, smell and the feel of what it is that I am actually thinking, feeling and sensing. Many experiences have intrinsic meaning and transformational power outside the realms of meaning making, symbolization and insight - the unconscious made conscious.

Simple experiences such as breathing, entered into fully, can have remarkable impact. Winnicott describes a woman who came to an early experience where living is equivalent to breathing. Twenty years ago, before I read his Psyche-Soma paper, I had a similar experience with a patient [Bobrow, 1995] involving what we might think of as "being alone in the presence of the other" or sharing a kind of early "quiet alert" state. But why think of these as simply regressive, even if by this we mean a regression to dependence in the service of inter-dependence, a regression in the service of ego capacities, or in Bateson's terms, a falling back to leap. These experiences are novel forms of being alive that carry great weight and power, despite not being formally in the realm of time at all. The consolidation of distinctions between past and present, inner and outer, self and other -- are critical developmental achievements, yet they can also trip us up and constrain us. Winnicott's ideas on the intermediate area of experience help but don't quite capture the non-dual nature of experience that Zen practice facilitates and I believe psychoanalysis also potentially makes available.

There is something primordial about the experiencing of breathing and inhabiting one's body in an open and alive way. But why stop at breathing? We often pass over simple realities of living such as walking, cooking, eating, talking, touching, digging in the ground, and feeling, thinking and dreaming themselves, perhaps in our desire to understand deeper meanings. Can we harvest the ordinary activities of living, inner and outer, pleasant and painful, engaging them, in and of themselves, as expressive shapes of living mind itself? What if transformational capacities, based on deep, internalized understanding of mind and self, develop such that the inevitable ruptures and the negative affect states they engender are no longer perceived as obstacles to be resisted and no longer generate surplus suffering? Would there be a reduced need for repair? What if affect regulation were no longer such a primary preoccupation but rather an integrated background function? Could we open to deeper knowledge and appreciation of what our lives and death are?

A line from a pop song, "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," brings us toward the question of aim. If suffering, dukkha is inherent in life, life is also short, and impermanence, annica, is our lot. This is a growing realization and catalyst for growth or despair in both analysis and meditation practice. What obstructs our ability to allow the moments of living themselves, without added or associated "meaning," to present life itself to us, through and as us, and for us to have the presence of mind to be in attendance and encounter it, if not as a gift, then with curiosity?

Psychoanalytic explanations run the gamut; a partial list includes: excessive envy, developmental deficits, a psycho-neurological makeup unable to contain our capacity and appetite for experience, super-ego harshness, irrational guilt, unbearable anxiety and masochism. In Schore’s neuroanalytic developmental view (2003) defenses are strategies for dealing with unprocessable affect. Obstructions are as diverse as the individual character. But from the Buddhist point of view, these explanations, valid as they may be given the theoretical vantage points from which they emerge, are incomplete. The problem lies in our attentional approach to reality. From the Theravada perspective, we do not observe closely enough. From the Zen point of view, we have not entered into the experience wholeheadertedly, there is still an observer observing something external to it. We are like a cat running after our own tail, and so can't benefit from the awakening power of the moment, whatever its content. If each being, each moment, contains the whole universe, then it is a doorway to and a manifestation of the infinite, of ultimate reality. Let’s not mystify it, Zen experience is immanent and non-conceptual. We miss it because our phone line is busy.

To see a World in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wildflower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour. (Blake)

Blake and Buddhist intersubjectivity are in accord. We can say that each of us has an epistemological blind spot that co-exists, metaphorically speaking, with an "attention deficit."

In Zen, essential nature is unfathomable and must be "been." But how? It is vividly expressed through all sensory channels when “localized mind.” irritable searching after certainty, and constricting dualistic views are not obscuring. Beyond categories, mind operates as our senses, emotions, thoughts, pains and pleasures, the sun, the moon and the earth. How can that which cannot be measured, or discursively described come forth, without mediation? This is difficult for our minds to fathom. Why? It is our mind.

I suggest that the attentional approach that characterizes presence of mind is a receptive, non-judgmental equanimity that doesn't simply contain; it fathoms or knows, and recognizes, while retaining the potential to respond spontaneously and flexibly, in accord with circumstances. A neuropsychoanalytic analogue might be what Schore, citing Bach (2003, p.31) describes as “… a higher level integrative capacity that allows ‘free access to affective memories of alternate states, a kind of super-ordinate reflective awareness that permits multiple perspectives on the self.’” Permits the unitary self to fall away without disintegration, and perhaps, in Buddhist parlance, wake up. Mind comes forth in multitudinous and surprising ways when our feelers, sensors, our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind are open and alert in a multidirectional, non-vigilant way, acknowledging inner and outer, emotion and thought, past and present, reality and fantasy, without becoming snagged on or privileging either pole --that is, when such categories [and the theories of mind that underlie them] do not constrain perception.

Perhaps it is our presence, borne of freedom of mind, that we as analysts give our patients. This implies an absence, but I don't see it as depriving. It is a provision of something that can't be given. Our patients' responses, likewise, may be how they give of themselves, as we embody and bring the mind to life together, moment by moment.

Joseph Bobrow is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in practice in Studio City, CA. He is also a Zen Roshi and the founding director of Deep Streams Zen Institute. Joseph writes on the interplay of psychotherapy, Buddhism, and community in transforming trauma and generating a life worth living.

Joseph Bobrow is the author of several books including Zen and Psychotherapy: Partners in Liberation .

Click to see more of his books that are available through Amazon.com
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References

Alvarez, A. (1992) Live Company. London: Routledge.

Bobrow, J. (1997). Coming to life: the creative intercourse of psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. In Soul on the couch: spirituality, religion and morality in contemporary psychoanalysis. C. Spezzano and G. Garguilo (Eds.). Northvale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

(Fall 2002) Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and Winnicott’s Incommunicado Core. Fort Da, Journal of NCSPP, Division. 39 affiliate.

Cleary, T. (1983), Entry into the Inconceivable. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Fonagy, P. (2000). Attachment and Borderline personality disorder. J. American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 4, 1129-1146.

Jones, E. (1946). "A valedictory address." Int. J. Psycho-Anal. Vol. 27.

Kim, H.J. (1980), Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Milner, M. (1987). The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Fourty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Sanville, J. (1991) The Playground of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Schore, A. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. New York: Norton

Stephens, W., (1972). The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. ed. H. Stevens, New York; Vintage.

Winnicott, D. (1949). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma. In Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

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