Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in
Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism, by Loy, David
Reviewed by Padmasiri De Silva
Asian Philosophy
Vol.8 No.3
Nov 1998
p.215
COPYRIGHT 1998 Journals Oxford Ltd. (UK)
This work brings together the three traditions of psychoanalysis,
existentialism and Buddhism, as distinct domains of discourse. Five
chapters deal with specific issues common to these traditions and
their relevance to contemporary issues. The first chapter, entitled
"The Nonduality of Life and Death", explores our concerns about the
"fear of death". Loy says that our attempts to repress the fear of
death returns in the form of a compulsion to immortalise ourselves
in symbolic forms. The Buddhist perspective in this work is mainly
drawn from the later Mahayana Buddhist traditions, specially the Zen
tradition: "The Buddhist approach to this issue is presented mainly
by explicating what the 12th-century Zen master Dogen wrote about
the dualism about life-and-death. However, from the Buddhist
perspective, our primary repression is not death-terror but another
fear even more fundamental: the suspicion that `I' am not real"
(xii). The second chapter makes a critical appraisal of the thought
of Heidegger, specially his attempt to objectify time. The third
chapter dealing with nature of human suffering and pain is basically
a detailed presentation of the Buddhist perspective in terms of the
philosophy of Nagarjuna and the Hua-yen analogy of Indra's net.
Chapter four involves a very good presentation of Nietzche's thought
in relation to the themes of the book and some criticism from a
Buddhist perspective.
Two thematic strands run through this work: one is the problem of
death and life in the three traditions of psychotherapy,
existentialism and Buddhism; the second is what Loy refers to as the
sense of lack and transcendence.
Loy acknowledges that in spite of some of the limitations of
Freudian psychoanalysis, Freud's seminal contribution was that he
articulated and conceptualised the notion of "repression". Freud, in
one of his graphic metaphors, compared the repressed mental wish to
a guest who is not allowed into the drawing room. The tendency to
symptom-formation is described as the return of the repressed. The
therapeutic process is an attempt to break through the alienation of
the consciousness from some of its contents (Loy, pp. 6-13). One of
the central contentions of this work is that Freud focused only on
the repression of the sexual instinct, but not repression of
death-denial or the non-recognition of the spell of the ego. Freud
himself recognised the instinct of sexuality, ego instinct and death
instinct. But Loy contends that the Freudian analysis of repression
did not deal with repression of death-denial and the repression of
the egoistic propensities in humans. Citing the writings of Ernest
Becker, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein and Norman Brown, Loy emphasises
the point that a great deal of our energy is spent on death denial.
The built-in anxiety within us which is clearly brought out by a
number of existentialist thinkers, the craving for immortality,
Being as "Care" in the work of Heidegger, and the concept of lack,
as developed in this work, all point towards the spell of the ego.
While Loy refers to all the main Buddhist traditions, he draws
mainly from the later Buddhist traditions. He finds the Buddhist
analysis going beyond Freud and making an honest encounter with the
nature of the ego, and the vacuousness and the lack generated by the
attachment to the ego. These themes are presented with a great deal
of clarity and precision. In the author's words, "our primary
repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns
to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us
individually and collectively. My critique shifts from the terror of
future annihilation to the anguish of a groundlessness experienced
now "(p. 51). He also says that this groundlessness emerges as a
"growing feeling of lack". At this point emerges a very refreshing
insight that this feeling of groundlessness, the feeling of lack,
the fear of death and the desire for immortality are all
"symptomatic of our vague intuition that the ego-self is not a hard
core ... the axis of a web spun to hide the void" (p. 51). The
chapter entitled "The Pain of Being Human", spells out the Buddhist
perspective in detail. This pervading perspective is expanded to
explore the vagaries of social behaviour and the collective
unconscious, in chapter 5, where he says that the secularity of
modern life manifests four historically conditioned forms of
delusions, of the sense of lack at a collective level: the desire
for fame, the love of romantic love, the money complex, and the
spell of technology.
The first five chapters flesh out the thematic trust summarised
above, while the concluding section deals with different
perspectives of transcendence from this sense of lack. Contrasting
and converging philosophical and cultural perspectives are brought
from Japan, China and India. In a more speculative tone he says that
the West has opted for the focus on individuation, East Asia for the
fusion of assimilation to the group, while India developed the
different possibilities for religious salvation, and in a concluding
paragraph he suggests a more integral and a new cultural paradigm.
This paradigm is based on the metaphor of Indra's net, where
transcendence implies "interpenetration of all phenomena".
The focus on the three traditions of Buddhism, psychoanalysis and
existentialism had a great attraction for me, as this work throws
fresh light on the comparative study of these same traditions, which
was the subject matter of my own earlier work, Tangles and Webs [1].
In spite of my favourable impressions of Loy's analysis, in the
light of my own book, Buddhist and Freudian Psychology [2], I feel
that Sigmund Freud deserves greater recognition for his work, for
going beyond the libido theory, to the recognition of the ego
instinct, as well as the complexities of aggression, repetition,
compulsion, masochism, the ambivalence of love and hate and the
desire for death discussed in his work, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. The early Buddhist conception of the three forms of
craving, craving for sensual pleasures (kama tanha), craving for
egoistic pursuits (bhava tanha) and the craving for
self-annihilation (vibhava tanha) and their similarities and
differences to the libido, ego instinct and death instinct have been
explored in detail in my work. Erich Fromm emphasises that Freud's
paper on Narcissism remained a great contribution; if it had stood
independently of the libido theory, it would have broken new ground.
Freud's analysis of the ego was undoubtedly in a conceptual tangle:
the ego was a drive, it was a seat of order and control, it
represented reality, it was the basis of character and it was yet a
"precipitate of object losses". Freud finds that this deeply
overburdened ego is rooted in the id and yet it needs to be
controlled. On the one hand, we get the idea of the robust ego that
has powers of coping, and on the other hand we have the negative
idea of being egotistical (having self-interest in the bad sense).
The latter strain in Freud was very much influenced by Schopenhauer.
Freud in fact says that due to the similarities he found between his
thinking and that of Schopenhauer, he "refrained from reading
Schopenhauer". Thus Freud's attempt to understand the non-sexual
components of human behaviour, those of egoism, aggression and self-
annihilation point towards a very creative attempt to interpret his
clinical material. Unfortunately, he did not make good progress as
he was obstructed by the spell of his early libido theory, lack of
conceptual clarity, and the dominating hydraulic metaphors he took
from the physical sciences of the time. He was undoubtedly a pioneer
of an uncharted land and like the work of many pioneers, his
achievement is a job half done.
Of course, due credit has to be given to Loy's thesis that though
the phenomenon of death was a constant source of anxiety for Freud,
Freud had pushed aside the issue about the repression of death. In
fact, Freud has a beautiful essay on Transience, where he seems to
be absorbed in the experience with joy and tranquillity. Even if
this is Buddhist equanimity rather than a Freudian defence
mechanism, I agree with Loy that Freud, the great explorer of the
unconscious, did repress his own thoughts about the possibility of
death.
Also, Fromm feels that one of Freud's papers written towards the end
of his life, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, is one of his
greatest insights. In this paper, Freud remarks that when the
patient has completed analysis and leaves the analyst to go home,
for a normal routine life--then and only then "the patient qualified
himself to be an analyst", as the great journey of self-exploration
has just begun. These are insights which are very significant from a
Buddhist perspective. While there are many limitations in Freud (and
I have become more critical of Freud during recent years), in spite
of his neglect of the repression of death, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle and his paper on Narcissism need greater recognition from
a Buddhist perspective. There is a great deal of material on the
Buddhist critique of eternalism but the Buddhist critique of
annihiliationism needs to be explored and understood. Freud's death
instinct and the Buddhist concept of the craving for annihilation
raise puzzling paradoxes [3]. How is it that a person who even
clings to a blade of grass to save his life in some moment of
desperation decides to end his life? Both Freud and the Buddha have
illuminating insights concerning this puzzle.
Loy makes a good analysis of the existentialism of Heidegger, as
well as the philosophical insights of Nietzsche. Schopenhauer, an
important philosopher, who promoted the cross fertilisation of ideas
East and West, perhaps need a kind of recognition that he deserves.
In the final analysis, Buddhism is not either a mere system of
philosophical thought like existentialism or a pure system of
therapy like psychoanalysis. Buddhism has a strong philosophical
component, as well as a therapeutic dimension. What makes Buddhism
different from both existentialism and psychoanalysis is that it is
a path to liberation from the cycle of births. This point generates
important differences between Buddhism and Freud, as well as
existentialism, and adds a new dimension to this comparative study.
This point is not sufficiently thrown into relief in Loy's treatment
of the comparative study.
Apart from these few critical points, Loy has presented a coherent
and integrated thesis regarding lack and transcendence in three
philosophical traditions. He has also explored a variety of
philosophies, East and West and presents a very impressive knowledge
of these philosophies. In terms of breadth, the wide area the book
covers, and depth, the intensive insights it generates, this work
certainly deserves the attention of contemporary philosophers, in
East and West alike.
NOTES
[1] DE SILVA, PADMASIRI (1992) Tangles and Webs; Comparative Studies
in Existentialism, Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, 3rd edn (Singapore,
Singapore Buddhist Meditation Centre).
[2] DE SILVA, PADMASIRI (1992) Buddhist and Freudian Psychology, 3rd
edn (Singapore, National University of Singapore Press).
[3] DE SILVA, PADMASIRI (1996) Suicide and emotional ambivalence,
in: F. HOFFMAN & M. DEEGALLE (Eds) The Philosophy of Pali Buddhism,
Curzon Studies in Asian Philosophy (London, Curzon Press).
PADMASIRI DE SILVA
Monash University, Australia