Psychoanalysis and Eastern Philosophy: Buddhism

Instructor: Dr. Mario D’Amato

Description:

Buddhism began to be seriously studied in the West during the 19th century. While some thought that knowledge of Buddhism would most impact Western religion (e.g., Nietzsche’s reference to a possible “Euro-Buddhism” in On the Genealogy of Morality) or Western philosophy (e.g., Schopenhauer’s comparison of his own philosophy with “the Prajñā-pāramitā of the Buddhists” in The World as Will and Representation), the case can be made that Buddhism’s greatest impact in the West has been on forms of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis. In this course we will study the engagement of psychoanalysis with Buddhism. We will especially attend to psychoanalytic works that address Buddhism, whether directly or indirectly. But we will also examine materials from Buddhist discourse, to arrive at our own interpretations of the psychoanalytic interpretations of Buddhism. In short, we will engage in the dialectic between psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in the hopes of pushing it further.

Schedule:

Saturdays November 4, 11, 18, 25 at 11am New York time.

Format:

GCAS Zoom Platform — Live and Interactive seminar. Participants will have access to the reading materials and the course forum for exchanging research findings.

Readings:

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.

Alexander, Franz. “Buddhistic Training as an Artificial Catatonia.” The Psychoanalytic Review vol. 18.2 (Apr 1931): 129-145.

Epstein, Mark. “Beyond the Oceanic Feeling: Psychoanalytic Study of Buddhist Meditation.” The

International Review of Psycho-Analysis vol. 17 (1990): 159-166.

Watson, Alex. “Who Am I? The Self/Subject According to Psychoanalytic Theory.” SAGE Open (Jul-Sep 2014): 1-6.

D’Amato, Mario. “Ālayavijñāna.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Stewart

Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. Hoboken: Wiley, 2021.

Waldron, William. “Varieties of Unconscious Conception.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d.

Griffiths, Paul. “Concentration or Insight: The Problematic of Theravāda Buddhist Meditation-Theory.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion vol. 49.4 (Dec 1981): 605-624.

Epstein, Mark. “On the Neglect of Evenly Suspended Attention.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology vol. 16.2 (1984): 193-205.

Bion, Wilfred. “Notes on Memory and Desire.” In Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision, edited by Joseph Aguayo and Barnet Malin, 136-138. London: Karnac, 2013.