I was just struck by a recent book about the “real” relationship in psychotherapy. When people use the term “real” to describe the psychotherapeutic relationship, they are usually contrasting it with the “transference” relationship. Simply put, the transference relationship is the template based on past experience that the patient applies to the current experience with a therapist; the countertransference is essentially the same thing in the mind of the therapist. There’s nothing mysterious about transference. It’s how we learn. The way we think about parents or siblings enters into all our relationships. The “real” relationship is thought of as contrasting with the transference relationship, and the term “real” contains, I think, a subtle putdown of the psychoanalytic focus on transference. What, after all, is the “real” relationship? Real according to who? To an outside observer, perhaps. But, there’s the rub: in psychotherapy there is no outside observer, there is no objective perspective. If there is such a thing as the real relationship, it is an amalgam composed of two people’s perceptions, fantasies, fears, hopes, distortions, and transferences, etc. It is something that lives in the mind of each participant and in the interpsychic field between them. To privilege any point of view as “real” inevitably destroys at least half the richness of the relationship if not more.

From a Buddhist point of view, there is possible an even deeper deconstruction of the idea of the “real” relationship. Buddhism distinguishes between absolute and relative reality. The absolute perspective questions any and all of our ideas as being essentially illusions based on our craving for something “real” to hold on to, including most importantly the idea that we have a self. On the other hand, the relative perspective acknowledges deeply that we have to get through our day to day struggles, and that some of these illusions are very practical. “After the ecstasy, the laundry,
as Jack Kornfeld put it. From an absolute perspective, one where we recognize that even our notion of having a separate self is illusory, one where the distinction between self and other is very hazy, the question of what is the nature of relationship itself becomes very hard to grasp, if not ungraspable. What is the nature of a relationship between two illusory selves? Mindfulness and meditation clear a path to understanding this question. This is one of the main reasons why mindfulness and meditation can be so useful in psychotherapy.

I will be presenting a seminar for the Community Institute for Psychotherapy (CIP) on May 21, 2011 in San Rafael, CA along with Arlene Bermann, LCSW and Chris Fortin, MFT and Zen priest. The title is “ancient Zen pond, shrink jumps in … plop! Shame, Vulnerability and Beginner’s Mind.”

In meditation practice we learn, for example, to be aware of our breath. We learn that when our mind wanders, when thoughts appear, we take note of those thoughts without becoming involved with them, and we return our awareness to our breath. Thinking is part of our nature, the wandering mind is part of our nature, so we haven’t failed in our meditation. In a sense, the most important lesson of meditation practice takes place in the return to our awareness of the breath. I heard a Zen teacher say that if we maintained perfect unwavering focus on the breath, it would be little more than a circus trick. We bow to each thought of our wandering mind, we bow because we have no way of knowing the magnitude of the mystery each thought contains. We bow and return to our awareness of the breath.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we learn to let go of our tendency to be immersed in discursive, logical, controlled thought. We learn to let go of shame and reveal in our free association where our wandering mind is going. Each association may seem, on the face of it, trivial or meaningless or embarrassing or confused, but we nevertheless bring it to conscious awareness and speak it. This becomes our door to the unconscious, to our connection to a realm larger than our limited conscious self.

These two practices can inform and reinforce each other. In meditation and in therapy, we learn to be sensitive to every fluctuation in our awareness, to not become lost in the pull of the storm of our thoughts, to honor our thoughts and remain centered as we learn who we are. I recommend that my psychoanalytic clients practice meditation as a tool to increase the freedom of their associations in therapy. I would also recommend that meditators have a taste of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a way of opening to the mystery of thoughts we bow to as we return to the breath.