Along with all devotees of Adi Da in the Lake County parish community, Bill was taking a four-week course designed to examine the defining incidents and experiences of our early life (with our parents, siblings, and others) that might provide important clues as to our characteristic way of relating to people now, in our adult years. Adi Da had spent years making it abundantly clear that each of us tends to endlessly repeat an almost ritual pattern of interaction with one another that unconsciously but repetitively duplicates our early emotional reactions to life. His purpose in having us undertake this examination was simple but profound: our unconscious emotional patterning is the principal reason for not only our chronic failure to be happy and love other beings, but also for our self-defeating failure to consistently recognize, receive, and respond to his own Spiritual Transmission of Love-Bliss-Brightness This was no small matter since recognizing and receiving the Master’s Transmission is the eternal core and essence of spiritual practice in his church of Adidam.

Having observed that too many of my fellow devotees were uninstructed in human psychology and often had no clear idea even of what a neurotic pattern looks like, I had suggested that those taking the course (which, it turned out I had written while working for Adidam’s Education Department a couple of years earlier) augment their study of Adi Da’s own seminal teachings on the matter by reading an accessible psychology book from his recommended reading list, The Basket Of Tolerance. The list was fairly long so I picked out about five or six books that I thought people would find most useful. Bill had chosen a personal favorite of mine that also happened to be the most sophisticated of the lot, Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s Narcissism and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Disroders. And so, as dawn broke over Lake County that morning,  Bill met his new day by reading the first thirty pages or so of the great Jungian analyst’s book.  It affected him as if he had seen Medusa. The shock of self-recognition that came through the author’s descriptions of the so-called narcissistic character cisorder had left him almost literally immobile for a half an hour. When I answered the phone, the first thing he told me was that it took him several minutes to actually be able to walk the four feet from his chair to the telephone to me to tell me of his plight.
* * *
Emotional maturity rarely, if ever, comes easy. To truly grow up most of us must pass through a profoundly difficult ordeal of self-knowledge filled with crises large and small. It is immensely humbling to see how our early life fears, traumas, misunderstandings, confusions, evasions, and repressions have long controlled our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Even so, great psychology must do more than expose the roots of our precious self-conceits. It must also lift us beyond ego-bondage. Heightened sensitivity to the why’s and wherefores of our egoic ways and wiles becomes truly consequential only when we are moved beyond our neurotic dramas of self-confining, other negating reactions of self-protection into both a vital and a psychic connection to our fellow human beings, the natural world and, most importantly, the Joyous Spiritual Reality that Encompasses everything. For when all is said and done—and with due respect to the hard core humanists among us—only the Living Spirit can truly soften the armored confusion that characterizes a typical human lifetime. This is why the great English psychiatrist E. Graham Howe advised us “any psychological system must be unsatisfactory and misleading, both in theory and practice, until it does admit our essentially spiritual nature.”

By such a measure, the late Nathan Schwartz-Salant gave us great psychology. Through five seminal books—Neurosis and Character Transformation, The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing, The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self, The Black Nightgown: The Fusional Complex and the Unlived Life, and The Order-Disorder Paradox—along with his well-curated anthology, Jung on Alchemy, and numerous clinical papers in the respected Chiron Clinical series that he edited, Schwartz-Salant established himself as perhaps the most daring and depthful analytical psychologist of the past few decades. What makes Schwartz-Salant’s work so unique is his ability to both walk and widen the path of archetypal and alchemical wisdom pioneered by C. G. Jung himself. In so doing, he integrated body, psyche, and spirit in a manner that has broadened the scope of contemporary clinical practice and issued an implicit challenge to the entire profession.

As we see in their titles, Schwartz-Salant’s first books—Neurosis and Character Transformation: The Psychology of Narcissistic Character Discorders and The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing—are dedicated to the two most discussed (and difficult to treat) so-called “character disorders” of our time. Both are masterpieces of understanding and vision that completely redefine their subjects, opening up new pathways of understanding and healing.  A third book, The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self, is so unique as to be unclassifiable. Advertising itself as “a thought-provoking and inspiring text for anyone who wishes to engage the mystery of growth within themselves and within their relationships”, it is in fact a kind of Ariadne’s thread offered to committed partners who would explore devilishly difficult realms of their personal and interpersonal lives. Schwartz-Salant takes us into the nether zones of the psyche wherein even relatively normal people sometimes experience near psychotic confusions of daunting intensity. That can require a Dantesque ordeal for those who dare the journey. But the reward can be the liberation of extraordinary powers of intimacy and healing between true lovers.
Accompanied by my friend Eliot Hurwitz, in the fall of 2008 I interviewed Nathan Schwartz-Salant at his office just a block or two from Princeton University, in New Jersey.  I remember the occasion vividly. Although built of brick, the room in which we met—and where Schwartz-Salant saw clients—had a light, airy quality created by skylights, pleasingly underpopulated bookshelves, and hanging plants. Schwartz-Salant himself had a grounded and relaxed yet expansive quality that radiated openness and goodwill. I found myself thinking that if ever were to go into psychotherapy I would want it to be with a person like him. As he tells us in the accompanying interview—a story which he put into print in his final book, The Order-Disorder Pareadox, Nathan Schwartz-Salant was yet another a psycho-spiritual conversion story that made the psychedelic 1960s one of the most extraordinary cultural moments in American history. Het was in the midst of filling the rigorous doctoral program in Engineering Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley when suddenly “the quest seemed meaningless” and “the bottom had suddenly dropped out of my existence”.

It was early fall, 1964. At my apartment in Berkeley, California, the day after this awareness, and still stunned by it, I happened to listen to KPFA, a public radio program, and heard Harvard professor Timothy Leary speaking about the wonders of a new hallucinogenic drug, LSD. By coincidence, within twenty-four hours a friend arrived at my apartment with the drug, which he had just brought back from the East Coast. Several days later, alone, I took 100 micrograms of LSD, and the result was a vision of Light that was life changing.
I use the term “Light,” although it was not an ordinary light. My readings, years later, led me to notions of the “White Light” or “Invisible Light,” which is akin to what I saw. Beauty, and the impossibility of anything being that beautiful, was perhaps the central impression, as was a sense of the Light being infinite. It was as though I was transported outward toward the Light, and then, after I became frightened as I felt sucked away into it, I managed to shake free of the experience and reenter space and time. Now I would say that my soul went out to this infinite dimension, and then returned to space-time existence.
The shock of reentry was extreme. Today I can still feel a mild version of the traumatic affect, and I am often aware of—but no longer so intensely apprehend—the presence of the Light. But that Other dimension remains a main orientation in my life.
The Light experience led to a radical transformation, something known as a “rebirth”.

To most people, Jung of course is the man who put the spirit back into Western psychotherapy. While he treated esoteric spirituality respectfully, however, it would be more accurate to say that Jung put the psyche back in psychology. In his writings and clinical work the individual’s psyche is seen as much more than the self-enclosed box of repressed sexual longings and aggressive impulses so brilliantly charted by one onetime mentor, Sigmund Freud. Of course Jung, like Freud found an abundance of those intensities in his patients, as well. But he discovered that the psyche is also encompasses much more. Indeed, the psyche is the indispensable bridge to the powerfully vivifying forces and subtle resonances that herald the presence of the Living Spirit. In Jung’s work, the mind escapes its narrow, private prison of fleshy, mechanical mortality and becomes animated by forceful archetypes as contemporary as they are ancient. Jung’s theory of the archetypes presents us with a psyche that speaks through the characters of ancient personae acting out patterned narratives that may nevertheless become the vehicles of Divine Power.

Jungians pay a price for violating the yet dominant materialism of our day. Up against the reductive realism of Freud’s instinct theory, much less the garden variety social psychologies that serve mostly benign but limited social purposes, it is hard for Jungians to shake off the unfair impression that they indulge in a kind of woolly minded mysticism incapable of meeting the grit and grind of our perpetually frustrated, endlessly desiring mental-emotional conflicts. Part of the reason for this lies in the seductive power of Jungian terminology. “Animus” and “anima,” “persona,” “Self,” “collective unconscious” “syzygy,” and the like are highly symbolic notions that can all too readily can be replayed like a deck of Tarot cards whose meanings may appear to wear out from overuse. But Schwartz-Salant’s writings never give us that impression. Although he is clearly a master of the entire Jungian corpus, ranging from not only the Swiss sage himself but also including wings as diverse as Michael Fordham’s British semi-Freudian school and James Hillman’s literary polytheism (named Archetypal Psychology), his employment of Jung’s basic ideas always feels freshly minted out of his clinical encounters, rather than the reverse. Likewise, although Schwartz-Salant, like all Jungians, readily drew from the vast well of human mythology from which Jung himself gathered so much inspiration that it became his distinct trademark, he always undertook his own historical research into and parsing of even the most well-known myths. Thus, even familiar mythic archetypes were reborn afresh out of the long, protracted, and often exceedingly difficult ordeal of self-knowledge shared by client and analyst. Moreover, Schwartz-Salant had an special affinity for Jung’s alchemical writings and through them he daringly integrated what to many will seem the esoteric phenomena that unfold in the interactive field between patient and analyst with psychoanalytic understanding.

But Schwartz-Salant was not closeted with the schools spawned by C. G. Jung.  He drew as easily from Freudian psychoanalysis—both in its classic form, the Kleinian/object relations school, its Lacanian rereading, the Kohutian self-psychology revision (for which he appears to have a special affinity), and other variants—especially those that stay close to our felt, bodily experience—as he did from the academically snubbed “subtle body” esotericism of a G.R.S. Mead. But none of this was mere intellectual syncretism. Schwartz-Salant absorbed these resources from the inside out, as it were.

In other words, he was a natural alchemist who looked to integrate body, psyche, and spirit. His working laboratory was the interactive field between himself and his clients. Indeed, Schwartz-Salant’s inspired and not infrequently daring employment of the tricky, mercurial, analyst-implicating data derived from the so-called “counter-transference” (the analyst’s unconscious reactions to his patient) is one of his most distinctive contributions to analytic psychology. We will get to this in a follow-up piece when I discuss his pioneering extension of the Kleinian notion of “projective identification” into the realm of the psychic field between patient and analyst. That is the arena in which the analyst’s subconscious reactions to his patient, rather than being a mere negative, finds a genuinely creative use. But first a few words about how I, a man who has never been in analysis, came to admire Schwartz-Salant’s writings. This requires an introduction to the topic of his still seminal book on the “narcissistic character disorder”, Narcissism and Character Transformation.

THE NARCISSISTIC CHARACTER DISORDER

I sometimes joke to friends that studying social psychology during my abbreviated college years did more to prepare me for my many years in a spiritual community than anything I may have previously learned about religion and spirituality per se.  While not entirely true (let’s give my crazy mom, good schools, and my Pisces sun and Mars moon their due), learning how to navigate the challenge of social relationships, or social space, is a critical part of everyone’s required growth. Social space can become especially hard to bear in those testing moments when talented narcissists whom you have no option but to engage cloak their games of domination in “spiritual” camouflage. That’s when the religious imperative of humility and acceptance runs smack into the human imperative of drawing the line on bullshit. Neither is ever an easy task on its own. Taken together they are more than twice as hard.

By virtue of having spent almost my entire adult years practicing in the exceedingly good company of the Enlightened Adept Avatar Adi Da Samraj, the Living Spirit has become the obvious and pervasive context of my life. Because the Avatar’s Spiritual Transmission was so generously, unstintingly given to all His devotees, in our community everyone was deeply, bodily infused by His Blessing Presence. And because my spiritual practice unfolds in the potent social space of an enduring community setting—traditionally viewed as an irreducible necessity if one’s spiritual life is to be truly consequential (and certainly one of Adi Da’s most basic requirements of his own devotees)—I have had ample opportunity to observe in myself and others the manner in which our unconscious patterns and motivations all too easily traduce the Spirit’s inherent imperative to surrender the ego in love and service to God.  (All too easily? Hell, let’s be honest here: All but constantly!)  This is most commonly seen in the psychic inflation to which any one of us can easily succumb when our unconscious fears and hidden ambitions get conflated with the Spirit’s own gifts. 

During the years of his most active and playful engagement with devotees,  Adi Da was a genius at generating precisely the conditions in his community that would laminate this tendency—most often by giving authority and power to individuals who possessed the testing combination of sensitivity to his Spiritual Presence, a confusing, hard-to-handle admixture of heart-intelligence and egoic cunning, and a distinct need to dominate others. The Adept’s payoff for this arrangement could hardly be bettered. The individual in authority would inevitably be brought low by his or her own hubris while everyone else would have to deal with the revelation of their own characteristic oedipal pattern of reaction to a threatening and more-than-occasionally capricious authority figure. Whether one aggressively reacted to or passively accepted such an individual’s provocations, in the setting of our spiritually-charged community everyone’s game eventually became obvious. The more skilled the individual in authority, however, the more difficult it would be to bring about the turn of events in which he or she too would have to become responsible for his or her own behavior.

It was in relation to one such person—an undeniably talented, frequently inspirational member of our community who Adi Da had invested with leadership responsibilities—that I found Schwartz-Salant’s descriptions in Narcissism and Character Transformation especially valuable. This man’s role and status in Adidam was for several years roughly equivalent to that of head monk in a Buddhist Zendo. As such, he rightly possessed a fair degree of disciplinary authority that could not help but offend those upon whom it was exercised. Head monks are of necessity the instruments of the demands that the Spiritual Master places on his devotees.  As such they are deservedly protected by the one they serve from the retaliation of their fellow practitioners.  That protection becomes even more necessary in relation to a Spiritual genius like Avatar Adi Da, who in his early teaching years routinely engaged in unconventional “crazy wisdom” behavior that, in fulfillment of a promise he made in the epilogue to his autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, deliberately offended and confounded virtually every one of his devotee’s expectations, preferences,  false dualities, and unconscious seeking. It is no easy matter to hold the first chair in a choir singing such a Master’s changing Songs, and our head monk’s job of faithfully executing Adi Da’s at least sometimes apparently contradictory instructions guaranteed him no small measure of bruised egos. Fair enough. But over the years this particular individual had also engaged in enough high-handed, nakedly self-aggrandizing behavior—including the use of heavy handed tactics to disarm or distance potential critics—that the for-him unwelcome moment of his own reckoning had finally arrived. Understandably, amongst his erstwhile peers there was a fair amount of trepidation about actually forcing the event.

Before continuing with our special case here, a cautionary word is in order. It has been said that psychological terminology is all too commonly employed as a “vocabulary of denigration”. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” we are told in Ecclesiastes.We all do well, therefore, to show humility when using the profession’s often highly loaded technical terms. Given that all human beings—short of the egoless Enlightened—are obliged to overcome their own persistent self-conceits, it is best to check the mirror before uttering the word “narcissist”.

Nevertheless, there are some individuals who raise the common, even universal liability of ordinary human narcissism to a high art. I am talking about those often talented but decidedly ruthless people whose self-regarding power and control needs are so thoroughly unmediated and unmitigated by either critical self-reflection or community feeling that they pursue their selfish ends with a relentlessness that not even passing years seems to bend or diminish. Of course, when such tendencies become absolute we talk of “sociopaths”—that small, often charming, but ultimately lethal cohort whose own capacity for empathic feeling is simply non-existent. I am not addressing that type of individual, who we all by know have come to know through the movies as the smiling “friend”  who sits unperturbed on the shoreline sipping a mai-tai while their trusting companion drowns.). The determined narcissist certainly suffers a large deficit of empathy, there is no doubt about that. But they lack the naked sociopath’s willingness to inflict harm, or even kill, without conscience.  My subject here, then, are those of us afflicted with what psychoanalytic ego psychology terms the “narcissistic character order”.  A few paragraphs from Lawrence Joseph’s useful survey of the character disorders in his book Character and Self-Experience provides us with a basic introduction.

Narcissistic characters have traditionally been understood as persons who are overtly superior but covertly inferior. They have been described as smug, conceited, pompous, grandiose, condescending, contemptuous, exhibitionistic, and entitled. Narcissists seem to need to be the center of attention, evoking others’ admiration if not envy. The thinking of narcissistic characters tend to be self-centered, focused on fantasies of greatness and triumph. Egocentric in their thinking and unable to see the world from another’s point of view, they develop a degree of narrow-mindedness, so that there is a difficulty in appreciating emotional conflicts from multiple perspectives. Their egocentrism makes their conduct somewhat stimulus-bound and overly reactive to the demand characteristics of a situation, so that their behavior may at time be impulsive and show poor judgment. When they are feeling good, their affective expression tends to be animated, buoyant, and happy, as though they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. They seem “full of themselves”—indulged and sated individuals without a care in the world. Yet narcissists are quick to take offense, easily feel slighted, and as a consequence are easily angered. Narcissists are not at all shy in expressing their anger. They can be cutting, sarcastic, and clever in putting someone down. They can also be wrathful and demanding, unafraid of making a scene if need be. In situations in which narcissists feel it would be tactless and petty to waste their time being openly angry, they can be haughty, cold, and impersonal.
. . .
Others tend to experience the narcissist as off-putting and intimidating in the long run. The narcissist attempts to overpower the other with awe for the narcissist’s greatness. Initially, the other may be seduced by the narcissist’s charisma. The other feels entertained, flattered, and fortunate to have the good luck of being in the narcissist’s good graces. . . .
Over time, though, it gradually becomes apparent that the narcissist is unsharing and that a relationship with a narcissist is not reciprocal. It begins to seem that the narcissist derives some sadistic glee in being a “have” while others remain “have nots.” The narcissist’s gloating over being a competitive winner evokes envy and resentment in others.
. . .
If denial, overcompensation, overvaluation, and illusory wish fulfillment are universal defenses against narcissistic injury, then . . . [w]hat is unique to the narcissistic character is to deploy an overarching strategy of defense in which one remains a center of attention and never relinquishes center stage. . . . Like the child’s game “king of the hill,” the narcissistic character believes that if one can only stand one’s ground at the top of the hill, a place where there is only room for one, then all of life’s problems will be solved.
. . .
The core identity theme of the narcissistic character appears to be to establish oneself as a totally unique, completely special, unusually talented, and exceptional person who by virtue of these superior qualities is automatically entitled to an exalted position in life to which all others should graciously defer and pay homage. Challenges to this identity theme provoke anger, hostility, hatred, vindictiveness, and contempt as a means of elevating the self by devaluing the other. Lack of support for the identity theme results in feelings of boredom, emptiness, and depletion. Dependency, neediness, vulnerability, and envy of others are construed as incompatible with the identity theme and are aspects of the self which are therefore repudiated.
The narcissistic character is shocked, hurt, angered, and disbelieving to discover that others view her as an arrogant, cold, and hostile person. No matter how often the narcissist receives such negative feedback, it is perfunctorily dismissed as a product of the others’ envy of her special attributes and possessions. Due to the narcissist’s egocentric world view, there is no room for multiple perspectives of equal validity but only for one absolute truth, in comparison to which all other viewpoints are indubitably erroneous.
Imagining that others would be happy and smugly self-satisfied to see the narcissist downed and defeated leads to a private sense of suspiciousness and mistrust. The narcissist would rather die than give others the pleasure of her defeat. Thus, any genuine sense of suffering or unhappiness must be kept to oneself. . .
In general, the narcissistic character is privately mistrustful and suspicious toward others.
.  . .
Unconsciously, narcissistic characters feel inferior and inadequate, viewing the self as a “have not” in a world of “haves.” Unconsciously, narcissists feel deprived, neglected, and ignored in a world in which others have captured the center of attention.
. . .
Narcissistic characters feel that no one finds them attractive and, feeling starved for recognition, warmth, nurturance, and relatedness, they begin to feel rapacious and greedy. Narcissists feel that the sense of neglect which they experience must be due to their lowly status. They feel like homeless beggars, paupers, or orphans—individuals who are the lowest of the low without a place to belong. At bottom, narcissists feel utterly alone—cut adrift to fend for themselves in a cold, impersonal, competitive, and cruel world. Frightened of being lost and never found, narcissists feel vulnerable and weak.
. . .
The narcissist, believing that no warm nurturing home will ever provide a haven in a heartless world for waiflike persons, hardens and toughens the self for survival in a ruthlessly competitive world populated by opportunistic others. . . .
Despite this attempt at emotional hardening, the narcissist is quite envious of others’ success and would like to spoil and devalue who others are and what others possess. What is especially envied is the moral integrity others possess, for it is just such inner substance that the narcissist seems to lack.

While wonderful clear, vivid, and accurate, this description needs to be deepened. Although Josephs ably identifies key qualities and compensatory motivations that animate the dedicated narcissists among us, he does little to explain the genesis of this emotional pattern. Yes, fearful vulnerability makes for desperate compensations. But only the saints among us have put those motivations behind them. Besides a few sidelong references to squandered creativity and the like, his portrait of the narcissistic character does not sufficiently articulate the particular skein of early life experience, skewed presumptions, fearful motivations, and, most especially, psycho-spiritual confusions that enable us understand why some of us enact this particular pattern.

A turn to the Freudian tradition (in its classical, existential, and Lacanian forms) gets us further under the hood to examine not only what drives the grandiosity for which the narcissistic character type is so well-known but, even more, to understand how and why, in the face of his or her endlessly repeated frustrations, that pattern and pursuit remains so firmly in place. The broad answer, as every psychologist should know, lies in understanding the complex logic of the neurotic desiring that fuels this condition’s endlessly renewed failures. For all real Freudians, of course, the vicissitudes of desire begin with mom, every infant soul’s most consequential bearer of the promise of paradise. The psychoanalyst M. Guy Thompson’s distillation of some key aspects of Freudian theory in the first edition of The Death of Desire (the second edition is a very different book) brilliantly lays this out for us.  In explaining the self-defeating dialectics of the dedicated narcissist’s obsessive pursuits, Thompson’s Lacan-inflected description here also gives us a short course in some of the best psychoanalytic theorizing of the past few decades. The following lengthy passage is demanding and may well require rereading but it fully repays the effort.

Narcissism, which delays the encounter with the real, is more emphatically constructed in what has recently—especially in America been termed “narcissistic disorders,” categories of a newer pathology noted in numerous works by Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut. Situating this idea of a pathological narcissism between the neurotic and psychotic predispositions, it is in reality a neurosis of a most complicated form which contains the compulsive qualities of the obsessive and the envious disposition of the hysteric, rooted in flagrantly paranoid features. No better term than “grandiosity” could hope to characterize the extraordinary self-reference through which they encounter others. Consumed by an unremitting demand to achieve love and admiration, their inflated concept of themselves is only exceeded by the extreme tributes they require in order to keep their omnipotence alive. While affecting great interest and concern for the object of their attention, their only real interest is in the tributes which support their enterprise. Underneath their concern lurks the contempt that maintains their supposed superior status. Their envy eventually destroys the good services of their benefactors, whom they exploit, suck dry, and then abandon before the other has a chance to abandon them, which their paranoid inclination feeds upon. Like the obsessive, the so-called “narcissistic type” enjoys nothing save the glorification of his identity, which, of course, is dependent on others for confirmation. Incapable of mourning the loss of his mother, he in fact keeps her alive by making himself indispensable—a trait not uncommon in the hysteric.
The man of resentment par excellence, if you disappoint him he will never feel genuine sadness or, as in the obsessive, guilt. Instead, he will be consumed by a seething anger which is occasioned by vengeful fantasies. These feelings are capable of being replaced by a melancholic depression which only serves to perpetuate his grandiosity. It is at these moments, of course, that these people get a glimpse of the profound insecurity and impotence which lies beneath their omnipotent posture. We would concur with Kernberg’s assessment that, “Narcissistic patients characteristically adapt themselves to the moral demands of their environment because they are afraid of the attacks to which they would be subjected if they do not conform, and because this submission seems to be the price they have to pay for glory and admiration.”
Like all neurotics, but perhaps in his case even more so, the narcissistic type is essentially a conformist. He conforms, not to the other’s expectation of him, but to his ego which relies on the other to perpetuate this image. And this is what lies at the heart of his resentment and his downfall, for the admiration of others is precisely what perpetuates his unholy course in keeping his mother alive, and subverting his never glimpsed emancipation. Locked in the prison of his maternal bondage, the narcissist perpetuates the omnipotent fantasy of being the phallus for his mother by projecting his wounded grandiosity onto all of his relations and sublimations, so that the debt for his aborted freedom need never be acknowledged or paid. The bastard son of his obsessive and hysteric ancestors, the narcissist is certainly superior, if only in the relentless zeal with which he orchestrates his neurotic destiny. A neurotic’s neurotic, he is admired and envied by those even more perversely neurotic than he is, since what they themselves admire is the voyeuristic spectacle of his folly—a folly which they need only admire, but which he must endlessly pursue. No friend of desire, what all these neurotics share in common is the dread with which they keep their desires at bay.
In its fully articulated (sublimated) form, desire is the desire to be recognized by another subject of desire who desires the same thing. This dialectical structure of recognition comes to dominate the articulation of desire through the subject’s use of that language which ushers him further into a discourse in which his ceaseless desire for dominance and completion can be realized. Once this gratification was evoked in his bodily integration inside the mother’s body. Then he attempted to reestablish it through his intermittent encounter with the breast. And then an imaginary communion with self was formulated at the hands of an egoic structure the creations of which merely served to alienate him from himself. By means of language a new dominant experience is constructed, that is, a drama which relies on another subject of desire to be the slave to his ceaseless demands. And it is through this dialectical structure that he establishes a system of reciprocity which serves to recapitulate the attentive love of the mother’s gaze upon greeting his birth into the world.
But his quest for communion is not merely a demand for completion (which is the alienating directive of the ego grasping at straws). The speaking subject encounters an open-ended world of possibilities in which his desire can never be satisfied or completed. Indeed, the recognition by another does not recognize his subjectivity as an entity in its own right. Rather, the other recognizes in the subject’s appeal only what that appeal means to the one who listens to it: a recognition which depends on the other’s desire.
The problem with the neurotic is that his speech is not directed to another subject, but rather to himself. In other words, his discourse serves to uphold that alienation within his egoic personality which symbolizes that which he takes himself to be. He tries to measure up to his own expectations and in doing so completes the circle of his own egoic captivation. Thus, his speech is censored by his ego as it passes through the filter which stands between himself and the other (and between himself and the object of his desire). Consequently, the other is apprehended as merely that confirmation of himself who does not need to listen to his words in order to comprehend the message of his demand. Instead, he is expected to nod his head in agreement, to be the slave to his blind demands. In the service of his own servitude, the subject seeks positive reinforcement—which is music to the ego’s ears-for all manner of narcissistic and self-serving directives, whose only purpose is to maintain a dialogue with himself by trapping the truth of his desire in the web of the ego’s unquenchable appetite for his death in the form of satisfaction. 

Individuals possessed by the narcissistic character disorder characteristically fail to know the difference between appropriate anger and destructive rage Any one of us can—and indeed, sometime should—be profoundly angered by one or another of the slights, betrayals, and even deliberate injustices, large and small, personal and collective, that inevitably befall sentient beings in this morally impoverished world—especially those injustices systemically, institutionally inflicted upon whole populations under the color of law. Mature people understand that responsible, controlled, but never loveless expressions of anger may indeed be necessary to deal with events.

Narcissists are generally incapable of just such self-control and self-overcoming. They are all but defined by a chronic disposition of self-righteous rage over endlessly remembered, rehearsed, and rehashed injustices—not seldom real ones but also many that are perhaps imagined. The narcissist, therefore, is not enraged because of injustices inflicted upon innocents—although public controversy over acts and patterns of exploitation may provide them with an excuse to enact their intense reactivity.  (In any event, skillful, high-functioning narcissists who become visible leaders grasp that the public expression of their deep-seated rage will only discredit them. They more commonly confine their tantrums to private circumstances while seeking devious ways to humiliate opponents in secret.) But many low-functioning narcissists have no such qualms about acting out public dramas that no sane, sensitive person would dream of doing. Such individuals are typically both exhibitionists and solipsists. Utterly oblivious to their effects on others and incapable of grasping how obviously they are driven by primitive, ungoverned egoic needs, they notice only the degree of their audience’s compliance. Thompson’s observation that what the narcissist’s loyal fans “themselves admire is the voyeuristic spectacle of his folly—a folly which they need only admire, but which he must endlessly ‘s pursue”—explains the public narcissist’s enormous appeal to the tens millions of admirers similarly afflicted.  Their ritual celebration of grievances binds them together.

Having invoked Freudian theory, it would be rather odd to overlook the very thing that made Freud so famous and influential: human sexuality. Emotionally speaking, people with the narcissistic character disorder come in all sizes and shapes and it would be fatuous to ascribe a particular sexual script to them all. However, recalling M. Guy Thompson’s mention of the narcissists “flagrantly paranoid features” , it is worth nothing that Freud advises us that paranoid personalities typically have a pronounced homosexual component. (This by no means suggests that homosexuals are any more narcissistic than heterosexuals. Nor does it mean that such narcissists are active homosexuals.) Freud is pointing to an unconscious aspect of the narcissist’s competitiveness with their own sex. This squares with my own observations over many decades. It seems to me that many narcissists look to sexually humiliate members of their own sex, not seldom even very close friends, by seducing their spouses. The scale of that empathic failure was brought home to me when, after years of suffering his flagrant infidelity, the most ruthlessly promiscuous such individual I knew suffered the indignity of having his own once captively loyal wife finally retaliate with her own very public infidelity. Witnesses to the aftermath reported that the freshly cuckholded rake looked as if he’d aged 100 years overnight. Narcissists are solipsists. They have little motive to dedicate their imaginative capacities to empathetically identify with their fellow human beings.
But the epidemic of narcissistic character disorders bespeaks a cultural pathology that will forever escape Freudian theory.  All decent Freudians “know” that real and lasting happiness is a mirage, the imagined perfect satisfaction (always wished for, always pursued, never fulfilled, but never relinquished) of being the fulfilling object of our mother’s affections (viewed, of course, through substitutes—sex partners, status, honors, wealth, etc.) This view is a limit on psychological theory not because it is wrong to hold that there can be no final fulfillment in this mortal world. Human beings are indeed perpetually frustrated, even tormented, by inevitable pain, loss, and death. Who can argue that, as the Buddha taught, human life as it is ordinarily known and lived is suffering? The limit of Freudianism lies in its adherence to the materialist scientism that would confine human experience solely to the conventional objects and goals of this apparent world. Of course our socialized egos are almost entirely bound to the ordinary world of appearances that is the arena of most of our conflicts. But to hold that the material world is the only reality is to deny the esoteric, subtle, visionary, or “vertical” dimension of human experience, and therefore the possibility of genuine self-transcendence.

This is why Jung’s explicit argument for (and, indeed, his demonstration of) the verity of the objective psyche, along with his personal and professional briefs on behalf of humankind’s esoteric spiritual traditions, are so important. In its dual role as both the locus of egoic consciousness and the gateway to the vertical transcendent whereby the living Spirit most often becomes known within our human frame, the psyche must be revalued as both the seat of our self-conscious suffering and the bridge to our inherent connectedness to nature, humankind, and God (or the Divine). As such, bringing the magical potentials of the psyche’s visionary function to life is an absolute necessity for human culture. Without it, we have no means to transcend our linguistic, social ego mind and the separate, isolated, and therefore ultimately meaningless life otherwise dictated by sorrowful mortality.

In contemporary letters, the word most often used to describe this visionary function is the Imaginal (a word coined by Henry Corbin, a student of Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology who later became a celebrated scholar of esoteric Islam; it has since been adopted by many Jungians). The Imaginal refers to the faculty of Imagination, or active Imagination, that was so lionized by the European Romantic movement. It has remained a strong background counter-cultural force ever since., The Imaginal is the awakened, visionary psyche cultivated in most of the world’s esoteric spiritual traditions, East and West alike, as the means whereby we expand our awareness beyond the data of the five senses. Nevertheless, although as profoundly important this function is to human sanity and integrity, since the European Renaissance the Imaginal’s modes and means have not been welcomed—that is, have not been operationalized—in Western culture. This is the arena in Schwartz-Salant really shines. His had a great ability to integrate the examination of neurotic patterns with an expanded psychic, Imaginal process that prompts transcendence. Remarkably, it is through serving the integration of this higher psyche with the lower soma (that is, the mind with the body), without excessively valorizing one over the other, that he is able to liberate the much praised eros that Freudians consider to be the sine qua non of human fulfillment (but whose pleasures they otherwise seem to know only in brief spasms) from confinement to material flesh. To the ancient Platonists and Neoplatonists who celebrated it so liberally, eros is most essentially the motivating force to spiritual transcendence, not merely the means to sexual release.
Ashrams are far from immune from the complexities of human politics. To the contrary, in authentically esoteric societies the exercise of power and authority typically requires a sensitivity to dimensions of life and spirit much greater than we ordinarily consciously contend with in daily life. Since valid spiritual authority is derived from and expressed via those who enjoy a surfeit of spiritual virtue and intelligence, the usual negotiations of our democratic egalitarianism cannot be blithely applied here.  Thus, my friends and I were burdened with the special requirement to separate the imperatives of our friend’s role in the ashram (which we respected and agreed deserved a high level of tolerance) from those driving his narcissistic need to remain immune from the consequences of his own abuses (which we suffered and for which we agreed he must finally, at long last, be held accountable—not least for his own growth!). It was when some in leadership became confused and hesitant by the burden of exercising their discrimination and bringing our friend to accounts that I sent them key excerpts from Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s description of the so-called “narcissistic character disorder” to bolster their native intelligence.

I of course had seen more than a few reflections of myself and many of my friends in Narcissism and Character Transformation. The good doctor makes clear that narcissistic defensiveness and power seeking is a common aspect of every kind of human neurosis. But as a complex and dominating pattern in itself, the narcissistic character is unmistakable. The problem for me was that no reductive description, however worthy (such as the ones provided by Josephs and Thompson above), could possibly capture in an integral manner the psychological needs, moral complexities, and spiritual ambiguities that characterize this syndrome. This is where Schwartz-Salant’s spiritual intuition, ably wedded to his clear-sighed realism, serves so well. Therefore, despite the risk of being seen as inappropriately importing psychological thought (even of a Jungian stripe) into such a thoroughly sacred context, I felt entitled to send my friends the several pages you will see below. In what follows, I quote liberally from Narcissism and Character Transformation not only to fill out the story, but equally to display the depth and usefulness of Schwartz-Salant’s writings. I’ll begin with his brilliant “Profile of the Narcissistic Character”, itself a small masterpiece of Jungian understanding.

The following descriptions highlight the dominant features of the narcissistic character disorder. Everyone has in his or her personality some of these features, but in the narcissistic character they are chronically present.

Lacks penetrability
The experience of being with a person with a narcissistic character disorder is one of being kept away, warded off. Often this is accompanied by a body tightness or tension. Extreme self-reference is dominant in the narcissistic character, so that whatever one says is immediately transformed by that person into a story or fantasy or idea about himself (or herself). One feels like a stimulus to a response which excludes participation.

Rejects interpretation
A common analytic experience is that interpretations, if given, are distorted or have little effect. If the analyst attempts to expand the analysand’s self-awareness by interpreting a family or life problem in the light of dreams or other psychic material, the interpretation may be 1) totally ignored or rejected; 2) enthusiastically accepted, only to be totally nonexistent in the following session; or 3) taken in and selectively modified to serve the person’s a priori inflated or deflated self concept. In all cases, the resultant experience is that the interpretation was useless or even destructive.

Cannot tolerate criticism
Criticism is met with extreme resistance. The person with a narcissistic character disorder has so little sense of identity—a feature of which is the capacity of the ego to be separate from, yet related to, the Self and the outer world—that any criticism at all is felt as a personal threat. This extends to reductive analysis generally, for viewing himself relative to any psychic content other than his own grandiose (or deflated) self concept threatens his identity. Criticism of any kind, before a good rapport is established (which can take a very long time), may result in the patient’s abrupt termination of therapy.

Cannot integrate synthetic approach
While reductive analysis is not feasible, at least until the narcissistic transferences are worked through, it is equally, but more subtly, destructive to employ what Jung calls the synthetic approach.  The narcissistic character is presymbolic, unable to appreciate the reality of the symbol because of the ever-present merger between ego and Self, or ego and world. The symbol is the “other,” the nonego characterizing the objective psyche, and unless it bursts through in the form of a unio mystica (a very rare occurrence) symbolic reality will not exist for the narcissistic character. Thus interpretations along symbolic lines, stressing the positive, synthetic nature of unconscious contents, will only result in inflating an already grandiose ego-Self merger.
Unfortunately, this feeding of a person’s narcissism is a seductive approach that often keeps narcissistic characters in therapy for a long time, with little transformation. Furthermore, unconscious rage is built up by the synthetic approach, for the person knows he is really not being related to. If anything, the premature reference to symbolic reality makes it more difficult for the patient to express anger, and as such actually blocks transformation.

Low empathetic capacity
Just as narcissistic characters are difficult to reach empathetically, so too they can be cruel and self-centered in situations that beg for the slightest degree of empathy. Often one gets the feeling that it is not just a question of a low empathetic capacity, but rather that empathy is withheld for cruel, sadistic purposes.

Takes pride in having no needs
The narcissistic character rejects feelings of need for another human being, for experiencing such needs can unleash rage and envy that could flood the weak ego structure. Narcissistic characters often take pride in having no needs, while doing a great deal for others. “I can do it” is often their motto. If their own needs for sympathy or relatedness are kindled, this often is experienced as a blow to their self-esteem, and can lead to depression and loss of energy.

Lacks sense of history or process
Narcissistic characters experience history in a marginal way. Situations are not really experienced because every situation is met out of the weak ego’s complex of low esteem. Consequently, historical process is only assimilated to the extent that it aggrandizes the ego. Another class of events remembered with great tenacity are those which wounded the ego’s self-esteem.
History is also distorted. We have seen how the narcissistic character can distort interpretations; this can extend to extensive lying. For the internal-grandiose pressure so overwhelms the ego that it causes the ego to meet situations not with a realistic response, but with lies that meet the inner demands of omnipotence. Thus it is not what actually happens historically that is of importance to the narcissistic character, as much as how that event meets—or can be twisted into meeting—inner, grandiose pressure.
A lack of real, historical sense may manifest in other ways. For example, narcissistic characters often feel much younger or older, but rarely their actual age. Their sense of age may be diffuse, varying greatly from one situation to the next. Another example is their tendency to tell the same story over and over again, with no awareness that they are repeating it to the same person. This can be especially painful to a more conscious partner who, pointing out the repetition, gets the response, “That is so new to me,” or “I didn’t know you’d feel that way,” when the same issue has been talked about over and over again. The sense of “newness” is very real for the narcissistic character, but the repetition is confusing and annoying for the person listening.
The narcissistic character’s lack of a sense of history includes a poor relationship to inner psychic processes. This may be a response to the grandiose pressure; which (as shall be described later in the section on narcissistic structures) can be characterized as a negative magician or negative senex figure. As such, the rejection of history is a result of the lack of this archetypal potential on an inner level, a potential that would stem from the positive senex or father constellation.

Disturbed masculine and feminine functioning
Both masculine and feminine functioning are disturbed in the narcissistic character. The realm of spirit as a connecting link to creativity and religious values, as well as a positive connection to the “spirit of the times”—and especially as the capacity for reflection—are missing. Instead there is a grandiose power drive. Under its control, certainty must reign and chance be suspended. Along with this constellation, which has affinities with the “black magician” of fairy tales and folklore, the feminine realm of being (including proper relatedness to the Self and the body) is absent; crushed by the power drive and compulsion of the “magician,” but basically under the influence of a negative feminine constellation. In the language of fairy tales this is called the “false bride” –the negative mother in the form of the witch who usurps the place of the “true bride.” Through the “false bride” the value of the Self is usurped by the ego, leading to inflation and the denial of the positive significance of suffering. All is oriented toward appearances, outer rather than inner beauty (see section ten in this chapter).

While feminine and masculine functioning are disturbed in the narcissistic character disorders of both men and women, the burden of transformation usually falls upon the proper connecting link between consciousness and the unconscious. Thus, for men the anima problem is usually central, while for women the problem is mainly with the animus.” (We shall see in the next section how envy of the opposite sex, so common in narcissistic characters, stems from the anima/animus problem.)
When the anima emerges in positive form, the potential exists for internal mirroring, for ego and Self to enter into a relationship of mirror symmetry. Similarly, the emergence of a positive animus yields reflection and objectivity. For both men and women, the transformation of the contrasexual components results in the capacity for union and involvement with another person based upon consciousness and experienced needs. Thus the archetype of connection, the coniunctio, both to outer and inner worlds, is born and/or resurrected in the transformations of the narcissistic character disorder.

Potential for positive archetypal constellations
Both the outer and inner world of the narcissistic character have few good objects. Archetypally, the negative aspects of the mother and Self are dominant, so that the inner world is experienced as full of hate, rage, envy and crushing demands. This leads to a feeling of emptiness. But it is crucial to recognize that the narcissistic character is in a sense unborn, and that especially unborn are the positive archetypal constellations. Consequently, while the person’s experience of his inner world is one of emptiness and danger, it is not uncommon to find, for example in dream material, a positive inner world ready to be born. But for this to occur (as will be clear from later discussions and clinical material) the transference. countertransference process must be constellated in a stable manner.
Until the inner world constellates in a positive way, reflection and imagination are superficial; flashiness substitutes for depth. But with the emergence of positive, archetypal factors comes the possibility for imagination to creatively function; the person no longer has to stay on the surface of life and the unconscious, but may instead experience a growing ability to penetrate into both realms. This signals the transformation of the narcissistic character.

This very useful list of qualities, grounded in Schwartz-Salant’s penetrating explanations of their manner of functioning, appears early on his book. The rest of the Narcissism and Character Transformation, which is invaluable, goes deeply into the genesis, structure, and potential for transformation of the narcissistic character disorder. That material is far too rich to summarize here. But we do not need to finish reading his book to make use of what we have just read. At this point, however, I would add a further elaboration of one of Schwartz-Salant’s description of the narcissist’s “Disturbed masculine and feminine function”. Based on my coming to know well several individuals who fit his description to a T (one of them a woman), I would also add that many of those afflicted with the narcissistic character disorder like to be seen as hypersexual. But that I do not mean that they greatly enjoy the sex act. That may or may not be the case, and in any case I have no way of knowing if any given individual does or not. I mean that a very considerable part of the narcissist’s lifetime is devoted to making sexual conquests and to their self-presentation as an intensely sexual being. 

Schwartz-Salant points out that the narcissist’s refusal of the vulnerabilities of authentic relationship leave them with the problem of where to put the excluded archetypal energies, which can be powerful. The solution for the emotional and spiritual starvation that ensues is to displace those archetypal energies onto sex. In everyone’s case, when love and desire are poorly combined, sexual pursuits are fraught with power issues dictated by the imperatives of our precious self-image. But when love is weak or even absent in sexual relationships, narcissism takes over completely . It is then that the sexual arena is held sway by the narcissist’s envious disposition. And where envy rears its green head, the games of competition will alway be joined.  However much or little any given narcissistic character may enjoy the physical act of sex, their often relentless pursuit of sexual attention and conquest has a large—and largely unconscious—component of competitiveness with members of their own sex. These days many such people are often spiritual poseurs who presume to offer their impressionable conquests wise guidance that they are in no way qualified to provide.

To put it bluntly, narcissists look for undeveloped egos who will worship them and who are not really capable of exposing their moral vacuity.  (As Joni Mitchell sings, “You don’t like strong women because they’re hip to your tricks.”). For men (and the rarer women who enact the same pattern) such relationships are by definition episodes of later life. In their early and middle years the narcissist’s relationship with a partner of the same or similar age most often foundered when—seen by that partner for who they were and faced a humiliating crisis requiring self-knowledge, confession, repentance, and change—they failed to meet requirements for change that none of us like, most of us resist, but which we ultimately embrace out of humility, love, and respect for the other.  A person with a narcissistic character disorder simply cannot bear to be seen as the crass, frightened, immature being that they are. Consequently, they cannot or will not suffer the loss of face that is often the price of a deepened intimacy.  At root, their avoidance is as much spiritual as a moral fault.

I have seen this pattern played out a number of times, proving the accuracy of Schwartz-Salant’s descriptions of the resolute narcissistic’s very distinctive manner of dys-relationship to the spiritual or sacred dimension of life. Indeed, in many ways his characterization of the narcissistic character pattern echoed the simpler, more direct criticisms addressed to virtually all his devotees by Adi Da himself, proving Schwartz-Salant’s point about the universal applicability of this pattern. Perhaps the crowning irony of the latter’s intense portrait of the narcissistic character, whose usurpation and betrayal of the living Divine Itself is positively Miltonian, is that the narcissist is always a conformist. It turns out that those who most fervently believe in their self-presumed grandiose role in life (that is, their persona) are the most banal of people.  Here I quote extensively from Schwartz-Salant’s stunning summary, “Transformation of the Narcissistic Self,” which also appears early on in Narcissism and Character Transformation. Note especially his commentary on the difference between his own and the classic Neoplatonic view of “mirroring”. This points to the underlying psycho-theology of “incarnation” (or coming into life) that is so key to understanding the difference between traditional other-worldly spirituality and the Jungian approach. In all that has been written on the Narcissistic Character Disorder, I know of no better description of the complex itself and the process—truly, a conversion—that transforms it than this one:

The Self in the narcissistic character disorder is an amalgam of autonomous elements, a “false uroboros.” There is an absence of the tension between opposites that characterizes a healthy psychological structure. When one of the elements is dominant, it has no connection with any of the others. Instead, it takes over and triggers the ego’s defensive system, making consciousness difficult and limited. When transformed—which happens when they are recognized and assimilated by consciousness—these amalgam elements form a differentiated structure with an inherent tension between opposites. Then the ego can begin to function in a stable manner.
Within the undifferentiated amalgam four primary elements can be recognized. They may be approximated as follows:

1) The black magician, a term borrowed from folklore, represents that factor in the psyche that drives for control and exhibits extreme grandiosity. It insists upon total determinacy of events, so that spontaneity and chance are defended against. Rather, reality is equated with its thoughts and needs, and the power to “know” and control is continually exhibited. This omnipotence simultaneously demands mirroring, without which its very existence is threatened. A good example of this quality is the dark side of the Old Testament Yahweh.
2) The partner of the black magician in the amalgam may be called the false bride. This represents a wrong connection to the Self in terms of concern with power, and it manifests in the identification with appearance. Just as the witch in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” has a magic mirror that she consults to assure herself of her beauty over all others, so too the bewitched feminine side of the narcissistic character (whether male or female), rather than relating the ego to the Self, turns psychic energy back onto the ego. Hence the person is always referring internal and external events to his or her own ego.
The false bride is the enemy of the true bride, who represents the proper soul connection to the Self and functions in part as the capacity for being. The dominance of the false bride leads rather to continual thinking and fantasy, and especially doing, usually concerned with gaining self-esteem.
A prime feature of the false bride, often united with the black magician, is the refusal to show suffering. This would reflect a weakness that would endanger their drive for power. Instead, they present a facade of well-being: “I’m okay, I can handle everything.” Analogously, the bride of Yahweh during the exile was said, in Kabbalistic tradition, to be the witch Lilith! Yahweh was separated from his true soul, the Shekinah, who suffered along with the children of Israel until her reunion with Yahweh.
3) Ego-persona identity is characterized by undifferentiated social compliance and adaptability. Social acceptability is so dominant a need for the narcissistic character that the ego cannot separate from the persona, which in this case becomes a rigid mask carrying the inner false bride attitude that paradoxically denies the need for another person. The persona ego is not individual; it demands omnipotence and perfection according to collective values. It continually strives to meet these impossible demands, often collapsing under the strain, manifesting as energy loss and depression.
4) The shadow is the fourth element. Its primary characteristic is envy and an associated rage. Narcissistic rage, with its unforgiving quality for wounds to the ego’s self-esteem, colors much of the individual’s sense of history. Envy, the recurrent conviction that “nothing will ever be there for me, only for others, so I’ll spoil any potentially giving object,” chronically inhibits change and the integration of anima or animus.
In the unconscious, untransformed state of the Self, these elements are not separate, they are parts of a homogeneous amalgam. This mixture is often created by the ego’s regressive fusion with the Self, a result, perhaps, of improper handling by parental figures of the emerging exhibitionism and idealization during childhood. Usually this exhibitionism is carried by instinctual and aggressive energies. In its regressive flight, the ego attempts to recreate the original paradise or uroboric condition. But it is a “false uroboros” in which needs are repressed rather than automatically filled by a positive parental experience.
In psychotherapy the transformation of the amalgam takes place in a manner analogous to the ascent and descent of energy known to the alchemists.” It is a circular process by which “matter is spiritualized and spirit materialized.” But the alchemists’ projections reflected the transformative dynamic within the Self, while in the psychotherapy of narcissistic character disorders, the ascent and descent of libido unfolds through the transference-countertransference process. This is the vessel to contain the “circular movement,” inhibited by.the regressive ego-Self merger.
The ascent of libido is analogous to the idealized transference, while the descent of libido corresponds to the mirror transference. The spiritual “ascent,” through the patient’s idealization, in turn “descends” through the analyst’S proper relationship to the induced mirror transference; for example, by containing while experiencing his own exhibitionism.  Equally, the mirror transference and its exhibitionistic energy is caused to “ascend” by - the analyst’s induced idealized response, and the proper processing of these energies. In this manner, the ascent and descent of libido is mutually experienced through the analytical vessel.
Although a general topic of chapter two of this study, it is worth noting here that the mirror was taken by the Neo-Platonists in their commentaries on the Narcissus myth as having the effect of drawing the soul down into matter and bodily life. Mirroring does have just this function. In distinction to the Neo-Platonic dread of matter, modern man should welcome this descent when there is a concomitant spiritual awareness.
When the elements in the narcissistic character disorder begin to transform through the constellation of the transference-countertransference process, they begin to be experienced as separate aspects of a totality. With this new Self structure, ego and unconscious exist in a relationship of consciously realized mirror symmetry, each influencing the other.
The quaternity structure that appears as a result of the transformation can be represented and characterized in the following way:

The uroborus, symbol for both narcissistic self-absorption and individuation as a circular, self-contained process. (Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werk, 1760)

The false bride and the black magician. Could it be said any better? The more I pondered these two “characters,” the more I appreciated how powerfully they summarize the narcissistic syndrome. Indeed, we would be well-advised to post these passages on the bulletin boards of all organizations, not merely the churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, zendos, and yoga retreats hosting the people most likely to value such wisdom. Even so, those of us who presume to be on a spiritual path owe Schwartz-Salant special heed here. For the false bride and black magician combination are always in the wings looking to lay claim to the life and mind of any and every would-be spiritual aspirant upon whom a divine charism alights.  This is precisely why every truly effective spiritual tradition seeks to protects it own practitioners from such self-inflation by benign protocols of deference, respect, and humility toward not only one’s teacher and the Divine Itself, but also ones fellow practitioners, including “even the least amongst us”.  Yes, we all betray the living spirit in every moment of our active egoity. But betrayal becomes most pernicious when it is enacted in the face of (and even during presumed advocacy of) spiritual revelation itself: corruptio optimi pessima (“corruption of the best is corruption at its worst”).

That being said, merely to suffer a hobbled self-consciousness is obviously no antidote to this universal liability. What makes Schwartz-Salant’s work so useful is that his inquisitive, open-minded, and non-reductive approach to human psychological development serves our self-knowledge without leaving us feeling merely objectified or otherwise denigrated. In the incarnation process we value the many little and not so little defeats of our egoity not because we masochistically revel in humiliation but because they force a repentance and redirection of our life and mind that reestablishes our conscious connection to the Transcendent and to other beings.  Schwartz-Salant describes the transformation of the the black magician, false bride, ego, and shadow complex of the narcissistic character disorder this way:

1) The black magician gives way to a positive spirit; the Self is felt as a “content of the ego” and as its source, both “father” and “son.” The positive puer-senex constellation emerges. An embodied awareness becomes possible for the ego. Compulsive doing becomes reflection.
2) The false bride gives way to the true soul. The positive value of suffering emerges. Psychic energy is channeled toward the Self and away from its excess investment in the previous ego-Self merger. The capacity to be appears as a positive value. Relatedness, as opposed to being right, becomes a primary value. Generally, the care for one’s soul becomes meaningful and represents the transformation of the previous attitude in which appearances were the dominant factor. A capacity for empathy develops.
3) The ego disengages from the persona and becomes a carrier of personal identity. The capacity to feel and express needs for another person emerges. An awareness of rage at not being mirrored or at one’s idealizations being improperly treated is more conscious, and gradually becomes a capacity to express anger in a related manner. The ego also becomes aware of its “pettiness” and becomes chagrined at the experience of envy, which it gradually recognizes to be a common, all-too-human psychic experience.
4) The shadow of the new quaternity structure becomes the old narcissistic character disorder. That is, the narcissistic character disorder in its exhibitionistic-grandiose form does not simply disappear. Rather it becomes the substantial shadow side, always potentially regressive, of the new personality structure.
The narcissistic character disorder does not only result from insufficient maternal empathy. It is also an archetypal pattern and constellates to protect a new Self structure from invasion from other archetypal contents, as this aspect of the Old Testament Yahweh protected the monotheistic vision from the mother archetype. Equally, it exists as a resistance to change, and then it functions just as a narcissistic character formation stemming from early infantile deprivations. It then causes a merger with the Self, and all the old symptoms of exhibitionism and grandiose control tend to appear. Hence, the duplex nature of narcissism stays as the shadow side of a Self constellation, either protecting its integrity, or else resisting its transformation, whence different archetypal centers would become dominant.

Our creative struggle with our neuroses, then, doesn’t simply mark us as permanently damaged beings.  Human neuroses are not merely faults to be eradicated, although of course faults they surely are. Like Jung, Schwartz-Salant believes that our neurotic patterns are most basically opportunities and goads for us to grow beyond the emotional and spiritual limitations that would otherwise remain unnoticed by the usual “well-adapted” ego. As such, neuroses possess a dynamism that forces us to grow up and grow beyond. Schwartz-Salant may have been the only psychotherapist on Earth who found in the narcissistic character disorder a serving dialectic that drives the individual to take new risks for such growth Further, he even perceived in this disorder the emergence of a new and profoundly significant archetype in the culture as whole: 

Jung’s general attitude toward neuroses was that in the long run they have a positive purpose. He believed that those who become neurotic are also in a sense chosen—because they are often forced to deal with the unconscious. Narcissistic characters may be carrying the seeds of a new conscious experience of the Self in which both matter and spirit, both ascent and descent, have equal value. As such, they would be heralding a change in the collective unconscious Self image.

As encouraging as that may sound, the journey of self-knowledge required to reconcile the ego and Self demands a great deal of both patient and therapist. While Schwartz-Salant’s brand of Jungian psychotherapy can bear extraordinary fruit, progress comes at a price.  Speaking here of the suffering that must be accepted by those afflicted with the so-called “borderline character disorder” (in which, as the name implies, the individual dips in and out of outright madness) , Schwartz-Salant also notes the “act of faith” required of the therapist if the patient is to be enabled to face his or her demons:

The link between the self as a positive force and the psyche’s dark, destructive qualities poses an important question. For if the self is encapsulated within or possessed by dark aspects of existence, are we to regard these darker aspects as parts of the self? The answer is that it is important to do so (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 25), for the therapist’s attitude toward the self is crucial for its potential regeneration in positive form. If we undervalue the borderline patient’s psychotic mechanisms and treat them as something to be suppressed or changed, rather than encountered and actively explored in the face of a multitude of defenses that deny pain, we will lose the self and at best gain an ego and an enhanced capacity for repression. A religious issue is involved: the will of the self, itself apparent through dreams and fantasies, is too weak to incarnate into space-time functioning. An act of faith on the part of the therapist is necessary if the person is to embrace his or her madness rather than flee from it, for the borderline person can only imagine the perils of change, not the rewards, and experiences surrender as a descent into emptiness or madness from which there will be no return.

When psychology moves us beyond the punitive rationalism so characteristic of our times it can midwife the awakening of the living, breathing, feeling psyche itself. But Schwartz-Salant’s surmise that the current prevalence of narcissistic character disorders heralds our culture’s dire need to overcome the ancient split between “matter and spirit” certainly doesn’t make the disorder any kind of deus ex machina for spiritual awakening. There’s hard work to be done and crisis aplenty for everyone (therapist and patient alike) in this journey. And even a “successful” outcome of treatment is no guarantee that we will awaken to a truly fruitful relationship to the Divine. As I said earlier, that requires something more: in fact, a genuine religious and spiritual conversion. Even so, it is a passage that will establish in our lives a platform for stable spiritual growth, should we be wise enough to build upon it.  It is a necessary but not a sufficient foundation for life turned beyond egoity. Real spiritual growth begins from here.

In any case, I don’t think any Jungian of recent years did a better job of mapping the dialectical process of such psychological growth than Schwartz-Salant. That was not only because of his willingness to accompany his patient into the chaotic, fragmented, and deeply dissociated—even psychotic—states of mind that may need to be admitted on the path to healing.  If you’re an honest and capable therapist, that goes with the territory. What lifts Schwartz-Salant’s therapeutic work to another level is his ability to endure the chaos, the bewilderment, and not infrequently the numbing deadness that may inhabit the psyche-in-transformation all the while patiently awaiting the spirit archetype to make its salvatory appearance. As he noted, doing so takes “faith”.  That a key dimension of how he lived such faith came out of his highly original work with the psychological process known as “projective identification” should be of interest to us all. But before we take a look at that aspect of his work, we need to first more deeply appreciate how the archetypal approach totally revisions our understanding of interpersonal dynamics. I will cover both topics in part II of this review essay.

At its core, Jung’s idea of the Self refers to the integrated or individuated personality in whom the unconscious and conscious minds have achieved a healthy balance. Since such individuation requires a viable connection between the ego and our spiritual nature, Jungian psychology is built to assist the psyche’s opening to or reception of our higher being. But Jung is not playing the part of a religious evangelist here. His approach was dictated by the inner dynamic of his patients’ healing.  If we think of the religious dimension of Jungian thinking as an invocation of the “vertical”  dimension of existence into the “horizontal” interpersonal or social dimension of our personal relationships, we can appreciate how their integration vastly expands our conventional understanding of human development. In fact,  where the vertical and the horizontal intersect is the precise locale of Schwartz-Salant’s most original and far reaching contributions. That he is especially adept at retooling accepted psychoanalytic notions pertaining to our social relations from an archetypal perspective is a strength that gives him just claim to a professional audience beyond the usual Jungian cohort.

For example, in both Narcissism and Character Transformation and The Borderline Personality: Character and Healing, Schwartz-Salant does an extraordinary job of linking two central notions of Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology—“grandiosity” and “idealization”—to Jungian archetypal process. As mentioned before, he believes that the intense egoic energy manifested by narcissists is often an aggressive displacement of archetypal energies from their Divine Source onto the field of our interpersonal relationships. The therapist must simultaneously keep both vectors in mind when dealing with such persons

Given its archetypal nature, a spiritual attitude towards the Cephisus-like [masculine invasive] force is necessary. The problem is not only one of personal relatedness. Rather there is a religious problem embedded in the issues of narcissism .  .  .  An attitude that respects archetypal dominants, while paying due regard to issues of relatedness and transference problems, is essential in the therapy of narcissistic character disorders.
Grandiose and idealizing attitudes and behaviors are commonly viewed as little more than character flaws—as bad manners or childish naivety, in the case of the former, and delusion, in the case of the latter. But by relating these conceptions to childhood frustrations and confusions occurring in the unfoldment of our connection to the Spirit archetype (first mediated to us by our parents, who for children hold the place of the gods), we gain a whole new depth of understanding of the genesis of our emotional patterns. Most parents understand very well what is going on when their children do something grandiose and exhibitionistic. They likewise realize that they are there to function as protective/appreciative God-Parent to their children, and as such are idealized by them. They may even sense this is how their child is handling the force of the Spirit archetype, whether assumed for self or projected onto another.

But if a parents fail to receive their children’s projections with patience and humor, their negative reactions can be hugely damaging to the child’s development. This usually comes from the parent’s parent’s own failure in this regard. The English psychiatrist E. Graham Howe has forthrightly stated that parents not infrequently hate their children. Likewise, Schwartz-Salant tells us “It is not unusual for the parents to envy the talents or abilities of their children, quite unconsciously. In such cases the child hears, ‘You have something special,’ but with the underlying message, ‘I hate you for it.’ . . . Analysis often reveals an underlying feeling of having been hated, the object of intense envy.” Treating others “in the way he experiences being treated himself”, envy thereby can easily become a dominating trait of the narcissistic personality, “the dark side of the narcissistic character.” The hardest place to observe this envy in operation is in our closest intimacies:

Envy can dominate the life of the narcissistic character. A man may envy his wife’s activities, femininity and way of being. Whatever she has he wants. And the narcissistic woman may envy her mate’s physical prowess, business acumen, or social ease. They can be totally unaware of their envious feelings, for to admit them consciously would be too “petty” and demeaing to their image of themselves as benevolently interested in the other person.

Envy of this kind appears to be rooted in the fact that the contrasexual components of personality, the man’s anima and the woman’s animus, are especially undeveloped in narcissistic characters. They are largely assimilated by the exhibitionistic-grandiose form of the self, so that their proper functioning, which is to relate the conscious personality to both the outer and inner worlds, is deficient. Instead of reflection and relatedness there is compulsion and a continual self-reference.

Integrating these “contrasexual components”—Jung’s famous anima and animus, which refer to the unconscious feminine personality within a man and the unconscious masculine personality within a woman, respectively—is essential to achieving balance. Bringing it about is a famous and very well-trod feature of the Jungian path. Properly excavated and aligned, the anima and animus are the conduits and accomplishers of our psychological connection with the archetypal or spiritual energies of the “Self”. If they remain frozen, undeveloped, compulsive, “The narcissistic character keenly feels the pressure of individuation, and equally the lack of a living relationship between ego and Self when they are merged in a grandiose form.” You will recall that the failure to achieve this integration is a very telling sign of a narcissistic character disorder.  What Schwartz-Salant adds to the discussion, however, is a newly elaborated and very daring reconsideration of a key contribution made by venerable Freudian child psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, the famed founder of Object Relations theory. Our discussion of his work in that regard will appear in a succeeding article.

* * *

We live in a secular world. To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy. (“L’enfant abdique son exstase”: Mallarmé.) Having lost our experience of the spirit, we are expected to have faith. But this faith comes to be a belief in a reality which is not evident.

                R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

I came to R.D. Laing through his prophetic masterpiece, The Politics of Experience, published in 1967, the reading of which was a transformational moment for many of my generation. We immediately recognized him to be one the few truly sane voices in that apocalyptically-minded prelude to what is now threatening to actually become global apocalypse. Laing’s seminal, elegant demolition of mechanistic metapsychology, which he replaced with a social phenomenology that distilled a generation of European existential and critical thought into a clear and truly human “science” of persons-in-relation, was and remains one of that era’s virtuoso acts of critical intelligence. It bestowed an intellectual liberation one could not go back on.

Laing began that demolition six years earlier with the publication of The Divided Self and Self and Others—beautifully written, brilliantly argued companion texts that did much to establish phenomenological psychology in the profession’s mainstream. Both have well withstood the test of time. In those three books, Laing showed us that we cannot truly engage the issues of love and ultimate meaning that are so central to our lives if we surrender psychology to mechanistic scientism’s manner of understanding and otherwise fail to critically reevaluate the misleading presumptions incarnate in the discipline’s inherited technical language. In the field of psychology there surely never has been a better torchbearer for the corrective intelligence that the existential orientation brings to standard psychological theories of “causation.” His words in that regard bear repeating at length:

Under the heading of “defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These “mechanisms” are often described in psychoanalytic terms themselves as “unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself.

Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that “splitting,” for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop.

There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such “defenses” by the term “mechanism,” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology.

But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.²

1.

Laing was a fierce critic of the reductive scientism that rules the world to this day.³ A medical doctor, and thus himself a man of science, he kept up with significant developments and was in no way discounting the legitimacy or value of the scientific enterprise itself. Rather, in the great tradition of the English Romantic critique (“We murder to dissect,” wrote Wordsworth), he challenged scientism’s perversion or misapplication of a universal human method of free inquiry that is otherwise essential to our civilization. As Laing put it, “Natural scientism is the error of turning persons into things by a process of reification that is not itself part of true natural scientific method.”⁴ In an interview published in The Laughing Man magazine, in 1984, he was quite blunt about the effects of this error, “Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.”⁵

It is important to appreciate that Laing was not just offering a limited, merely academic course correction to the “natural attitude” (Husserl) of ego over against world that holds the default position of knowledge in our day. Rather, he is evaluating familiar resources and revisiting familiar territory more deeply and truly than our usual egoity finds comfortable. Consider this extraordinary but, when one thinks about it, perfectly obvious statement about the significance of the work of Sigmund Freud: “The relevance of Freud to our time is largely his insight and, to a very considerable extent, his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be.”⁶ After following that statement with the the declaration that “an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth, and love,” Laing raises the stakes considerably in a passage that has strong echoes of the influential fifth century C.E. Christian mystic Dionysius the (Pseudo) Aeropagite:

And immediate experience of, in contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits, Powers, Dominions, Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote. As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence.⁷

What made Laing’s critique of scientism in The Politics of Experience so extraordinary, then, was his clear advocacy of the realms of experience it excludes. That an ordained psychiatrist should then go on to write of the verity of paranormal phenomena, the existence of discarnate spirits, the transcendence of egoity, and even of the reality of God’s gracious Presence did much to pry open a door which millions have since walked through.

[N]owhere in the Bible is there any argument about the existence of gods, demons, angels. People did not first believe in God: they experienced His presence, as was true of other spiritual agencies. The question was not whether God existed, but whether this particular God was the greatest god of all, or the only God; and what was the relation of the various spiritual agencies to each other. Today, there is a public debate, not as to the trustworthiness of God, the particular place in the spiritual hierarchy of different spirits, etc., but whether God or such spirits even exist or ever have existed.⁸

I do not know how any reasonable person could regard the above as merely metaphorical. Similarly, it would be hard to explain away the profundity of this striking challenge to all ego-based psychologies and philosophies:

[A]ll religious and all existential philosophies have agreed that . . . egoic experience is a preliminary illusion, a veil, a film of maya—a dream to Heraclitus, and to Lao Tzu, the fundamental illusion of all Buddhism, a state of sleep, of death, of socially accepted madness, a womb state to which one has to die, from which one has to be born.⁹

In 1972 Laing wrote a brief but laudatory preface to Only Two Can Play This Game, a book by the genius mathematician, fellow M.D., and polymath G. Spencer Brown (published under the pseudonym “James Keys”), who he had recently trained in psychotherapy. Spencer Brown is world-famous for his treatise on mathematical logic, Laws of Form, which demonstrated the paradoxical basis of mind (and that mind itself is always a praxis, not a mere mirror of presumed to be “external” or “objective” realities). Most basically, Only Two Can Play This Game is a thoroughgoing critique of the premises and effects of the scientific materialist worldview that dominate contemporary Western culture—a view that Spencer Brown argues is rooted in a profoundly anti-female bias.

All man’s philosophy is a rationalization of his inner experience—or lack of it. And a lack of inner experience of the archetypal woman is expressed in a very obvious manner, by academic materialism, or its modern offshoot, logical positivism.

Some logical positivists would not call themselves materialists, but they still share the same attitude. They maintain that what is real is only what can be described when you look outwards, when you look at tables and chairs and suchlike. What you see when you look inwards, the archetypal pattern, the divine love, the sense of how it all fits together, this they say is unreal and ought to be ignored. At the same time they manage somehow to suggest that it is dangerous and ought to be done away with.

To the logical positivist, the events of our lives are nothing more than chance unfoldings in a meaningless universe, love almost entirely a matter of negotiated exchange, and happiness never more than a temporary achievement. Priding himself on his skeptical reserve, the logical positivist is always prey to a cynicism that masks an underlying despair. Later in his book, Spencer Brown identifies the source of this distorted view:

What we have alienated in ourselves is in fact what it is possible to know in respect of the complete and universal totality of being and non-being. Why do simple discoveries of the obvious take so long? Not because man is incapable of seeing them, but because he is neurotically prevented from seeing them by his own self-imposed alienation from what he knows what must be so.¹⁰

In both his critique of scientism and his advocacy of the spiritual, Laing himself was clearly drawing from a wealth of personal experience, from the terrible to the sublime. Perhaps the essence of his genius was his extraordinary capacity to sympathetically identify with others. I recall reading an account of how early in his career he trained himself to achieve deep empathy with people by following someone down the street and progressively taking on his or her characteristics until the gestalt of that person’s personality became obvious (all the while reserving a thin avenue of escape back to his own relative sanity). This is the kind of training a Stanislavski would have required of actors. It is not something we expect from a psychiatrist. As Stanislavski well knew, there sometimes was a profound psychic, perhaps even spiritual, component to this manner of being with others.

In that regard, the social anthropologist Francis Huxley, a strong, free-spirited friend of Laing, told a revealing story. Huxley considered him not quite a shaman in fact but nonetheless a shamanically empathetic personality who was perhaps somewhat overmatched by the demands of his vocation. He relates one occasion that

concerned one of the first, most chronic inhabitants of a P.A. [Philadelphia Association] household, David by name, who had just returned from hospital in a high state of mania. Laing gave him what I once heard him call his undivided attention . . . He did this silently and without looking at him, so well that David soon fell silent. Laing then told the others present what he had done, whereupon David took flight again. Laing once more set himself to attend, again David fell silent. What he had done, he later told me, was to take David’s frenzy and contain it in himself. But the effect on him was so great that, when he left soon after to drive himself home, he collapsed in the car from the strain. David, meanwhile, was back in high speed mania.^1w

Perhaps we know too much about Laing’s faults as husband, father, and friend to idealize his human qualities. But we should not deny that the man was almost preternaturally gifted in his ability to connect with people on multiple levels. Stories of this are legion. Laing’s account in the “Confirmation and Disconfirmation” chapter of Self and Others about apologizing to a female schizophrenic patient who, after ten minutes of motionless silence between them in a therapy session, noticed the moment his mind began to wander and said, “Oh please don’t go so far away from me,” is certainly a case in point. As Laing noted, most analysts would have been tempted to analyze the patient’s request rather than confirm the validity of her perception.

Another striking vignette is included in a recently published anthology of essays on Laing:

I remember one occasion with a girl of seven years old. She was brought along by her father because she had stopped talking. He brought her into my room and he left. She sat on the floor, crossed her legs, and just sat there—not particularly withdrawn but certainly not looking as though she was interested to play or to have any conversation. She sat there like a sort of miniature Buddha, and I was sitting in my chair and I couldn’t imagine how I might get to her. I asked if she’d like to talk and she had nothing to say. So I got off my chair and sat there on the floor in front of her. There was no plan that I worked out. She allowed me to touch the tip of her little finger with the tip of mine and gradually allowed me to touch the tips of [all] her fingers with the tips of mine. And I shut my eyes.

I had a flash when I did that . . . a pang . . . of anxiety that she might do something to my face. Maybe I was picking up something from the tips of her fingers, but it went away. And I allowed myself to become completely absorbed in the kinesthetic sensations at the tips of her fingers. And for something like forty minutes or so, nothing [happened] except a gradually developing movement/dance with the tips of her fingers. . . . It became absolutely imperative that I not lose touch with the tips of any of her little fingers. And I imagine it began to feel as important to her as it did to me. After about forty minutes, I opened my eyes and as I opened my eyes I found her opening just at the same moment, without a word having been spoken. So we withdrew our fingers from each other, and went back to my chair. I said to her, bring your dad along now if that’s all right with you, and she nodded.

He told me later [that] as he was walking along the road with her towards the car he turned to her and said, “[W]hat went on between you and Dr. Laing?” She turned to him and said, “[I]t’s none of your business!” And these are the first words she had spoken in about two months!¹³

Two of the sixties’ psychedelic grandees, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert), testified to the spiritual reach of Laing’s sensitivity and intelligence. Timothy Leary’s story was about his and Laing’s first meeting, which took place at the Millbrook estate in New York where Leary was residing. Beginning their encounter straightaway with the offering, “I know an interesting game. Would you like to play?,” Laing immediately engaged him in a non-verbal, upper body, dance of entrainment that catapulted both into an ecstatic state of consciousness. (In 1969, at a Grateful Dead concert in Minneapolis, I witnessed—and even briefly participated in—a very similar interaction between two people standing some distance apart.)

Ram Dass, the American spiritual seeker who spent decades as the counter-culture’s favorite spiritual cheerleader, had this story:

I went over to England once, and Tim (Leary) told me to look up Ronnie, and we meet about five minutes in a pub, and Ronnie said we ought to take acid, LSD, together. I said sure, so we made an appointment, and a few days later we met, and we said whose LSD shall we use, and he said, well, his was legal, so we decided to use his. He was so far out. I mean, the minute we took LSD he took off his clothes and started to do yoga. This was three or four years ago, and I had never seen anything like this. I mean, I was ready to turn on Miles Davis and lie down and, you know, have a groovy session with this high head. He did this yoga, so I watched for a while—like I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll watch, I’m cool . . . super-cool. Then he came over to me and he looked at me in a very protective way. And I felt that look eliciting in me all the childlike needs to be protected.

And I felt my face changing and my whole orientation going into that. We stood in that for a second, and then I saw his face melt and he became this fantastic, delicate child that needed to be protected. And I felt my face changing and my whole orientation giving into that. And what we did in the next five or six hours, completely silently we lived out . . . each of these symbiotic roles: lovers, friends, enemies, father- child, teacher-student . . . and every one you could think of. And we reversed them. And some of them stuck us because they were so scary—to accept being lovers? To accept being enemies? To really hate? But we had to accept that one too before we could get on with it.¹⁴

Ram Das wemt on to say that once everything had been shown and released, both men found themselves gazing into a radiant field of light into which their visages had all but dissolved. This was, he said, the moment when he first realized humankind’s inherent divinity.

Obviously few psychiatrists (or, for that matter, few actors) were as capable of venturing to and perhaps over the edge as Laing. Anyone who has ever walked to the precipice of a psychedelic or a psychotic shattering knows that only one who has been there could have written these words about the psychotic experience:

[T]he very ontological foundations are shaken. The being of phenomena shifts and the phenomena of being may no longer present itself to us as before. There are no supports, nothing to cling to, except perhaps some fragments from the wreck, a few memories, names, sounds, one or two objects, that retain a link with a world long lost. This void may not be empty. It may be peopled by visions and voices, strange shapes and apparitions. No one who has not experienced how insubstantial the pageant of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize the sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or exist alongside it.¹⁵

It should be obvious, then, that Laing approached the great human encounter that we call psychotherapy with a breadth of perspective—that is, a true availability to the full dimensionality of their experience and the influences that shaped them—that breaks the boundaries erected by the standard consensus. He told a1985 conference on the evolution of psychotherapy that he took the long view when working up a client’s case history:

Is it [related to] what was going on before [the person] came into the room . . . ? Is it [related to] events that have been going on for a number of years? Does it go back to childhood? Does it go back to birth? Does it go back to conception? Does it go back to before incarnation? Does it go back to before conception and one’s last death? Does it go back to past lifetimes?¹⁶

2.

R. D. Laing was not a spiritual teacher per se, but his work should be understood as a resolute insistence that the reductionism that would separate the human psyche from its interpersonal expressions, social nexus, spiritual content, and transcendental or gnostic primacy is absolutely false. He was both prophet and priest of our liberation from all forms of alienation— whether disavowed games of social entrapment (for which he appropriated Marx’s term “mystification”), suppressive political programs, the scientific materialist reductionism that yet dominates official society, the anti-spiritual bromides of conventional religion, and of course the fearful egoic willfulness that is pretty much everyone’s constant mistake. That is why his function in this world was, and remains, hugely prophetic. Prophetic teachings expose error at its roots, summon us to a higher vision, and advise us that the journey forward, although costly, is absolutely worth the trouble.

That prophetic role is epitomized by Laing’s unabashed, unequivocal advocacy of our indelibly spiritual nature. I see no reason to hedge this dimension of his work. That it was dear to his heart is plainly evident in his own books, in the culture he and others developed in the Philadelphia Association households in London, in his friendships with spiritual teachers such as Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche, in his own informal conversations, and in his travel to and lengthy meditation retreat in India. One has only to read two books Laing warmly recommended—Mircea Eliade’s The Two and the One, which pays homage to the global tradition of the divine light, and Ian Dallas’s The Book of Strangers, which paints a portrait of a traditional sacred culture so ecstatic and profound that our entire civilization’s preoccupations are rendered absurd by comparison—to appreciate the absolute importance to him of embracing an authentically spiritual alternative to the scientistic heresy.

Moreover, Laing made it crystal clear that psychologists who are unaware of, resistant to, or otherwise in denial of the primacy of the spiritual dimension of existence suffer a grave limitation in their capacity to serve patients: As he put it in The Politics of Experience, “As it is, the secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the blind leading the half-blind.”¹⁷ In this Laing echoed the strong, clear declaration by his older friend, sometime advocate, and pioneering fellow psychiatrist E. Graham Howe that “any psychological system must be unsatisfactory and misleading, both in theory and practice, until it does admit our essentially spiritual nature.”¹⁸

However, although Laing cited the great Advaitan Sage Sri Sankara’s Brahma Sutra and spent weeks meditating with a high yogi in remote part of India, he was principally a man of the West. In The Politics of Experience his invocation of the divine employs classic Christian spiritual terminology (and Laing was in all things a classic thinker), albeit without sectarian implications:

The outer divorced from an illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The stage of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e., alienation or estrangement from the inner light. Certain actions led to greater estrangement, certain others help one not to be so far removed. The former used to be called sinful.¹⁹

He offered his strongest, most unguarded spiritual views in The Laughing Man interview.²⁰ After proclaiming that “human life is only dust and ashes without love,” Laing goes on to say:

The first English Translation of what is now called “the holy ghost” was by John Wycliffe, who translated it as “our healthy spirit.” That is the manifestation of Divinity within and through our own nature. All our natures, with this healthy spirit, are sparks of light in the same fire. That immediately unites us. That companionability in the light of our healthy spirit—which is light and love and the way and truth and life—is what I have become less embarrassed about affirming in the last thirty years or so.

A little later on in the same interview he speaks as majestically as any Christian mystic, although his words here could easily be translated into the language of Hindu, Buddhist, or Sufi spirituality:

Laing: I believe that the material world is contained within the world of the Spirit, which has final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times. I don’t think anything happens to materials except what Spirit allows.

Interviewer: What, then, do you feel is the highest potential of Man?

Laing: The highest human potential is to glorify the Spirit, for the Spirit to manifest itself through us. I think that comes by the grace of the Spirit. The very cooperation of Man with God is God-given. The end of life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The token of that perfect accomplishment is beatitude.

Finally, a bit further on in the interview, in answer to a question about spiritual surrender, he offers this unreserved recommendation:

Laing: If one is surrendered completely to God, then one has no fear of death, no fear of what anyone can throw at one, and that is tantamount to peace. Again, in the English translation of the Greek New Testament we find, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In the original it reads “Blessed are the spiritual beggars,” those who are completely empty-handed. That emptiness is synonymous with surrender. In surrender, you lose everything. If one is surrendered to God, one cannot find any consolation or satisfaction in anything else but God. That brings complete peace, compete emptiness, and total service. All these words—peace, love, blessedness, fearlessness—are simply different aspects of the same diamond.”

3.

Returning to The Politics of Experience, then, we can appreciate Laing’s forthright advocacy of a genuinely spiritual pathway for those undergoing “the schizophrenic experience.” Before exploring that, however, let us dismiss once and for all the persistent claims that he valorized psychosis as the royal route to spiritual awakening. Laing did nothing of the kind, as his repeated caveats to the contrary in that book amply prove. In the book he draws a very important distinction to guide our understanding:

From an ideal vantage point on the ground, a formation of planes may be observed in the air. One plane maybe out of formation. But the whole formation may be off
course. The plane that is *out of formation’ may be abnormal,bad or *mad’ from the point of view of the formation. But the formation itself may be bad or mad from the point of view of the ideal observer. The plane that is out of formation may be also more or less off course than the formation itself is.

The ‘out of formation’ criterion is the clinical positivist criterion.

The ‘off course’ criterion is the ontological. One requires to make two judgements along these different parameters. In particular, it is of fundamental importance not to confuse the person who may be *out of formation’ by telling him he is ‘off course’ if he is not. It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that, because a group are *in formation’, this means they are necessarily ‘on course’. . . . Nor is it necessarily the case that the person who is ‘out of formation’ is more ‘on course’ than the formation. There is no need to idealize someone just because he is labelled ‘out of formation’. There is also no need to persuade the person who is ‘out of formation’ that cure consists in getting back into formation. The person who is ‘out of formation’ is often full of hatred of the formation and fears about being the odd man out.²¹

People who may be “out of formation” with the norm may or may not be on a spiritual journey. Laing point is simply that our socially defined “normality,” which by his lights means to be dissociated from the spiritual intuition that makes mortal existence not only bearable but worthwhile, provides no baseline standard of sanity.

More to the point perhaps:

Certain transcendental experiences seem to me to be the wellspring of all religions. Some psychotic people have transcendental experiences. Often, (to the best of their recollection) they have never had such experiences before, and frequently they will never have them again. I am not saying, however, that psychotic experience necessarily contains this element more manifestly than sane experience.²²

In sum:

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.²³

Fritjof Capra reports that Laing once told him, “Mystics and schizophrenics find themselves in the same ocean, but the mystics swim whereas the schizophrenics drown.” Indeed, given our wasteland civilization’s denial of the reality (much less the primacy) of our spiritual nature, and therefore the rarity of effective acculturation to the divine, how could a significant number of us, especially the more sensitive, not go under?

One thing should be clear: affixing the technical medical diagnosis of “schizophrenia” onto a human being is about as good a way as any to heighten whatever forces within him or her that are adding to his continued self-entrapment. In some cultures, such as we find in India today, where the psychiatric establishment is more reticent about medicalizing emotional disturbances, there is a far higher rate of what we might call “cure” than we find in American psychiatry. Having a little honest wit seems to help. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann reports:

Indian families also don’t treat people with schizophrenia as if they have a soul-destroying illness. . . .. Many of the doctors didn’t mention a diagnosis. Many of the families didn’t ask. There was a good deal of deception—wives grinding medication into the flour for the daily chapattis they made for their husbands, doctors explaining to patients that they were completely well but should take strengthening pills to protect themselves from the ravages of their youth. As a result, none of the patients thought of themselves as having a career-ending illness, and every one of them expected to get better. And at least compared to patients in the West, they generally did.²⁴

A fellow who read The Druid of Harley Street, an anthology of the writings of E. Graham Howe that I edited several years ago, wrote me that he became Howe’s patient after being treated by a psychiatrist who told him that he was “a schizophrenic.” When he told Howe of his previous therapist’s diagnosis, Howe thundered, “Better he should have beaten with you with a stick. It would have done less harm.”

This is not to deny that some forms of psychosis have an organic basis, or that manic-depressive and schizophrenic syndromes are typically accompanied by distinctive biological footprints. It is possible to understand the biological (neuroanatomical and neurochemical) dimension of these disorders, however, without falling into a false causal reductionism. The psychiatrist John C. Cuttings’ philosophically sophisticated evaluations over the past three decades of an enormous body of neuropsychological research have indeed convincingly demonstrated that people exhibiting chronic schizophrenic and depresssive patterns of experience and behavior exhibit distinctive and very different neurological patterns, although this does not mean that they are necessarily genetically caused.²⁵ Likewise, the psychiatrist John E. Nelson, in his important book Healing the Split, presents much of the more convincing neurochemical research on these disorders within a developmental schema that includes a robust consideration of their psychic and spiritual dimensions.²⁶ Given what we are learning about “brain plasticity,” there is no reason to believe that these phenomena are irreversible. Moreover, as we will see when we consider the work of Leon Hammer below, there are forms of traditional but nonetheless fully scientific diagnosis and understanding that place Western medical research in a much more expanded context than it presumes to allow us. That being said, it seems to me that all who would treat people in extreme states owe it to both themselves and their patients to get a good grasp of the neurobiological and neurophenomenological material gathered and presented by Cutting and Nelson, and also by another psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, in his landmark work The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

So, what about this matter of swimming versus sinking? Laing advised us that “Experience may be judged as invalidly mad or as validly mystical. The distinction is not easy.” How do we know the likelihood of each outcome? That is, how do we determine if an individual passing through some form of psychosis, or, put perhaps less prejudicially, an “extreme state,” is moving deeper into egoic entrapment, dysfunction, and bondage or through a process that, no matter how disorienting and difficult, is progressing towards psycho-spiritual healing and even liberation? This surely has a great deal to do with the kind of help one receives.

When we are talking about spiritual profoundity, that help might well first appear as a radical dislocation of one’s ordinary state. Take the example of the late Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. In his youth he was a a well-adjusted (in the words of his biographer, C. B. Purdom, “high-spirited, eager, and friendly”), intellectually capable, artistically oriented, and even athletic natural leader who showed no signs of either emotional or spiritual turmoil

. . . until the May morning in 1913 that he happened across Hazrqat Babajan, a very old Muslim woman saint, sitting under a neem tree in Poona, India. Spontaneously moved to embrace her, from that moment on Meher Baba cared for nothing other than spiritual life. Every evening thereafter he returned to her and simply sat in complete silence until, on a January
evening in 1914, she told him, “This child of mine will after some years create a great sensation in the world and do immense good to humanity.“ After returning home that night, Meher Baba began experiencing electric (kundalini) shocks and passed into profound states of spiritual absorption that for the next ten months rendered him all but unaware of the world.

His own early spiritual adventure would almost surely have won him the diagnosis of “schizophrenic” in the America of his day—with that designation’s attendant dangers of incarceration, insulin shock therapy, and even lobotomy. However, some who find themselves launched upon an apparently psychotic episode are literally blessed to find themselves sustained and guided by the Greater Reality. Meher Baba eventually emerged as as a transmitting spiritual master who made service to people in extreme mental states a feature of his ministry, expecially in India, where he set up several ashrams exclusively for masts (pronounced “musts”). He famously never spoke after his thirty-first year, communicating with others by writing on a small slate that he always had with him.

Meher Baba eventually asked his devotee William Donkin, a British- educated doctor who lived with him in India, to write an account of his spiritual work with the masts. The resulting book, The Wayfarers: Meher Baba with The God-Intoxicated, is a fascinating portrait of a great Adepts’s service to an intriguing and unusual assortment of human beings. Fortunately, the spiritual master himself contributed a very illuminating forward to Donkin’s history. Here I quote Meher Baba at length:

Masts are totally different from ordinary mad persons. Although to the casual observer they might seem to be like each other, they are utterly dissimilar in their intrinsic nature and significance. Though both are far from perfection, and need correctives or healing, there is a vast difference in the nature of their inner mental states, and in the spiritual value of the results that are achieved by the application of correctives. These important differences need to be understood carefully.

In feeble-minded or mad persons, aberrations from the average pattern of responses and actions are the results of their mental incapacity to adhere to the ordinary ways of the world. Through inherent psychic weakness, their directive effort has come to an impasse, or has fizzled out. The cases of break down of the mind in ordinary madness are as often due to aimlessness in life, as they are due to insufficiency, or to the inadequacy of the available “will-power“ or mental strength. There are usually many other contributory factors in such cases. Persons who find shelter in mental hospitals are generally those who have been subjected to unusual mental shock or strain. They lose their balance of mind due either to insufficient mental development or to the operation of physiological or psychic forces of disruption. Though these physiological or psychological forces that have caused mental disruption are irresistible, they are of the ordinary kind. In ordinary madness, the collapse of the normal functioning of the mind has come about by unmaneageable conflicts or disintegrating factors; and the best that can be hoped for by removing the causes of disturbance, is the restoration of the previous state of normality of the mind.

But the case of masts is altogether different in origin, as well as in potentiality. There is no doubt that masts often exhibit an incapacity to deal with the ordinary situations of life; and they are, in this respect, comparable to those who are deranged in mind. But the departure of masts from normal behaviour and responses is not due to lack of sufficient mental development, nor is it due to any chaotic forces of disruption; it is due to a suspension of interest in the ordinary pursuits of life, and to an absorption in the spiritual realities encountered on the path towards Truth-realization.

Like cases of ordinary mental derangement, the cases of many masts may show signs of mental conflict, when considered from the purely theoretical point of view. However, from the point of view of their intrinsic nature, the two cases of mental conflict are poles apart. Ordinary mental derangement is due to an acute and insoluble conflict between incompatible sanskaric [inherited or karmic] inclinations in connection with the world. But the unusual psychic states of the divine madness of masts are due to the dispersion of sanskaric inclinations by the powerful urge to realize the God state.

In the divine madness of masts, the advancing urge to realize the Highest brings about a complete shattering of the mental structure, and all its normal tendencies and capacities. This condition of the mind ultimately leads to a total inhibition of the mind, which is the gate way to the unmani [transcendent or unitive] state. The successful termination of the steady impulsion to Truth initiates the mast into the supra-mental state of integral understanding and direct realization of the Supreme Self. But this drive for the Truth, in its process, entails far-reaching ravages of the psychic field. It involves a complete break-up and a reconstitution of the mental structure, and of existing tendencies. There is no wonder that the inevitable, intermediate mental states are, in their expression, found to be as much removed from average states as are the abnormal states of mad persons.

Confusion between the abnormal and the supernormal states of consciousness arises due to mixing up two ways of interpreting and measuring madness and its degrees. According to one way of interpretation, madness is a deviation from the average mode of consciousness and behaviour; and its degree is to be measured by the amount of its departure from the average pattern. But according to another way of interpretation, madness is the incapacity of consciousness to understand or express truth; and its degree is to be measured by the extent to which it deviates from truth. If these two distinct standards are mixed up with each other and applied simultaneously, they inevitably lead to a confusion between the abnormal mad states the supernormal mast states.

When the mast states are measured by the standard of the average pattern of responses and actions, they will inevitably be interpreted as having an even greater degree of madness than ordinary madness. But if we change the standard, they will be interpreted differently. When the mast states are measured by the standard of realization and expression of truth, they will inevitably be interpreted as having increasing degrees of sanity. When viewed in the light of the Truth, the average pattern of responses and behaviour, which is the most common standard for measuring degrees of madness, would itself appear as a veritable form of madness; and ordinary forms of madness, which have failed to reach even the average pattern, would present themselves as deeper levels of madness. However, all these different phases of unfolding human consciousness are better understood when they are viewed in their continuity, and in relation to the ultimate objective of realizing and expressing the Truth. When viewed in this way, ordinary madness is seen to be the most dim reflection of the Truth, and the average mode of consciousness, and the mast states, are both seen to be increasing degrees of sanity and approximations to the Truth that becomes completely manifest in its unqualified reality and fullness only when the domain of the mind is crossed.

Those aspirants who get launched on the mast line, find themselves propelled by an irresistible impulsion in the form of a yearning to realize God as the Divine Beloved. The psychic journey of masts is a mysterious flight from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from a sense of isolation and frustration to the experience of fulfilment, through a complete merging in the Divine Beloved. Even in the initial stages, those who are on the path of masts get intoxicated by glimpses of God as the Beloved. As the mast advances on the inner planes he gets more and more God-intoxicated, and his yearning to be united with the Divine Beloved becomes so acute and irresistible that it gradually takes him beyond the domain of the mind.²⁷

If we follow Laing’s recommendation (“[I]t describes a Path that is actually there. . . ”) and take the time to read The Book of Strangers, we will get a brief but stunningly vivid picture of just such a mast in action. Although it is a parable set in the not-too-far-distant future, the authenticity of author Ian Dallas’s portrait of Sufi sacred culture is undeniable. In the following passage the story’s protagonist, who is experiencing the painful doubts and yearnings of his own dawning spiritual quest, has just entered an ancient Middle Eastern university town whose three hundred and sixty-five mosques are about to issue the sunset calls to prayer:

As I climbed down the steps back into the city, a man younger than myself, with a flowing white robe that billowed as he moved, came toward me. Although he was climbing the steps, he gave no indication of effort and seemed to float upward. He was bareheaded, and his black curling hair was cut close to his head. He held something in his right hand—held it out almost as if he were offering it to some invisible companion He was beautiful, and vibrations of some enraptured joy came from him in waves. He was oblivious to me as he came up the hill, just as he was unaware of the steps he climbed, yet unerringly he ascended, his glowing eyes staring up ahead.

The first thought that flashed into my mind was that he was stoned. The vibrations, the slight tremor of absence at the center of his being suggested it. But as he approached I changed my mind, deciding that he was not high, but mad. The word “catatonic” came to me as I caught the glazed, empty face, but as he passed me and the radiant energy flowed over me with all the immediacy of rain, I knew he was not mad. I saw what he held in his hands and I heard his deep, urgent voice. He held a necklace of wooden beads. He moved them through his hand, flicking the index finger, and with each bead he exclaimed, “Allah. Allah. Allah. Allah. Allah . . .”

Hurrying to a mosque to pray, our protagonist (who is never named) meets a wizened old Sufi who instructs him in prayer.

Impulsively and gratefully, I grasped his hand. He patted me on the arm like a child. After a while, I told him about the mad boy I had seen on the hill. He nodded as I spoke and shut his eyes. “Majdhub. Not mad, for he is lost. He is’—he laughed—“drunk. Drunk with love. Bathed in wine. Crystallized in honey. Majdhub.” He repeated the word with a certain satisfaction and gaiety that intrigued me. “What a little thing our love is! Can we even call it love? Not very far—hmm?—we will embark on the ocean. Aren’t you afraid. No? Ah! But you must be.²⁸

Although our enraptured Madjhub was an unproblematic—indeed, an inspiring—figure valued in a traditional sacred culture, people of the modern West, and increasingly the world over, have practically no cultural context for hosting such a person. Therefore, it is imperative that we have the benefit of psychologists who—even if not deeply attuned to the living psyche and, most especially, to genuinely spiritual states of mind—are at least open to the verity of these dimensions of experience. Lacking that sympathy and sensitivity, they will feel obliged to interpret such experiences as a little more than a perplexing manifestation of neurotic conflicts or psychotic refusals of relationship. And of course such experiences brings their own tests and trials. These require capable guidance. In that regard, Roberto Assagioli was a true psychiatric pioneer:

The opening of the channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the “I” and the Self, and the flood of light, energy, and joy which follows, often produce a wonderful release. The preceding conflicts and sufferings, with the psychological and physical symptoms which they generated, vanish sometimes with amazing suddenness, thus confirming the fact that they were not due to any physical cause but where the direct outcome of the inner strife. In such cases the spiritual awakening amounts to a real resolution. But in other cases, not infrequent, the personality is unable to rightly assimilate the inflow of light and energy. This happens, for instance, when the intellect is not well coordinated and developed; when the emotions and the imagination are uncontrolled; when the nervous system is too sensitive; or when the inrush of spiritual energy is overwhelming in its suddenness and intensity.

An inability of the mind to stand the illumination, or a tendency to self-centeredness or conceit, may cause the experience to be wrongly interpreted, and there results, so to speak, a “confusion of levels .” The distinction between absolute and relative truths, between the Self and the “I” is blurred, and the inflowing spiritual energies may have the unfortunate effect of feeding and inflating the personal ego.²⁹

As Laing noted in The Politics of Experience, “The distinction [between ‘invalidly mad’ or ‘validly mystical’] is not easy.” With Assagioli (and, I might add, E. Graham Howe), Laing would remind both patient and therapist to be on guard against the inveterate tendency of individuals manifesting extreme states to conflate the personal ego with the Transpersonal Self. He advises us, “The madman is confused. He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural with supernatural.” Once the therapist has concluded that his or her patient is indeed, at least to some significant degree, accessing transpersonal or spiritual dimensions of their being, he now has the task of helping him navigate often difficult and occasionally even very dark passages. Here again Assagioli offers sage advice:

Most spiritual experiences contain a combination in various proportions of permanent changes, temporary changes, the recognition of obstacles that need to be overcome, and the lived realization of what it is like to exist at this higher level of integration. It is this awareness that then becomes an ideal model, a luminous beacon toward which one can navigate and which one can eventually achieve by his own means.

But experiencing the withdrawal of the transpersonal energies and the loss of one’s exalted state of being is necessarily painful, and is apt in some cases to produce strong reactions and serious troubles. The personality reawakens and asserts itself with renewed force. All the rocks and rubbish, which had been covered and concealed at high tide, emerge again. Sometimes it happens that lower propensities and drives, hitherto lying dormant in the unconscious, are vitalized by the inflow of higher energies, or bitterly rebel agains the new aspirations and purposes that are constituting a challenge and a theat to their uncontrolled expression. The person, whose moral conscience has now become more refined and exacting, whose thirst for perfection has become more intense, judges with greater severity and condemns his personality with a new vehemence; he is apt to harbor the mistaken belief of having fallen lower than he was before.

At times the reaction of the personality becomes intensified to the extent of causing the individual to actually deny the value and even the reality of his recent experience. Doubts and criticism enter his mind, and he is tempted to regard the whole thing as an illusion, a fantasy, or an emotional intoxication. He becomes bitter and sarcastic, ridicules himself and others, and even turns his back on his higher ideals and aspirations. Yet, try as he may, he cannot return to his old state; he has seen the vision, and its beauty and power to attract remain with him in spite of his efforts to suppress it. He cannot accept everyday life as before, or be satisfied with it. A “divine homesickness” haunts him and leaves him no peace. In extreme cases, the reaction can be so intense as to become pathological, producing a state of depression and even despair, with suicidal impulses. This state bears a close resemblance to psychotic depression—once called “melancholia”—characterized by an acute sense of unworthiness, a systematic self-depreciation and self-accusation, which may become so vivid as to produce the delusion that one is in hell, irretrievably damned. There is also an acute and painful sense of intellectual incompetence; a paralysis of the will power accompanied by indecision and inabilty to act. But in the case of those who have had an inner awakening or a measure of spiritual realization, the disturbances should not be considered as a mere pathological condition; they have different, far deeper causes. ³⁰

Our need to find a ready and reliable means of distinguishing between truly constructive and destructive passages through apparent madness requires us to engage what I believe to be one of the most fateful conversations of our time—the nature of the psycho-physical anatomy of human beings and what it tells us about human development.

4.

Like his friend and sometime advocate E. Graham Howe, who always considered his vocation that of “medical psychologist,” Laing was unwilling to divorce our psychological understanding of human emotional states from a deep consideration of their physiological manifestations.

I didn’t believe and I still don’t believe there’s any what you call psychiatry or study of mental suffering this is properly divorced from taking into account a person’s whole being in the world which is one’s physical body as well, not in the split way as practised in medicine which is a double split, which reflects the schizophrenia that they describe in patients. There is the split between me and you and there’s the split between your mind and your body, a double schizoid split which I saw reflected in medical theory projected onto people who, when I met them, fully engaged me immediately, however crazy they were supposed to be.³¹

Laing felt that our purportedly separate and discrete bodies are not as separate and discrete as the science of his day believed. His medical intuition told him that we directly, even deeply, interact with and affect one another at the level of our neurology. He would have liked, he told Mullan, “to see how our brainwaves vary with what were were talking about”³²:

I thought there ought to be a branch of neurology which was equivalent to the neurophysiology of the nervous system, and I was convinced that the neurophysiology of one person’s nervous system was related to the neurophysiology of someone else’s nervous system. They were not completely isolated, nonconnected things. They were related to one another, there was an interplay between your physiology and my physiology.³³

Although he tried to keep up with neuroscience, however, Laing simply didn’t have the time: “I never did proceed in that field, of course; I couldn’t do everything. But I wanted to.”³⁴ Nevertheless, when he joined the Tavistock Clinic he was still “imagining a career in medicine in relationship to neuropsychiatry and the phenomenology of the world that we present ourselves to and which we live in as mediated through our central nervous system.”³⁵

Laing’s psycho-physical sensitivities were always acute. In his maturity as a psychiatrist he was quite candid about the profound impact the “double schizoid split” he described above has upon our manifest existence. In The Politics of Experience he gave us what is perhaps the most cogent phenomenological depiction of the psycho-physical complexion of our unregenerated humanity ever written by a psychiatrist:

When our personal worlds are rediscovered and allowed to reconstitute themselves, we first discover a shambles. Bodies half- dead; genitals dissociated from heart; heart severed from head; head dissociated from genitals. Without inner unity, with just enough sense of continuity to clutch at identity—the current idolatry. Torn—body, mind and spirit—by inner contradictions, pulled in different directions. Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body—a half-crazed creature in a mad world.³⁶

Psychoanalysis occasionally elicits this kind of deep polemical expression from its most committed and profound thinkers, whether artist, analyst, or academic. D. H. Lawrence, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm are certainly enduring cases in point. Even so, the profession is rarely kind to its own prophets. There is no better proof of this than the example of Reich himself, who famously was made to pay a terrible price for daring to challenge the psychiatric orthodoxies of his day. Pointing out that “Reich’s proposals as to the social influences on the functions of the sympathetic, parasympathetic and central nervous systems, and on our biochemistry, are testable, but are never tested,” Laing was obviously deeply supportive of his description of psychological health as the capacity for “a free flow of bioelectric energy” that mobilizes “the imprisoned serpent power,” thus allowing “a serpentine undulation of the whole body” in orgasm. In the same article Laing speaks appreciatively about Reich’s theory “of a type of biological and cosmic energy, and the investigation of its particular energy field.” ³⁷

Reich’s concept of “orgone energy” restores to our discourse the discarded, much maligned vitalistic element in science that animates the core of all traditional medical systems, East and West alike, along with functional psycho-physical esoterism of the spiritual cultures within which they arose. It is significant that Laing drew together our central and autonomic nervous systems and the functional blockage of bioelectric and orgone energy. This gives structure, process, and substance to what is meant when Laing otherwise speaks of us as “body, mind, spirit.” For most of human history these were accounted for in terms of our “esoteric anatomy,” a term Adi Da Samraj in particular highlighted as the key to understanding the stages of human development.

“Esoteric anatomy” is a good way of designating the apparent structures and processes that connect, regulate, and balance our physical body, the envelope of vital energy that pervades and surrounds it, our verbal or lower mind and will, our deeper or higher psyche (including our creative imagination, discriminative intelligence, and higher will), and the transcendent intuition that penetrates the root fiction of egoity itself. The best known and most widely employed esoteric schema—which I have just employed here—is the system of concentric gross, subtle, and causal bodies or “sheaths” bequeathed to us by the Indian Tantra. It is also elaborated in terms of the chakras or nerve plexes of consciousness and energy and the channels or circuitry that connect them. As his advocacy of Wilhelm Reich suggests, these were by no means as alien to Laing as one might have supposed.

Five years before writing The Politics of Experience, Laing contributed a foreward to E. Graham Howe’s book Cure or Heal?, who he celebrated there as “a master psychologist” and whose many books he praised for having “exhibited spiritual authority anchored to flesh and blood reality” (and who, by the way, he elsewhere described elsewhere as “a significant figure” in “the world of gurus and spiritual maturity” who was “absolutely and totally supportive of me having such a mixture of exasperated contempt for the world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis”).³⁸ In Cure or Heal? Howe correlates aspects of the chakra system of Indian Tantric esotericism with Western neuroanatomy. In his foreward to the book Laing notes:

Chakras for instance, those corporeal centres of energy known to the Hindus for thousands of years, are now being discovered by psychosomatic medicine. Howe has been using Chakra psychology for years, and perhaps knows more about this field than anyone in this country, if not in the West. This book contains in straightforward and reliable terms an account of the Chakra, in a way that suddenly lifts them out of the region of obscure scholarship and makes them immediately relevant to the practicing doctor and patient. What we have here is not a synthesis of different schools, but an original expression in the modern idiom of that which all schools seek to express in more or less rigid and desiccated ways. But here the expression is supple and fresh.”³⁹

For our purposes here the simplest and most useful way to envision our esoteric anatomy is to distinguish between the earth-bound, vital, instinctive, emotionally reactive, and verbal-mental preoccupations of the lower or “gross” life of the first three chakras situated below the heart (sometimes referred to as the “horizontal” dimension because of their association with the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious preoccupations of our natural, ordinary waking life), and the spacious or open, emotionally attuned, psychically sensitive, creatively imaginative, intelligent, intuitive, and spiritually oriented interests of the four chakras that constitute our high or “subtle,” being at and above the heart (referred to as the “vertical”dimension because it relates to the higher psychic, superconscious, and deeply intuitive functions that are associated with the states of dreaming, deep sleep, and Transcendental Realization Itself). Earth and sky, chthonic and supernal, body and mind, sense and spirit, life and light, instinct and intuition, left- brain and right-brain, descending and ascending—these are just some of the commonly paired opposites through which this polarity is expressed. Chinese medicine likewise pairs the “body-essence” with the “spirit-soul,” Max Scheler contrasts drank and geist, Jung refers to the “somatic-unconscious” and the “psychic-unconscious,” Roberto Assagioli and Sri Aurobindo speak of the “subconscious” and the “superconscious,” and Adi Da Samraj describes the lower and upper “coils,” one descending, the other ascending from the heart. In his book Invisible Anatomy, E. Graham Howe diagrammed the two dimensions and their meeting point.

From this perspective, we can readily see that the conventionally mad people described by Meher Baba are profoundly imbalanced and maladapted in their lower coil; that is, the functional requirements of their ordinary earthly existence—sometimes referred to as our “chthonic life”. Likewise the masts he so lovingly served are primarily preoccupied with the psychic and sometimes authentically spiritual phenomena of the upper coil or vertical dimension typically associated with light (sometimes referred to as our “celestial life”), also in a maladaptive manner (albeit to a profoundly different effect).

In any case, joining the two coils together (literally in the middle of body) is what almost all spiritual traditions hold to be the true center of human consciousness—the “heart” of which I have been speaking. Thus conceived, our heart is not merely the pump that oxygenates and circulates our blood. It is also the locus of our feeling, psychically or imaginally sensitive, and spiritually conscious being—that is, of our truly intelligent awareness. As such, the heart is the place from and by which the movements above and below, subtle and gross, vertical and horizontal, are brought into balance and integrated. By such means, the great universals of Consciousness and Life are thereby set free to pervade, nurture, organize, and transform the entire body-mind.

Adi Da Samraj summarized the matter this way:

The heart is extended above and below. Only the heart itself stands unmediated in the Place of Truth. If the dimension of the whole body above and below do not bow to the heart’s Place, then the heart becomes contracted and secluded in the ego-sense, the disposition of the separate soul. In that case, all worlds become delusion, and even simple things a torment. All that arises becomes a dream of ego, or independent consciousness.⁴⁰

Howe introduced R. D. Laing to perhaps the most wellknown esoteric designation of this heart center—as the anahata or “heart” chakra of Hindu Tantra. In the Mad To Be Normal interviews Laing offers this interesting report:

Howe cultivated a particular form of meditation directly on the heart Chakra and he convened a group of a few people that he knew who meditated with him for about 40 minutes a week. He invited me to join and I did. We never talked about it; at the time we simply convened together at 14 Wimpole Street and sat down in chairs and proceeded to meditate in whatever way we imagined we were meditating, on the heart Chakra. There were about eight of us. I can’t remember who the others were and I don’t think we ever met personally.⁴¹

Remarkably, the great esoteric spiritual schools and the traditional medical systems they spawned fully place the heart’s spiritual function at the core of both their meditative, yogic, and devotional practices and their medical diagnostic and treatment systems. Anyone who seriously studies the world’s traditional medical systems (traditional Chinese, Ayurvedic, Siddha, Tibetan and other indigenous medicines, homeopathy, naturopathy, shamanism, and all kinds of somatic approaches) soon realizes that they are fundamentally participatory, psycho-physical sciences rooted in the understanding that human beings are systems of living energy, or life-force, whose ultimate source and governance is a heart-based spirit-consciousness. In their more developed forms, these systems are as rigorously empirical and theoretically coherent as any Western science. But since they are psycho- physical sciences, they operate prior to or on the inside, as it were, of the body-mind split, providing extraordinarily detailed functional portraits of our interlocking physical, emotional, mental, psychic, and spiritual patterning. This close connection between traditional spirituality and traditional medicine explains why from time immemorial, in both the East and the West, so many holy men and women have also been talented physicians and healers. They are the foundations of human culture, if that culture is to have any hope of knowing the Great Unity.

Of course merely to direct ones attention to a subtle energy complex—whether the heart complex or anything else—is of negligible value. Moreover, to deliberately stimulate the higher or vertical energy centers above the heart, especially via the famous kundalini energy, without suitable preparation and guidance can be quite destructive. It took the Indian social scientist Gopi Krishna, for example, over a dozen years to realize human normalcy after his own premature kundalini awakening. That is why every significant spiritual tradition requires intensive preliminary disciplines to purify, ground, and morally transform individuals before allowing any engagement with advanced esoteric practices. Adi Da Samraj reminds us that other Adepts have warned disciples against naively engaging kundalini energies:

. . . I am reminded of something Shirdi Sai Baba [a great early twentieth century Hindu Adept] apparently said to somebody one time, cautioning him against indulging in certain kinds of psychic intensity and admonishing him to be very careful in “waking up the snakes.” In other words, it has by no means been universally recommended that one get into this kundalini business and ascending Yoga and psychism and subtle experiences and so forth. It is even a kind of fad that has developed in the Western world, with its limited experience of esoteric matters. And in the Western world particularly, it has developed quite recently.

[T]he most fundamental function of the brain is to act as a barrier to what is previous to, or outside, the gross mechanism. The brain is there so you will not think the deeper being. It is there to lock you out from it. Now, why? Not because some evil has overcome you, but because it is not good for you to become involved as an ego in the great range of all possibilities. To do so would be binding.

You are born in physical form for a unique purpose, which is to be purified. You are not born as a human being merely to be a human being, merely to be this physical person and get fulfilled. You are born to create a circumstance of conscious awareness in which the karmic is beyond your awareness, prior to your awareness, so that you can be purified, so that you can be concentrated in the physical and do sadhana [spiritual practice] there, which in effect will release you from the unconscious and the tendencies hidden there. Fundamentally you are already in a circumstance that is the appropriate one for sadhana. It is not that you must first enlarge your mind and your sphere of experience into the subtle play.⁴²

Meeting the demands and challenges of ordinary physical life, however, is precisely what Meher Baba’s masts refuse to do. It is a very telling failure, and helps explain why they required years of the great Adept’s personal attention and care just to achieve a basic, working equanimity. Even if the masts were more Godwardly oriented than most everyone else, they were nonetheless greatly disturbed. In fact, most spiritual traditions agree that it is inauspicious, if not outright dangerous, to attempt to independently engage our subtle or vertical yogic and mystical potentials without first bringing our vital-physical, emotional, and discursive mental life into balance. (Although, under skilled guidance, such explorations might serve a valuable initiatory function.) At the same time, the traditions also maintain that it is not possible to achieve a truly stable personal equanimity and good order without benefit of the nurturing heart- feeling and governing intelligence that is the spirit’s special gift. Left to itself the gross or lower life is incoherent, a function of the momentary and always conflicting impulses of the uninstructed vital being.

In every serious spiritual tradition, therefore, beginning aspirants are required to submit their ordinary functional life to purifying, enlivening, habit-transforming self-discipline, while also beginning to listen to and otherwise study the sacred teachings and engage the foundation practices of concentration, meditation, devotion, spiritual reception, and so forth. Such practical discipline almost always takes place within the setting of a gathering of similarly dedicated aspirants and entails obligations of personal accountability and compassionate service to others that frustrate our habitual self-enclosure and foster our empathic, moral awakening. These hard trials of discipline, which often entail a kind of fiery, multi-leveled purification, are compensated by increased personal wellbeing and the spiritual quickening so often spontaneously generated in the good company of more mature practitioners. The cultural implications of this for the psychotherapeutic treatment of people in extreme states remains to be explored.

Granted these caveats against prematurely catalyzing kundalini energies, it also must be said that contemporary Westernized humankind’s intense prejudice against engaging the vertical dimension of experience— most especially experience above and beyond the brain—is the dominant fault binding our entire civilization to its exclusive and ultimately self- destructive concentration in the earthly, horizontal dimension of experience and life. This tendency is amply on display via our current intense love- affair with neurobiological psychology. Although the interpersonal neurobiology developed by Daniel Siegel, Allan Schore, and others undoubtedly reveals important correlations between neurophysiological function and behavior, the disposition and manner in which it is currently practiced excludes forms of causation and modes of understanding that exceed the brain and body complex known to Western science. In so doing, it fails to take advantage of the subtlety and explanatory reach available through more traditional systems of diagnosis and practice. It is unfortunate Laing did not have the opportunity to develop a more inclusive science of “interpersonal-phenomenological neurophysiology,” to use the term coined by his student Steven Gans.

Be that as it may, although Laing opened his own unique passageway between psychology and spirituality back in the 1960s, there have been surprisingly few serious attempts within psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis to explore those possibilities. To this day relatively few psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, or psychotherapists have even attempted to develop theories of psychosis (or, again, less prejudicially, “extreme states”) that are at ease with the psychic, paranormal, esoteric spiritual and mystical phenomenology that so often accompany them. Recent works by Paris Williams, a clinical psychologist, and Edward Podvoll and John E. Nelson, both psychiatrists, are attempts to explain the various ways in which experiences of the “transliminal” (Williams) or “Ground” (Nelson) that is our spiritual and non-dual nature can figure in both the genesis and the healing of psychosis.

5.

Psychotherapy can be understood as a king of moral ascesis, or creative ethical ordeal, that restores our capacity for human relatedness under the testing circumstances of ordinary life. The discipline has profited greatly by following the myriad threads that lead to and emanate from that core defining critical purpose. But the time is long past when psychotherapy, and perhaps even psychoanalysis, can appropriately be conducted without fully integrating life itself (which, in the words of Owen Barfield, “is not an abstraction, but a factually antecedent unity”) into the process of personal insight.⁴³ In other words, we must fully admit the energetic dimensions of vitality, feeling, and spirit into both the diagnosis and treatment of emotional conflicts. There is nothing in existential philosophy that forbids us to acknowledge the role of the élan vital in psychological growth. To the contrary, Paul Tillich, a Protestant existential theologian whose The Courage to Be Laing admired, explains that a robust vitality is essential if we are to truly integrate, rather than avoid, the “Fear and anxiety [that] must be considered as expressions of what one could call: ’self-affirmation on its guard’:

Courage, in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity. . . The right courage therefore must, like the right fear, be understood as the expression of perfect vitality. The courage to be is a function of vitality. Diminishing vitality consequently entails diminishing courage. To strengthen vitality means to strengthen the courage to be. Neurotic individuals and neurotic periods are lacking in vitality.⁴⁴

I believe psychotherapists who wish to most effectively serve their clients’ emotional healing and moral awakening must ultimately combine the practical, moral and ethical, esoteric spiritual, and wisdom practices of the great religious and spiritual traditions and the great energy healing modalities evolved in both traditional and modern cultures⁴⁵ with existential and other dynamic forms of psychotherapy.⁴⁶  Leon Hammer, a medical doctor who trained at the famed William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, was one of the true pioneers of this evolving synthesis. His breakthrough book Dragon Rise, Red Bird Flies: Psychology and Chinese Medicine could be read with profit by any psychotherapist.⁴⁷ In it Hammer flatly asserts that “We can and must consider the entire range of behavior, personality, and intention as a province of energetics.”⁴⁸ He goes on to note that concepts of the ‘spirit’ (Shen), which is centered in the heart, are so central to Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) diagnosis and treatment system that some two fifths of all acupuncture points are associated with the reinvigoration of the Shen in the heart center. (To this day Hammer is considered one of the great masters of TCM pulse diagnosis.)

In Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies, Leon Hammer ably demonstrates how his own effectiveness as a psychotherapist greatly improved when he began to employ TCM, one of our planet’s great energy medical systems, in his psychotherapeutic work (in his case, via acupuncture treatments). Remarkably, Hammer found that openly sharing his TCM diagnosis with patients provided them with a a functionally useful and often profoundly illuminating portrait of themselves—one that could not easily be discounted as reflecting the therapist’s personal prejudices. Indeed, Hammer reports that only once in all his years of practice did a patient claim to be offended or otherwise adversely affected by his sharing of such information—testimony to the underlying psychological resilience of we human beings.

Hammer wrote that “Acupuncture clearly demonstrated its ability to shorten the period of time required for significant [psychological] change to occur, and to engender major alterations in patterns of behavior and thought well beyond what the other modalities of treatment could contribute.”⁴⁹ That his acupuncture treatments served the development of his patients’ self-awareness is equally impressive. Therefore, both dimensions of his work—the psychotherapy and the acupuncture diagnosis and treatment, then—should be kept in mind while reading my final lengthy quotation, here from Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies:

The accepted goal of therapy to achieve a change in character, in the ways in which a person characteristically avoids living life, was more readily achieved with the introduction of the needles. The depressed person who avoids both joy and responsibility for negative feelings; the obsessional person who avoids feeling by means of rigidity and orderliness; the oral person who avoids standing on the earth with his own two feet by demanding to be held and nourished; the schizoid person who avoids feeling through detachment; the schizophrenic person who avoids terror through fragmentation; or the paranoid person who avoids the unknown through projection: all of these desperate, maladaptive restitutive maneuvers represent the best that a person could do at the time, and with what was available, to stay in contact while staying intact. And any such individuals might be helped toward a constructive restitution by the needles.

Perhaps the most important consequences of the introduction of acupuncture into my practice was the flowering of awareness in my patients and my own appreciation of its significance to growth and development. People became aware of the tensions in their body, and how they were creating them through thought and action; of their resistance to feeling good and how they made themselves feel bad. Their sensitivity to food, sound, air, and emotional ambiance made them more alive and better able to care for themselves and self-heal. There were abreactions and cathartic events. Repressed emotions, thoughts, memories, dreams, images, and dissociated material (including that of childhood, the birth experience, and even perhaps old incarnations) came into awareness.

With even momentary relief of tension, anxiety, depression, and pain there came, often for the first time, the knowledge that it was possible to be free of the commonplace and accepted misery. Hope of renewal, accompanied by fear of the unknown, emerged from the shadow of the past. Perhaps most remarkable to me were changes in body awareness, balance, centering, groundedness, esteem, and even amazing changes in physiognomy. Psycho-physiological conditions were profound affected. My first patient, a Frenchwoman who had had acupuncture in France, not only recovered quickly from a manic- depressive illness, but also, within a matter of months, from a lifelong asthamatic and allergic condition. I recall one patient saying to me, “now that you have relieved my physical pain I must face my mental pain.”

Patients have reported feeling more alive and balanced, with an increase in energy to cope with problems of survival, communication, relating, working, and other stresses. Ego functions often improved, accompanied by expression of overall satisfaction with life. Even spiritual growth has been included by some as one of the benefits of acupuncture in this setting. Strangely, acupuncture has seemed to have the most dramatic results with people who showed the strongest denial mechanisms, the least insight, acute debilitating emotional states such as panic, drug, and alcohol dependent conditions, and the most severe psychiatric disorders. Even the draining, “toxic” personality became more nurturing.⁵⁰

The last two sentences in the above quotation merit special attention. Earlier in the book Hammer informed us:

I discovered in my practice that psychotics who had nothing to lose, frequently became “well” faster and more completely than neurotics, for whom change was a threat to the known and proven misery-ridden roads to power. Paradoxically, “failure” was a great opportunity and “success” an obstacle to growth. I learned that the availability of dissociated material made change possible, provided that one could construct a “new life experience” with that material, significantly different from the original. I realized that transference was simply the opportunity for that experience and that “resistance” was restitutive behavior, to be noted and respected as an attempt at survival—an attempt, to be sure, that had later become fixed and, therefore, a handicap. All “restitutive behavior” was, however, an attempt to maintain contact, while staying intact. I came to feel that the resolution of this polarization of energies was the main issue in therapy and life, rather than the psychoanalytic preoccupation with “resistance, ” which is the real resistance to growth, perpetrated by the therapy.⁵¹

It is wonderful to see that in recent years two of the foremost contemporary systematizers of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Giovanni Maciocia and Bob Flaws, have each produced a very substantial and comprehensive textbook on the use of TCM in the treatment of emotional and mental disorders.⁵² Although I am not competent to evaluate those two particular books, I do know that their other clinical writings are of the highest order. Neither Tibetan nor Ayurvedic medicine has yet produced equivalent textbooks—works that identify specific treatment protocols for the classic syndromes of Western psychology (depressive, schizoid, hysteric, etc.). However, there are worthy introductions to the topic in each of them. Terry Clifford, a psychiatric nurse who traveled to Tibet, Nepal, and Northern India to study how Tibetan medicine treats psychiatric disorders, gave us a good introduction in her excellent Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry. And David Frawley, the West’s leading Vedic scholar and a respected ayurvedic doctor, introduced the topic from Indian medicine’s point of view in his Ayurveda and the Mind.⁵³

7.

R. D. Laing defined psychotherapy as “an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.” Although there there is little in his writings that address the energetic dimension of human relationships, we have already seen he was sensitive to his patients on that level. But his valued friend E. Graham Howe foregrounded this issue in Cure or Heal?. In a section headed “Relationship Is the Source of Life and Energy, and of the Renewal of Personal Being,” which I included in The Druid of Harley Street, Howe offers a dynamic definition of the word “relationship” that integrates the critical dimension of our polarized energetics with the process of insight that all psychotherapies promote. Howe’s concept of relationship, therefore, helps us integrate both the horizontal/interpersonal and the vertical/transpersonal and energetic dimensions that are key to our understanding of both ordinary human maturity and the ordeals of madness:

Relationship is the experience of polarity between self and other. It is the cause of what flows, or happens, or eventuates, between us. I am over here. You are over there. But what is between us? A certain experience happens, and certain force flows, and expresses the truth, even miraculously, certainly non-conceptually, of our relationship. Whatever we may have thought or hoped or feared, if we are able to appreciate this new event in spite of our hopes and fears, we find that it is something quite different, new, true-in-itself, now for a moment, and personally—mine, and yours.

What is between us, what is the medium of our mysterious communication? What flows. The creative medium through which life flows, the truly creative medium, is “water.” But the inverted commas must serve to indicate that this mysterious bridge, or medium, is only “analogous” to water. As Jung might say, this is “archetypal” water. But these are only words, and to appreciate the reality of this medium it is necessary to experience it.

Let it be enough then for the time being to state that life needs apartness, separation, division and polarity, in order that energy may flow, experience may be realized and growth may happen. To close the vital gap, for the sake of comfort or security, is to find neither life nor death, but only depression and inertia. Apartness from the object of desire is the means of our life and renewal, and satisfaction is most salutary when soonest dissatisfied. The heart of life is like the wound of Amfortas, in the story of Parsifal. It is at its strongest when broken, provided that it claims no need for being mended.⁵⁴

Relationship, then, is the dynamic paradox wherein static oppositions and rigidities are loosened, and Heaven and earth, the unmanifest and the manifest, consciousness and life-energy are brought into rhythmic balance. Relationship is the primary functional meaning of all apparent things and processes. Relationship is how we experience our all-inclusive interconnectedness. Relationship is how we are sustained, how we are grown, how we are healed.

The reconciliation of the opposites is of course another definition of the task of psychotherapy. R. D. Laing clearly intended to highlight the profound cultural problematique created by our now all but frozen opposition between life and Spirit when he placed this epigram from the great fifteenth century doctor Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici at the head of The Politics of Experience:

. . . that great and true Amphibian whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds;

Laing did not elect to include the sentence that followed:

for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.⁵⁵

I believe that that full statement presents the intense dichotomy that defined Laing’s life and continues to challenge those who would advocate a spiritual path in our secular age. Francis Huxley described an occasion in which Laing arrived at a weekly Philadelphia Society society meeting confessing “he felt like exploding and breaking furniture.” “With tears streaming down his cheeks,” Huxley continued, he “told of the conflict raging between his two hemispheres. ‘I feel both of them’ he said, ‘they alternate, I’ve seen them in detail in myself.’”⁵⁶ In this Laing was also bodying forth the dilemma that pervades modern existential philosophy. Lewis Thompson, to my mind the twentieth century’s greatest aphorist, captured it brilliantly:

The profound modern Western romanticism, the agonistic tension in Luther, Pascal, Beethoven, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Kierkegaaard, is from the sense of eternity as the polar opposite of time, the Divine opposite of the human—the blind, violent attempt to conjugate them together. . . Spiritual ignorance would take heaven by violence for it does not know that there is only ‘heaven’.⁵⁷

Although he leaned East with both sympathy and intuition, Laing was nevertheless principally a man of the West. He may have engaged with both Sankara and the Buddha, but he was more at home with the likes of Kierkegaard, Buber, and the atheist Sartre. His genius was in the interpersonal realm. Of course he was deeply polarized to the spiritual dimension, both by personal preference and because of the needs of his clients. But Laing never came to rest in the divine and ultimately it functioned as a sometimes tangibly but only temporarily known reality. He was not a spiritual Realizer.

Indeed, Laing’s own version of the indelible conflict Lewis Thompson rightly claimed was suffered by nearly all existential philosophers—no doubt each in his own way—is well on display in this striking, and, yes, prophetic, statement in The Politics of Experience, which all but defines the heroic mood of that book:

The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete.Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

Already everything in our time is directed to categorizing and segregating this reality from objective facts. This is precisely the concrete wall. Intellectually, motionally, interpersonally, organizationally, intuitively, theoretically, we have to blast our way through the solid wall, even if at the risk of chaos, madness and death. For from this side of the wall, this is the risk. There are no assurances, no guarantees.⁵⁸

Those who knew him celebrate Laing as a great explorer and healer of the human psyche. While he may not be formally acknowledged as the artist, philosopher, and prophet he also surely was, these too were aspects of his being. Laing’s own confessions appearing in this article belie historian of psychoanalysis Daniel Burston’s claim that “despite his varied reputation as a militant atheist and electric mystic, the sad and simple truth is that Laing spent most of his adult life as a reluctant and often anguished agnostic who longed for the consolations of faith and a personal relationship with God.”⁵⁹ Even so, there can be no doubt that he was an intensely divided man who struggled to integrate his own sometimes extreme opposites. His struggles with depression and alcohol and his all too frequent boorish behavior provide more than enough evidence of that.

R. D. Laing is perhaps best remembered as a truly great alienist—a doctor and guide to unmoored souls who otherwise could find no one they could trust and nowhere safe to go. His legendary ability to befriend deeply troubled people and thereafter help unravel their skeins of self- and other- entangled misperception, false presumption, deception, and bondage—a compassionate genius memorialized in the vignette-dialogues that make up his book Knots—cannot be denied. We do the world a service by continuing to preserve his many lessons, all the better to keep watch over the existential flame he so courageously tended.

References

1 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967), p. 101.
2 Ibid., pp 17-18.
3To appreciate how deeply Laing got under the skin of the more forward thinking of his
fellow professionals, consider these sentences from Jungian psychotherapist Ann Belford Ulanov’s 2001 book Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality: “Cut loose from the transcendent, we fear a world in which anything can happen as Nietzsche predicted, or in which the dreadful has already happened, as Heidegger pronounced. In such a milieu, we grieve at the truth of Mallarmé’s words, “L’enfant abdique son éxstase.” Laing is credited here.
4 In point of fact, such free inquiry is precisely what people engaged in intensive spiritual discipline are themselves doing—experimental science. That the experimenter is also the subject under study simply required the development of investigative procedures (generally called “hermeneutics“ these days) appropriate to the so-called object of study. Fortunately, the tradition of this kind of participatory science goes back several thousands years.
5 “Sparks of Light: An Interview with R.D. Laing,” The Laughing Man, 5, 2 (Clearlake,
CA, 1984), p. 19.
6 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 10.
7 Ibid., p. 11.
8 Ibid., p. 98.
9 Ibid., p. 96.
10 James Keys, Only Two Can Play This Game (Cambridge, 1971), p. 26.
11 Ibid., p. 16 (my emphasis).
12 Salman Raschid (ed), R D Laing: Contemporary Perspectives (London, 2005), p. 195. 13 M. Guy Thompson (ed.), The Legacy of R.D. Laing (New York, 2015), pp. 118-119. 14 Peter Mezan, “After Freud and Jung, Now Comes R.D. Laing,” Esquire (January, 1972), p. 160.
15 Laing, The Politics of Experience, pp. 92-93.
16 R. D. Laing, Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Psychotherapy [Casette recording no. L330-WIA]. (Phoenix, AZ, 1985), available from the Milton H. Erickson Foundation, Inc., 3y06 N. 24th St., Phoenix, AZ 85016-6500.
17 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 100.
18 E. Graham Howe, The Druid of Harley Street: The Spiritual Psychology of E. Graham Howe (Berkeley, 2012), p. 539.
19 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 99.
20 The three following indent quotes are from The Laughing Man, pp. 19-21.
21 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 82.
22 Ibid., p. 95.
23 Ibid., p. 93.
24 Tanya Luhrman, “Beyond the Brain,“ The Wilson Quarterly, (Summer 2012)
25 John Cutting, A Critique of Psychopathology (Berlin, 2012), see esp. Chapter V.
26 John E. Nelson, Healing the Split: Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill (Albany, NY, 1994), see esp. Chapter V.
27 William Donkin, The Wayfarers: Meher Baba with The God-intoxicated [Meher Baba, Foreward], (San Francisco, 1948), pp. 3-5.
28 Ian Dallas, The Book of Strangers (New York, 1972), pp. 74-76.
29 Stanslav and Christina Grof (eds.), Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (New York, 1989), p. 34-35.
30 Ibid., pp. 39-40.
31 Bob Mullan, Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing (London, 1996), p. 116.
32 See the research conducted by the Heartmath Institute
(https://www.heartmath.org/research/research-library/)
33 Ibid., p. 113.
34 Ibid., p. 135.
35 Ibid., p. 144
36 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 33.
37 R. D. Laing, “Liberation by Orgasm”, New Society (March 28, 1968).
38 Mullan, Mad to Be Normal, p. 234.
39 E. Graham Howe, Cure or Heal?: A Study of Therapeutic Experience [Foreward by
R.D. Laing], (London, 1965), pp. 9-10.
40 Adi Da Samraj [Bubba Free John], The Paradox of Instruction, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, 1977), p. 69.
41 Mullan, Mad To Be Normal, pp. 233-234
42 Adi Da Samraj, Crazy Wisdom, 7, 4 & 5, pp. 27, 31.
43 Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London, 1971), p. 42.
44 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be [New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 78-79.
45 Especially, but not exclusively, the great Oriental systems. There is no reason to limit our resort to the traditional medical cultures such as Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Jungian psychiatrist Edward Whitmont has shown that Western homeopathy can be an equally powerful adjunct to psychotherapy. And I suspect Stanislav Grof’s holotrophic breathing, for example, is a valuable new approach. 46 Bringing this about is an evolutionary necessity that Eastern medical practitioners—coming as they do from anti-individualist, emotionally reticent
cultures—have always been reluctant to engage. This explains why the first modern textbooks on utilizing traditional Chinese medicine in the treatment of psychological disorders have all been written by Westerners.
47 Hammer also wrote traditional Chinese medicine’s most highly regarded—even in China!—textbook on pulse diagnosis.
48 Leon Hammer, Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies (Barrytown, NY, 1990), p. xxiii.
49 Hammer, Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies, p. 18.
50 Ibid., pp. 18-19.
51 Ibid., p. xix.
52 Giovanni Maciocia, The Psyche in Chinese Medicine: Treatment of Emotional and mental Disharmonies with Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs (London, 2009) and Bob
Flaws and James Lake, Chinese Medical Psychiatry (Boulder, CO, 2010)
53 Terry Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry: The Diamond Healing (New York, 1990) and Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness (Twin Lakes, WI. 1996(.
54 E. Graham Howe, The Druid of Harley Street, pp. 99-100.
55 Sir Thomas Browne, Religion Medici, Sect. 34.
56 Salman Raschid (ed), R D Laing: Contemporary Perspectives, p. 196.
57 Lewis Thompson, Fathomless Heart: The Spiritual and Philosophical Reflections of an English Poet-Sage (Berkeley, 2011) p. 77.
58 Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 100.
59 Salman Raschid (ed), R D Laing: Contemporary Perspectives, p. 183.

Copyright (c) 2016 William Stranger

          Some people may feel that by going on at such length, I am trying to upstage the Master. If so, however, they are approaching this commentary in the wrong spirit. Commentaries on the Old and New Testament, the Yoga and Buddhist sutras, with which Laing was intimately familiar, often go on for pages about a single line of text. Such commentaries imply that the text is worthy of sustained reflection, not something to be read and passed over in a hurry. Does that mean that I approach Laing’s words as if they were “holy writ?” No, indeed. Like the spiritual traditions in which he was so deeply versed, Laing was full of contradictions, and bringing those contradictions to light is a perfectly legitimate and respectful undertaking if we use the awareness of them to reflect with greater depth and clarity on the issues at hand, rather than making them the basis for a hostile deconstruction of his work. I hope that this free flowing meditation on Laing’s interview with Feuerstein will help to consolidate Laing’s hold on posterity, and demonstrate his continuing relevance to spiritual seekers in our time. Let us begin with the interview itself.

While the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing has gained worldwide professional renown for his work with schizophrenia, he has also won popular regard for his vehement social criticism. He contends that society, in general, is founded on denial of self and experience, rather than the discovery of reality in its fullness and wholeness. He has strongly objected to the modern trend toward depersonalization, especially as it appears in psychiatry in the guise of scientific objectivism.

[This article originally appeared in The Laughing Man magazine, vol. 5, #12, pp. 19-21. It is used by permission of The Dawn Horse Press. All rights reserved.]

    Before we comment on the interview itself, it may be helpful to know the following. A year or so before his death in August 1989, R.D. Laing was living quietly in Going, Austria, when he confided the following dream to his friend and follower, Theodor Itten. He dreamt he was “in” a soccer match, but that he was “both sides.” In other words, he did not identify with any individual player or team member, i.e. a captain or a goalkeeper. Nor did he adopt a corporate identity, becoming one team as opposed to the other. Instead, his description conveys the impression that in some sense he was everybody, on both sides, if not implicated in the action, the game itself (i.e. the offensive and defensive maneuvers from both sides of the field).

      Unfortunately, Laing said no more about this intriguing oneiric interlude. Beyond identifying it as a football (soccer) match, he did not describe the visual palette of the dream, nor report on the affect that accompanied it. Finally, he left no “free associations” by means of which we could interpret it, nor resolve the questions it begs—“If you are both sides, then the whole notion of winning becomes moot, doesn’t it? If you are both sides, then no one wins or everyone wins—correct?”

      Even in the absence of such information, however, several interpretations are possible. As I pointed out in The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing, books like Sanity, Madness and the Family, The Politics of Experience and The Politics of The Family were filled with scathing critiques of the nuclear family, giving rise to the widespread impression that Laing was basically opposed to the family. Nevertheless, beginning in 1972, Laing, denounced revolutionaries who neglected their wives and children in the interests of building “the revolution”, and defended the family against the growing tide of counter-cultural and ideologically inflected contempt for family life, baffling and antagonizing many former friends and supporters in the process.

        A similar reversal took place with respect to his stance on psychiatric drugs. Laing’s first book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, was a sustained attempt to make the process of going mad “intelligible” to ordinary, educated people. It was mercifully free of the jargon of mainstream psychiatry, psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the dominant approaches in the mental health field at the time, because Laing felt that reliance on such language gets in the way of understanding patients as suffering human beings, rather than deepening our understanding of them. As the sixties unfolded, Laing’s broadened his critique of mainstream psychiatry well beyond its theoretical models, to include various involuntary “treatments”, like drugs and electroshock, and became so vehement that he was often accused of being an “anti-psychiatrist”–a label he always rejected, by the way. But toward the middle and end of the eighties, Laing’s stance, though still critical, became more conciliatory, and he reached out again to many old psychiatric colleagues in an effort to engage them in dialogue. Perhaps inevitably, as he did this with increasing frequency, certain inconsistencies between his earlier and later positions came to light, disconcerting some of his followers from previous decades, who wondered where he really stood on the issues, and why he no longer opposed the (voluntary) use of psychotropic medication, provided patients were fully informed of the risks entailed in this approach to treatment.

          Thomas Szasz, whose reputation as “the gadfly of psychiatry” during the 1960’s was gradually eclipsed by Laing’s, remained remarkably consistent in all his basic positions as the decades unfolded, and would no doubt interpret Laing’s dream as an endopsychic perception–or a spontaneous symbolic self-representation—of Laing’s muddle-headedness and opportunism, of his tendency to embrace or espouse both sides of an issue; in other words, to equivocate, or to revel in ambiguity when it suited his purposes. After all, by Szasz’s account, Laing is everywhere–and nowhere–and does not have to commit himself to a position or to “take a side”. While Szasz’s appraisal of Laing is exceedingly harsh, any reasonably alert person can find some evidence of this tendency in his writings and public pronouncements. Consistency was not his strong suit.

        A Freudian might say that Laing’s dream represents the fulfillment of a childhood wish – perhaps the desire to see two adversarial parents (and their respective families) reconciled; a wish that is eminently understandable, once you delve into Laing’s family history. Alternatively, for a Freudian, it might represent Laing’s wish to finally overcome his own intensely competitive nature. After all, whatever else he was, Laing was nothing if not competitive. A few months after he reported this dream, he died on a tennis court, playing vigorously against Robert Firestone, a much younger man, in 105 degree heat — and beating him soundly, too! Several months before the dream in question, Laing told Theo Itten that he was engaged in planning an international “Olympics of the mind.” Sadly, nothing came of it, although Laing invested considerable energy in this project. The point here, however, is that the “Olympics” metaphor implies that someone who achieved international stature in the fields of philosophy, science, etc., must have undergone rigorous training and expect to meet his or her peers in a competitive arena.

            Unlike Freudians, who focus on early childhood experiences and internal conflicts, Jungians examine the dreams of middle-aged and elderly people looking for evidence of personal integration as the maturing psyche prepares for eventual death. That being so, a Jungian would probably say that the overt lack of an egoic identification and the rejection of any corporate identity suggest that this dream is really about the process of individuation , one in which the self becomes integrated through a conjunctio oppositorum , which, in Laing’s case, is represented idiosyncratically through the interplay of two opposing (male) teams, rather than the more conventional archetypal symbolism of male/female intercourse.

            Which interpretation is correct? Perhaps all—or none! People who have studied Laing’s life and thought in depth will be hard pressed to embrace or repudiate any single interpretation unreservedly, because they all fit certain aspects of his protean personality. But by the same token, none of them really do him justice, or capture all the facets of his mercurial temperament, his fierce competitiveness, his subtle and sophisticated mind, and, finally, his desire to transcend his internal conflicts, including the conflicts between individualism and collectivism, competition and co-operation that the dream fragment he shared with Itten probably calls attention to. Quite apart from any interpretation we may offer, the dream itself does not do Laing justice, because while it sheds light on his internal conflicts, it does not adequately reflect either his loving or truth-loving dispositions, both of which were deeply embedded in his psyche, and as much a part of his personal Gestalt as his other traits and vulnerabilities.

          By contrast, thankfully, “Sparks of Light” reflects Laing at his best, and contains many of his most profound reflections on spirituality and love. But as the editor of the interview points out in the preamble, this is not what his readers had come to expect, nor was it delivered in his usual style. Had Laing quoted a Vedanta sage, a Buddhist preceptor or William Blake, no one would have blinked an eye. But the surprise—indeed, astonishment –that most readers felt when Laing gave voice to an explicitly Christian religious sensibility calls for explanation, and the dream of the soccer match is really very illuminating in this regard.

        Readers of The Wing of Madness already know that Laing’s life and character were a study in contrasts. Depending on circumstances, and his frame of mind at the time, Laing could be disciplined or debauched, cruel or kind, courteous or rude, aristocratic or a man of the people. He also oscillated, at various times, between extremes of optimism and pessimism, diffidence (or reticence) and lurid exhibitionism, leading many people to conclude—quite mistakenly—that Laing was merely manic depressive, or “bi-polar.” Bi-polar? Not on your life, though the term “polypolar”, which I just invented for the occasion, would furnish a fair description of his complex personality. While I do not deny the existence of bi-polar disorder, nor underestimate the damage it can do, the term “bipolar” has become too popular, too diffuse and too clichéd in psychiatric discourse and contemporary culture. Besides, the effort to reduce the various contradictions in Laing’s life and work to the manifold expressions of a single (biological) substrate betrays a deeply impoverished (and/or overly inclusive) view of creative and unconventional people, and the role which tensions and polarities (of various kinds) play in potentiating creative intellectual and spiritual work.

        In any case, if you survey his life as a whole you will find that at various times, and in various ways, Laing straddled the boundaries between psychiatrists and mental patients, between radicals and conservatives, and between modern and postmodern epistemologies. But he also straddled the often adversarial boundaries between theists and atheists, mystics and scientists—a fact that is reflected in the disparate appraisals one gleans from his intimate friends an co-workers.  Some of his oldest and closest friends, including his adolescent chum John Duffy, whom I met in Glasgow in 1992, knew Laing only as an outspoken atheist—a man of the Left who was smitten with Sartre, and had nothing but contempt for pious souls and their self-deluding notions. Duffy, who met Laing at age 16, dismissed his religious utterances in later life as being a kind of poetry at best, hinting obliquely that Laing’s lapses into religious rhetoric might have been opportunistic or insincere, or possibly expressions of a passing weakness.

      Sydney Briskin, a social worker who helped found the Philadelphia Association, and who personally helped to negotiate the lease of the famous (and infamous) Kingsley Hall, saw Laing precisely the same way as Duffy–as an atheist, and a man of the Left. Briskin was stunned when Laing used the public auditorium at Kingsley Hall in the Fall of 1964 to deliver a thundering sermon in the old Calvinist style –and without a trace of irony, either. During the late 1970’s , having long since left Kingsley Hall,  Laing occasionally delivered sermons in his neighborhood Church, usually with great vigor and conviction.

      How to explain this seeming anomaly? Well, first let us note that Laing’s interests and activities in the Christian sphere were not known to the majority of his readers, and that Laing himself acknowledges the comparative oddity of his religious musings by admitting that he was finally expressing himself in a Christian idiom that he had become “. . . less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years or so.”

        Why embarrassed? Well, to give Laing the benefit of the doubt, it is true that during the Cold War era, when Laing rose to prominence, people tended to regard anyone who spoke often and earnestly of their faith outside of their immediate circle as being somewhat odd and ill-educated. That is no longer the case, at least in the USA. However, whatever prevailing attitudes were at the time, the fact remains that this statement also conveys the misleading impressions that though his reluctance to speak about it had diminished in the last few decades, for reasons that are not given, his faith had been constant throughout. This is simply not so, and is belied by many other things he said, both before and after this interview was given. Indeed, reviewing all his pronouncements on spiritual and theological questions over he years, the cumulative impression one gets is that he spent most of his adolescence and adult life as a reluctant and sometimes deeply anguished agnostic who longed for the consolations of faith, but could not overcome his doubts and misgivings sufficiently to affirm what he desired, sometimes ambivalently, sometimes whole-heartedly. This is probably the real source of his “embarrassment.”

          What kind of Christian was Laing when he was not overwhelmed by doubt? Before answering that question, it is instructive to note that as a teenager, Laing was exposed to two different kinds of Christianity–the Evangelical-cum-fundamentalist variety of Calvinism, and the older “Celtic Christianity” that arrived in Scotland with Brendan the Navigator (484-578 C.E.) and St. Columba (521-597 C.E.), both of whom had a role in the building of Iona Abbey on the Isle Iona, in the Lower Hebrides.  By the age of 14, Laing claimed, he had emphatically rejected the former, Evangelical form of Christianity in favor of the latter, Celtic variety, at least for a time. This claim is born out by his on again/off again relationship with the Very Reverend George MacLeod (1895-1991 C.E.), who like Laing, incidentally, was a native of Glasgow who rose to the rank of Captain in the British Army. McLeod was the founder of The Iona Christian Community, which is an ecumenical Christian community based on the Isle of Iona in the Lower Hebrides and dedicated to the preservation of Celtic Christianity and the erasure of world hunger and poverty. Though few people outside of Scotland are aware of it, Laing spent many days there over the course of his career. Indeed, in the early 1980’s, Laing pondered the possibility of situating a foundation to be called St. Oran’s Trust on this fair island.

      Laing’s embrace of Celtic Christianity is also evidenced his insistence in his remark that we are all one in the Universal Fire. Indeed, he says, our individual souls are nothing but “sparks” emanating from this universal fire. Classicists contend that the idea that the soul is a “spark” of a Divine Fire probably originates in the Orphic religion, but gets taken up by Plato in the 4th century B.C.E., and subsequently, by the Stoics and neo-Platonists in the Hellenistic-Roman era. While originally a school of pagan philosophy, Neo-Platonism and the emanationist approach to theology later took on Jewish, Christian and Islamic forms, and, as we survey the history of Western spirituality, we find the imagery of the soul as a Divine spark as a common idiom for mystics of all three traditions.

        Another striking feature of his talk with Feuerstein, is that when asked to share the fruits of a lifetime of introspection, Laing responded that he discovered “that hope is justifiable.” The term “hope” does not surface often in Laing’s work, and though he vigorously repudiated the suggestion, many reader—friends and critics alike—found The Politics of Experience to be an angry and eloquent expression of overwhelming despair. If so, of course, Laing had clearly recovered some of his optimism in the interim. Meanwhile, the suggestion that hope is justifiable, and that this represents a hard won discovery on his part, says a great deal about him personally.

        That being so, it is also instructive to note that Laing tries here—and not for the first time—to link the idea of love to the project of scientific inquiry. Laing often despaired of getting psychiatrists to see that viewing their patients primarily or exclusively through the lenses of the natural scientific attitude is profoundly dehumanizing. The idea that science is (or ought) to be informed by a loving, reverential attitude toward nature was self-evident to someone like Einstein, but is odd and incongruous to most scientists, so Laing justified this linkage by pointing to the destructive potential of scientific research that lacks this basis. He said:

      If you investigate and inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is accumulated and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the
destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.

      Though Laing’s readers often found these remarks strikingly original, the fact remains that they are a close paraphrase of ideas expressed by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in the 1930’s. Laing was introduced to Buber’s critique of scientism by his mentor, neurologist Joseph Schorstein in 1949. But Laing was evidently determined to co-ordinate Buber’s critique of loveless science into a specifically Christian message, which emphasizes the centrality of prayer and service. Admittedly, these are also Jewish values, and Buber also anticipates the reservations Laing expressed about certain features of mystical theology. Laing said here,  for example, that

I don’t like to go so far as to talk of actual union with God or becoming God. Such expressions tend to encourage Man’s vanity and spiritual ambitions. You find people saying, “What’s the point of being a bank manager if, through meditation techniques, you can become God in less time than it takes to get through business school?” I would much rather speak of being a slave of God, in whose service is perfect freedom.

        Jews and Christians both stress God’s transcendence. But where Buber (and Jews generally) differ from Laing (and most Christians) is in the use of the idiom of slavery. Jews speak of being God’s servant, or alternatively, his willing and active collaborator in the work of Tikkun Olam—the repair or restoration of the world through acts of love and justice. The eventual consummation of this holy mission (in the Messianic time) is often depicted by Jewish mystics as the eventual return of the Holy Sparks to the Primordial Fire. But in the meantime, from the Jewish perspective, God liberated the Jews from slavery in Egypt precisely in order to serve him, and permitted a whole generation of former slaves to perish in the wilderness because the slave mentality is inimical to the worship of God. Service to the Lord is essentially the act of a free man or woman, so the notion of being “a slave of God” is somewhat incongruous to the Jewish mind. The Hebrew Bible (and accompanying commentaries) leave no room for doubt on this score. God does not want slaves, whose work is—by definition—coerced. Besides, even the most intimate I-Thou relationship does not preclude conflict, and Jacob famously wrestles with the angel, refusing to surrender, before finally being accepted by God and embracing his personal destiny. He was thenceforth known as Israel, which means “he wrestled with God”—which is evidently what Laing did for much of his adult life.

          Having said that, however, Laing’s reluctance to speak of “becoming God” prompts us to reflect that in Western religious traditions, the condition of religious (and of interpersonal) communion in love—or indeed of any kind of genuine intimacy—is the inexorable separateness and singularity of selves; a theme that Laing broached in existential and phenomenological terms many times. In Self and Others, for example, Laing spoke with great eloquence about the sense of unqualified privacy and the incommensurability of one’s personal being that accompanies the experience of one’s being-for-oneself, citing the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to underscore his point. In The Politics of Experience, Laing continued in this vein by emphasizing that although people experience one another as experiencing the world or themselves in certain ways, no one has direct access to the experience of another person. Conversely, he maintained my self is my experience, and my experience, in the final analysis, is myself.

        George Feuerstein was alert to the apparent paradox of discussing certain kinds of mystical experiences and practices from the standpoint of the separateness and singularity of the self, and raised the issue indirectly as follows:

FEUERSTEIN: But experience presupposes an experiencing subject, or the ego. Therefore, no experience can be truly transcendental, since the ego is still in place. What is your view on that?

Significantly, Laing replied:

LAING: I don’t think that such a thing as the ego exists. The ego is a cultural hallucination. The “ego” is a name for a coherent set of mental operations that enable us to function in our society. We draw a circle around those operations and think it is a thing with which to identify ourselves. We must disidentify ourselves from the ego and see it as a process, a systematic, reasonably coherent set of operations. What we call our ego we know to be always changing, impermanent, transient, but still we persist in this hallucination. The transcendental perspective is both immanent and transcendental. So one must simultaneously get into oneself and out of one’s ego. It is a return to ordinariness, as in the ox-herding cycle of Japanese Zen Buddhism. A mountain finally becomes a mountain again, a tree a tree, a river a river.

      Laing’s words here are quite illuminating. Whereas Feuerstein equates the experiencing subject with the “ego”, as many philosophers do, Laing speaks of “disidentifying ourselves” from the ego, which implies that ultimately we have—or more precisely, that we are –selves that are separate from our egos. Similarly, he speaks of the need to “get into oneself and out of one’s ego”, implying that the less self-estranged we are, the less caught up we are in “cultural hallucinations.” And though he does not say so in quite so many words, it follows from this that the self and the ego are not two different terms for the same entity, as many of us imagine, but fundamentally different entities, the ego being a “cultural hallucination”, the self being our authentic ground of experience.

        In stressing the difference between the self and the ego, Laing was joining with a small but important group of psychoanalytic thinkers for whom the distinction between the self and the ego is pivotal to understanding transcendental and psychotherapeutic experience - C.G. Jung, D.W. Winnicott, E.Graham Howe, and oddly enough, Erik Erikson, who is still widely misinterpreted as an “ego psychologist.” In this sense, perhaps, Laing and Feuerstein were on different wavelengths and talking past one another, since Feuerstein seemed to assume that the ego and the self are synonyms through out this brief exchange.

      The interview between Laing and Feuerstein ended on an odd note, too. Feuerstein inquired whether, or to what extent, Laing’s personal contact with “holy men” had motivated him to surrender himself completely to a spiritual teacher or guru. Laing responded by saying that

LAING: I have associated with a number of holy men. It is impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like without meeting and spending quite a lot of time in the company of such people. But I have never felt any inner impulsion to surrender myself to a guru. However, if some people feel they need to do that, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to do so. A genuine spiritual master would not be able to exploit that for his own egoic advantage. It has been said that if you go to a guru with a pure heart, that purity of heart will protect you, even if the guru turns out to be an impostor. It will do the guru harm, not the disciple.
FEUERSTEIN: Do you feel there are people around now who actually have Realized God and are empowered to lead other people to the same Realization?
LAING: I have not personally met any such one. I have met a number of people I would regard as servants of God.
FEUERSTEIN: You are saying you have not actually met somebody whom you felt was God-Realized. Is that, perhaps, the reason you did not have that impulsion to surrender to a guru? If you had met Jesus, would you have followed him? As he said, “Follow me.”
LAING: (pause) I hope so. Yes, definitely.
FEUERSTEIN: That is an honest answer.

    What neither Laing nor Feuerstein stated, at this point, is that from a Christian perspective, Jesus was not just some “God Realized” holy man, or a particularly potent and charismatic guru, but God incarnate. But by the same token, surrendering to God is entirely in keeping with the Christian ethos, so Laing could not possibly have answered “no” to this question without nullifying everything he said prior to that point in this same interview. Meanwhile, without actually saying so, Feuerstein himself appeared to be hinting that Jesus was merely a supremely gifted “spiritual master”—a stark difference in perspective they politely agreed not to broach here. So the real point of this exchange, perhaps, is that while dancing around this controversial issue, Laing was politely expressing some reservations about the potential pitfalls of personal charisma among gurus of one sort and another, hinting at the potential dangers of egoism and exploitation (on the part of the guru) and eventual disappointment (on the part of his followers.)

      Nevertheless, Laing and Feuerstein were on exactly the same wavelength when it came to decrying the dangers of scientism and materialism in contemporary culture. In this context, Feuerstein extracted a rather stark and startling statement of faith from Laing, as follows.

LAING:. . . the material world is contained within the world of the Spirit, which has final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times. I don’t think anything happens to materials except what Spirit allows.

    This statement can be interpreted in various ways—theologically, philosophically and metaphysically. At the very least, it represents a clear and resounding repudiation of the materialist interpretation of history and of human affairs that many of Laing’s erstwhile friends and followers continued to cling to. But a statement like this also lends itself to a psychological interpretation. Among other things, perhaps, Laing’s emphasis on the Spirit’s “final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times” is an expression of resurgent optimism, and a vivid expression of what Erikson called basic trust—an affirmation of the basic goodness and trustworthiness of the cosmos, in spite of the manifold horrors and privations we undergo individually at the “material” level. Statements of this kind do not always have this meaning, of course. Depending on circumstances, the statement that everything that happens is allowed by the Spirit - presumably in the service of our ultimate redemption—can be plausibly construed as a call for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of (possibly preventable, and certainly horrific) events. Ever since the Holocaust, for example, Jews, and increasing numbers of Christians, wonder how God could have let this catastrophe happen, and point out that saying it happened with God’s full knowledge and consent are making God complicit in unspeakable depravity. Similarly, saying that hurricane Katrina was “permitted” by God because of the sinfulness of New Orleans’ residents—a la televangelist Pat Robertson—is a travesty of what Laing was trying to say. So, however people are tempted to interpret this statement of on a philosophical or spiritual plane, experience compels the conclusion that, odd as it sounds, a statement of faith like this can be an affirmation of faith, a technique for blaming (and perhaps vilifying) the victim, or a thinly disguised wish fulfillment fantasy that covers up an underlying hostility or intolerance.

      Having said that, it is clear from context that Laing was not calling for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of evil, because he begins his remarks with the observation “that hope is justifiable,” and goes on to emphasize the importance of love, prayer and service. And though Laing would have rued the comparison, given his distaste for American “ego psychology”, his musings on this point are entirely in keeping with Erikson’s claim that hope is the virtue characteristic of “basic trust”. As Erikson often pointed out, hope is the foundation of all other “virtues.” Sociability, self-esteem and self-discipline seldom flourish in a climate of pervasive mistrust, which distort human development and human relationships in myriad ways. And though he couched them in the language of existential phenomenology, Laing addressed similar kinds of issues when he talked about ontological security and insecurity and the schizoid patient’s fear of authentic self-disclosure in The Divided Self.

    That being so, it is important to point out that Laing’s childhood was fraught with experiences that provoked a profound sense of mistrust, especially in relation to his mother. As a result, perhaps, in adult life, he was seldom as certain of the presence of some sort of Providence or Divine oversight at work in the course of unfolding events as he appears to be here. Had his childhood been less harrowing, and his adult life less fraught with conflict, controversy and the blandishments of fame, Laing might have been able to cultivate a steadier, more consistent faith, and would probably have lived a longer, more temperate and more fulfilling life as a consequence. But by the same token, if he had done those things, he might never have had those remarkable insights into the minds of the mad that riveted the world’s attention on him for a brief but memorable span of time.

Daniel Burston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology who holds doctorates in Psychology (1989) and in Social and Political Thought (1985) from York University in Toronto. He is also an Associate of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and on the Advisory Board of the C. G. Jung Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh, the Advisory Board of Janus Head, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis. His books have been reviewed in numerous journals and newspapers, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The New Statesman, and many other magazines.

He is the author of The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D.Laing, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy as a Human Science. Dr. Burston’s most recent book is Erik Erikson and the American Psyche: Ego, Ethics and Evolution.

However, like many attempts to expose Western people to the core doctrines of Eastern mysticism, “The Sacred Mirror” offers an interpretation of their nondual teachings that highly transforms their original meaning, compounding the difficulty. What makes nondualism so troublesome is that it runs counter to our usual intuitions of reality.  Fundamentally, the problem Westerners have with nondualism is twofold: (1) its core contention that there no absolute separation between one person and another; and, (2) its controversial implication that there is no fundamental difference between the true self of the individual and the Ultimate Self or God. (Obviously, the Absolute of nondualism—whether it be described as Consciousness, Self, Void, or even “God”—is of an entirely different order than the Deity of the Semitic religions.)

“The Sacred Mirror” aims to explore the implications of nondualism for the practice of psychotherapy. It is an extremely difficult task, especially in Western culture. Where it is entertained at all, the notion that there is no ultimate separation between self and other is sometimes thought of as too abstract and even alien an idea to be useful in clinical practice. And the idea that human beings might, in their very nature, actually be divine is anathema to prevailing Western sensibilities. However, this is core contention and controversial implication of nondualism. Futher, perhaps surprisingly, nondual points of view can be found in Western mysticism. For example, a famous medieval Christian monk, Meister Eckhart, exhorted spiritual aspirants to his own highest intuition: “I discover that I and God are one.” But Meister Eckhart was severely chastised by the Holy Roman Church for his “heretical” views. Other nondual mystics have fared worse. Some have faced forced ritual “purification”, torture, or, as in the examples of Giordano Bruno and Mansour al-Hallaj, even death. Clearly, identifying the very Self of human beings with God (however conceived) is an extremely controversial claim. This is why nondualism has been kept something of a secret within Western spiritual traditions, if not held to be a pure heresy. As David Loy puts it in his excellent book on the subject, “Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy”: “[In the West,] claims about subject-object nonduality, like the broad mystical tradition where they have found their most comfortable home, have survived as a puzzling subterranean undercurrent . . . a seed which, however often sown, has never found fertile soil . . .”

Nevertheless, the notion that our usual presumption that the ego-self and its every other can and should be transcended is seriously entertained by the contributors to Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal’s daring attempt to introduce therapists to the potentially auspicious benefits of nondualism. In their introduction they tell us that all of the chapters were written for this volume by authors with first-hand familiarity with nondual awareness. In addition, many of them know each other and have participated in a living synergy through various contacts, including the presentation of their work at an annual conference, called “Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy”. The authors, who are either seasoned clinicians or established spiritual teachers, are quick to point out that this volume is neither synoptic nor gospel, but an exploration in progress, one that the reader is emphatically invited to join.

The nascent flowering of nondual wisdom now underway in the West is thought to represent new challenges and opportunities for the field of psychotherapy. Indeed, the authors suggest we are witnessing the emergence of an entirely new genre of psychotherapy. Prendergast makes this striking observation about the significance of this new genre: “Awakening nondual awareness adds a depth dimension to any of the existing schools of psychology, regardless of their orientation . . .. It is not so much that therapists integrate Being, as they are absorbed by it. As they more deeply attune with and embody the ground of Being, Presence is enhanced.” The author’s define “Presence” as “Being aware of Itself, whereby one’s ordinary sense of self and reality are literally nothing more than a dream from which we can potentially awaken. In fact, even while dreaming it is possible to be cognizant and thereby engage in lucid dreaming, the first stirring of nondual awareness.”

Clearly, the authors have chosen a formidable task: take the unusual mystical doctrine of nondualism and make it user-friendly for clinical service providers. To do so, the various chapters provide specific clinical techniques, or “skillful means”, whereby the clinician might effectively intervene with the client, enlisting the aid of traditional nondual practices. Peter Fenner suggests in his chapter, “Nonduality and Therapy: Awakening the Unconditioned Mind,” that the fundamental clinical goal of nondual psychotherapy is to awaken clients to their own true nature, which is thought to be the source of healing power. In fact, the unconditioned mind is said to be beyond suffering and ailment, literally, the very state in which healing occurs. We come to know our inherent nature through a letting-go or pruning process, similar to the idea of postmodern and phenomenological approaches to therapy. This approach is one with which Stephan Bodian explicitly concurs in his chapter, “Deconstructing the Self: The Uses of Inquiry in Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice.”
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A basic premise of the book is that a client’s essential, nondual nature can be reflected back to him or her by the therapist, hence the metaphor of the mirror in the title of the book, as well as in Prendergast’s own chapter, “The Sacred Mirror: Being Together.” Sheila Krystal elaborates on this idea in her chapter, “A Nondual Approach to EMDR: Psychotherapy as Satsang,” referring to nondual therapy as the process in which “the Self meets itself in the sacred mirror of satsang.” She defines satsang as the “coming together in the company of God (as lovers of the truth) . . .”; which is to say, being in a loving relationship with God. Consequently, “The Sacred Mirror” is unusual as a clinical text, for it is willing to include God as a significant agent in the healing process—although most chapters remain tentative in this regard, preferring theistically neutral accounts of nondualism. Indeed, apparently because of its lack of reference to an explicit divinity, Buddhist nondualism dominates in “The Sacred Mirror”. With this approach, any potential controversy over the appearance of God in psychotherapy can be more readily side-stepped.

Time and again in my own clinical work, I have seen the benevolent effects of a spiritual communion that acknowledges and respects nonduality as its ultimate truth. To put it simply, love is the healing principle. Only in overcoming the divisive act of separation between people does love actually emerge into this difficult world. Nondual therapy can be understood as the intention of relinquishing one’s sense of being a separate self, allowing the living presence of love to embrace and pervade both client and clinician, replacing the sense of separation from which they each otherwise suffer. As this living presence informs their relationship, the wisdom of love inherent to each one’s own deepest being comes to the fore. In this way clinical practice becomes most auspicious for the client.

However, in therapy it is easy to confuse the experience of heightened human intimacy with that of the nondual reality. That being so, it is fair to ask whether the authors have succeeded in their efforts to establish nondualism as a viable base for clinical practice. It seems to me that in their attempt to make this most difficult material accessible to a contemporary clinical audience, they have fudged a little. Prendergast, for example, describes the transformations wrought in the client by nondual psychotherapy like this: “In time and without any conscious effort or intent we become like stained glass, more adequate forms for the transmission of light. Our individuality is liberated and enhanced as we knowingly share this common ground with all beings.” It seems misleading to speak in terms of liberating or enhancing one’s individuality, for egoic individuality is precisely what is transcended in nondualism. Likewise, becoming stained glass (which, almost by definition, is multicolored and therefore suggests form or defination)  is a questionable metaphor. The realization of the nondual state is better understood as the realization of the very Light Itself.

The literal translation of the Sanskrit term advaita, from the initial Indian spiritual tradition of nondualism, is not-two, more commonly referred to simply as Oneness.  However, there are two very different types of Oneness found in spiritual literature: (1) holism, in which we are connected to or intimately a part of some larger spiritual reality, while retaining our distinct identity; and, (2) nondualism, in which are sense of being a separate self disappears completely and we realize that we literally are this larger reality. Overall, “The Sacred Mirror” favors the former over the latter. In doing so, it would appear that “The Sacred Mirror” is not so much offering an innovation of psychotherapy, as merely elaborating on psychotherapy that is already taking place.

Humanistic and existential psychotherapies advocate holism, not nondualism. They speak of treating the “whole person”. Transpersonal psychotherapies also generally align with holism, although they expand the term’s reference to include spiritual dimensions. Stanley Krippner offers a particularly compelling definition of this latter sense: “[A]n individual’s sense of identity appears to extend beyond its ordinary limits to encompass wider, broader, or deeper aspects of life or the cosmos—including divine elements of creation.” Abraham Maslow tends to speak in terms of “peak experiences”, in which one’s awareness of reality is suddenly heightened to include ecstatic and perhaps even mystical states. Likewise, Carl Rogers feels that life has the potential for transcendental intuitions that increase our capacity for healing. He describes moments in therapy in which “my presence is releasing and helpful to the other . . .. [I]t seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and becomes a part of something larger.”

These are the kinds of experiences described in Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal’s book. Although their work may add to the techniques of psychotherapy, all this stops short of authentic nondual states, however much the authors advocate their innovations as manifestations of nondual wisdom. In reality, what they are describing seems more akin to the temporary states—heightened well-being, feelings of intimate relatedness, or even, on occasion, mystical absorption—that most spiritual traditions have long regarded as well short of nondual Enlightenment.

Unfortunately, “The Sacred Mirror” never clearly differentiates the valid but non-ultimate experiences of associated with holism from the more profound nondual intuition of our native egolessness. Theirs is an understandable mistake, for nondualism in no way excludes the experiences characteristic of holism. As Prendergast puts it: “While essentially without qualities, [nondual reality is] commonly experienced as being vast, free, spacious, heartfelt, and present-centered. Many people report feeling a subtle joy, love, compassion, peace, gratitude, and sense of connectedness with all of life when they directly attune with it.” Clearly, these attributes resonate with the most ordinary and common goals of clinical practice.

One way to resolve the ambiguity between holism and nondualism is by contemplating a familiar experience: the sense of us. It is precisely the sense of us that is emphasized throughout “The Sacred Mirror”. For example, John Welwood’s chapter, “Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience,” even pays homage to Martin Buber’s vision of the I-Thou relationship: “The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.” This orientation to intimacy understands the human psyche in the manner of holism, in which you and I maintain our individuality but relax into a kind of communion with one another, a sense that we form a greater or larger whole. We become an us. In nondual realization, however, “you and I” drop out altogether. To the nondual realizer you literally are me. From this point of view, holism only approximates nondualism.

In a sense, holism could be thought of as preliminary or transitional to nondualism. That Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal should conflate the two doesn’t invalidate the holistic approach toward treatment they advocate, just so long as we understand its limitations. Indeed, “The Sacred Mirror” could be thought of as specializing in the holistic contact point of a bridge they are building to nondualism. Although the healing agencies they invoke may not be full-borne advaita, they clearly are of real value.

There is a feature of nondualism often overlooked in the standard view that merely defines nondualism as not-two. In his book, “Vedanta and Christian Faith”, the late Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths used a traditional formula to define the essential features of the nondual Godhead: “Ultimate reality can be said to be comprised of certain discernible attributes: . . . ‘sat’—being, ‘cit’—consciousness, and ‘ananda’—bliss . . .” This benevolent set of attributes—the living presence of free awareness and love—has clinical application. Effective clinical practice seems to follow the formula “the greater the awareness, the greater the love”. Like most clinical texts, “The Sacred Mirror” is self-conscious about directly addressing love as a viable therapeutic intervention. Occasionally, love is mentioned in a nondual sense, as when Fenner, building on a Buddhist orientation toward nondualism, states: “Another way in which the unconditioned mind unites with conditioned existence is through the union of love and wisdom . . .. The capacity to identify [with the client] is love. The capacity to disidentify is wisdom,”. The book’s only specific reference to love as an essential aspect of the nondual process, however, appears in an interview with Adyashanti in a chapter titled, “Love Returning for Itself.” Unfortunately, even this chapter is pretty short on instructions for therapists. In “The Sacred Mirror” love remains a largely unthematized idealism.
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Clinically, a host of therapeutic interventions build on the awareness/love equation, attesting to the essential role awareness and love play in the therapeutic process. In one guise or another, many of these appear in “The Sacred Mirror”. Interventions of this nature, which are common in clinical practice, are generally referred to as supportive technique, whereby the sense of us can be specifically engaged therapeutically. Examples include: accurate empathy and unconditional positive regard, mirroring and empathic immersion, focusing, communicative attunement, sensitivity to the intersubjective field, empathic resonance, gestalt awareness, and mindfulness. In fact, mindfulness could be thought of as the appropriate rubric for all of these approaches to developing awareness, which is no doubt why mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular as an intervention in clinical practice. Indeed, the infrequent references to mindfulness in “The Sacred Mirror” constitute a notable absence in the book.

Even so, “The Sacred Mirror” places an inordinate emphasis on awareness, either in the sense of concentrated, focused awareness (i.e., attention), or a more diffused, merely observing state referred to as “witness consciousness”. Leaving aside the authors’ likely confusions about the latter (most of what is described as witness consciousness seems much like the state of an intelligent and alert but nonetheless egoically identified observer), tt at no point does “The Sacred Mirror” come right out and state that love is the healing principle—or explain how love is directly related to awareness. “The Sacred Mirror” engages in a secondary focus that values a vague affective orientation on the part of the client, generally referred to by the following array of desirable attributes: equanimity, peacefulness, kindness, compassion, empathy, and occasionally even self-esteem. Perhaps the taboo in our culture and professional psychology against the appearance of love in therapy has made doing so too controversial for the contributors of this anthology.

In nondualism, the presumption of being a separate self not only misguided, it is impediment to love and happiness. In David Loy’s words: “[T]he nondualistic systems also agree that our usual sense of duality—the sense of separation (hence alienation) between myself and the world ‘I’ am ‘in’—is the root delusion that needs to be overcome.” Yet some contributors to “The Sacred Mirror” assume that this is a reductive, even anti-human view. For example, in her chapter, “Dancing with Form and Emptiness in Intimate Relationship”, Jennifer Welwood argues:

Love does indeed come from beyond us, from pure being, from the absolute source that shines through us and those we love. And the essence of love does involve a dissolving of the boundaries of separation. Yet, defining love purely as a mutual recognition of transpersonal being is incomplete and unsatisfying in human terms . . .. Nondual teachings that mainly emphasize the illusory quality of human experience can, unfortunately, serve as just another dehumanizing force in a world where our basic humanity is already under siege at every turn.

Unfortunately, this way of understanding nondualism takes away the very essence of what is it is to be nondual. Speaking equivocally about the separate self only undermines the ability to address its limitations. Yet, it is understandable how this objection might occur. Attaching meaning to experience is usually thought to be extremely important for human beings, perhaps even our most crucial enterprise. Nonetheless, it is precisely by putting our egoic humanity to the test, indeed, by ultimately transcending it, that the reality of nondualism can make its incontrovertible appearance—and, in doing so, replace our egoic complications with the divine healing properties of awareness and love.

In conventional approaches to psychotherapy, it is often thought that the objects or conditions of one’s love are the source of happiness. As the famed nondualist spiritual master Adi Da Samraj argues, however, being in possession of the objects of your love is not the source of happiness. Love, rather, requires a far more significant gesture of submission: we are obliged to give love—regardless of what happens as a result. Knowing this out front puts us in position of learning the essential lesson of life—which is not merely to be loved, or even to be loving toward this or that other, but to be unqualified love itself.

Ordinary clinical interventions attempt to improve our capacity to adapt to the conditions of ordinary life, but that does not put people directly in touch with the very source of love. Even spiritual orientations can confuse the issue. Simply put, there is an intimate—indeed, a nondual—relationship between awareness and love. The two are inseparable. They are born in us together when self and other truly yield to the greater Love.

In the words of Swami Vivekananda:

This mighty attraction in the direction of God makes all other attractions vanish for him; this mighty, infinite love of God which enters his heart with the divine waters of the Ocean of Love, which is God Himself; there is no place there for little loves . . .. He sees no distinctions; the mighty Ocean of Love has entered into him, and he sees not man in man, but beholds his Beloved everywhere . . .

Obviously, this represents a high standard for clinical practice! Indeed, it could be said that nondual psychotherapy is not really about being better adjusted or espousing a better social ideal—even if for the admittedly useful purpose of getting confused and willful people to behave better. Rather, the purpose of nondual psychotherapy is actually this: enlightenment. Certainly, such is the case for the spiritual traditions from which nondual doctrines are culled. It remains a very open question whether or not any therapeutic measures can measure up to this ultimate task.

Of course, it is perhaps not surprising that “The Sacred Mirror” should be reluctant to address such issues head-on. To date, nondual practices such as mindfulness have to be sanitized of any improper alliances with love, much less spiritual submission to be accepted into clinical practice. Nevertheless, to honor the nondual spiritual traditions from which such practices originate, both love and spirit must surely play as large a role in treatment as any other intervention. In so doing, therapy can perhaps further expand itself across the soul’s continuum. It should be enough for now to ask for the intimacy of a holism brave enough to kneel before the ultimacy of non-dualism, something “The Sacred Mirror” amply delivers.

D. B. Sleeth received an MA in humanistic and transpersonal psychology from Sonoma State University, an MA in counseling psychology from Argosy Graduate School in San Francisco, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. He currently practices family therapy with disadvantaged youth and young adults in Northern California. D.B. Sleeth lives with his wife of 11 years, both of whom are active members of Adidam, the spiritual community of the nondual spiritual master, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

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