THERAPEUTIC AIMS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY AND MEDITATION: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES IN THE REPRESENTATION OF SELF

Abstract

What follows is an attempt to think through a set of clinical issues that have emerged for me in recent years regarding the development of a sense of self. Questions about the nature and status of the psychological structure we call the have forced themselves on me from two sides. On the one hand, my clinical work with schizophrenic and borderline patients, all of the whom suffer from pathological disturbances in their subjective issue sense of selfhood, has convinced me of the vital importance of of developing a sense of continuity, identity and ongoingness in 'self existence. On the other hand, my experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation has made it equally clear that clinging to a sense of personal continuity and self-identity results in chronic discontent and psychic conflict. Every instant of our lives this clinging puts us in opposition to a universe in which nothing lasts for more than a brief moment, in fact where there are no things at all in any real sense, but only events on the order of milliseconds. As we now know from psychophysics, this is true of our internal universe of images, thoughts, feelings and sensations as well. As a clinician I do everything I can to help patients develop the sense of an inner cohesiveness, unity and continuity which is so tragically lacking, with such fateful consequences. As a meditation teacher, I work just as hard to help students see through the perceptual illusion of continuity and sameness in their experience-in Zen terms, to realize there is no-self. The issue I have been wrestling with then, as a psychologist practicing in both traditions, is the importance of this sense of self and its fate. I have been

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