0.5 Karen horney and erich fromm  (Page 22/23)

Horney equated Zen mindfulness with living fully in each moment, with wholehearted concentration (Horney, 1945, 1950; Ingram, 1987). This general theme is expressed quite eloquently in one of Horney’s favorite books, Zen in the Art of Archery (Herrigel, 1953), as well as in Herrigel’s other book, The Method of Zen (Herrigel, 1960). In the latter book, Herrigel expresses the essence of Zen from his perspective, presenting a psychological view that fits well with the relational-cultural perspective we will examine in the next chapter:

…the Zen Buddhist is far from limiting his feelings of joy and compassion to human beings and to every aspect of human existence. He embraces in these feelings everything that lives and breathes…The Zen Buddhist is constantly confirmed in his experience that there is a fundamental communication which embraces all forms of existence…He does not pass by the joys and sufferings of others without taking them to himself and reinforcing them with his own feelings… (pp. 119-120; Herrigel, 1960)

Fromm knew Suzuki at the same time as Horney, but the two men really got to know each other when Suzuki spent a week in Mexico in 1956, and Fromm then visited Suzuki in New York. In 1964, Fromm wrote to Suzuki that every morning he read a passage on Zen or something by Meister Eckhart (a well-known Christian mystic). In addition, Fromm was interested in Kabbalah and Sufism, as well as other spiritual approaches to understanding people (Funk, 2000). Fromm examined many of these diverse perspective in books such as The Nature of Man (Fromm&Xirau, 1968) and Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm, 1950), and he drew interesting connections between the physical activities of Yoga and Wilhelm Reich’s somatic psychology (Fromm, 1992). He was by no means an unqualified supporter, however, suggesting that some self-proclaimed gurus can do more harm than good when seeking to serve their own selfish interests (usually in order to make money; Fromm, 1994).

In their work together, Suzuki provided a brief overview of the essentials of Zen practice, which focuses on living life:

Zen may occasionally appear too enigmatic, cryptic, and full of contradictions, but it is after all a simple discipline and teaching:

To do goods,

To avoid evils,

To purify one’s own heart:

This is the Buddha-Way.

Is this not applicable to all human situations, modern as well as ancient, Western as well as Eastern? (pg. 76; Suzuki, Fromm,&DeMartino, 1960)

Fromm, for his part, identified ways in which Zen principles appeared to be compatible with psychoanalysis. He considered psychoanalysis to be the Western parallel to Zen, since Zen arose from Indian rationality and abstraction mixed with Chinese concreteness and realism, whereas psychoanalysis arose from Western humanism and rationalism. Fromm described the Western world as suffering from a spiritual crisis, resulting from a change in the pursuit of the perfection of humanity to the pursuit of the perfection of things (e.g., technology). Since we have lost our connection to nature, and to ourselves and our communities, we have become anxious and depressed. Psychoanalysis was developed to help us deal with these anxieties, as an alternative to the flawed ways in which we had been dealing with them in the past: religion (according to Freud). As described very simply in the quote above, Zen Buddhism also seeks to resolve human anxiety, simply by doing good and avoiding evil. In Freudian terms, doing good results from knowing oneself, and one can only know oneself through the process of psychoanalysis. Then, a person can act in accordance with reality, rather than being influenced by unconscious, repressed, and dysfunctional psychological processes. Therefore, Fromm considered the essential nature of psychoanalysis to be compatible with Zen (Suzuki, Fromm,&DeMartino, 1960), a perspective supported more recently by Mark Epstein in his comparison of Buddhist meditation and psychoanalysis, Thoughts Without a Thinker (Epstein, 1995).