Zen, Suzuki, and the Art of Psychotherapy

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Harrington, Anne. 2016. Zen, Suzuki, and the Art of Psychotherapy. In Science and Religion, East
and West, ed. Yiftach Fehige. London and New York: Routledge.

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 Zen, Suzuki and the Art of Psychotherapy

Anne Harrington, Harvard University (USA)

“[T) here is an unmistakable and increasing interest in Zen Buddhism

among psychoanalysts” (Erich Fromm, 1960)

In the 1950s, Japanese Zen Buddhism exploded on the American cultural scene. Zen is the

Japanese name for a tradition of Buddhism whose practice began in China under the name

of Chan. It claims to eschew textual authority and scholastic training in favor of practices

designed to facilitate direct and spontaneous access to the knowledge of the world as

given, free of all preconceptions (though there is a significant textual and quasi-scholastic

tradition associated with this claim!). In the early 20th-century, few knew what Zen was

and even fewer cared (it was -- in the words of a later journalist -- 'a subject of which even

an informed person need not be ashamed to know nothing' (Heard 1950)). However, in the

postwar United States—traumatized by fascism, haunted by specters of nuclear apocalypse

and increasingly alienated from its own institutionalized religious traditions—this practice

suddenly seemed to offer a form of anti-authoritarian, unchurched spirituality that many

people had been craving.

For some, it also promised something else: something that, on the face of it, should seem

more surprising: a set of tools for the psychiatrist, a set of insights for the psychoanalyst, a

kind of psychotherapy by other means. By the 1960s, it had become commonplace in

certain circles to describe Zen as a kind of “Eastern” psychotherapy, to compare the

relationship of the Zen master and his adept to that of the psychoanalyst and his patient,
and to ask questions about the psychotherapeutic function of Zen riddles (koans) like 'what

is the sound of one hand clapping?' By the 1970s, people were suggesting that some

schizophrenic patients might be best seen as thwarted Zen mystics, and invoking Zen

language in new politicized forms of psychotherapy designed to expose the hypocrisies of

modern society. And by the 1990s, the idea of Zen as a psychotherapeutic practice had

become part of the background furniture of American culture. In 1998, a Japanese priest

and psychotherapist puzzled over the fact that many Westerners 'regard the temple to be a

kind of therapy center and the Buddhist priest to be a type of psychotherapist.' None of the

Japanese people who came to the temple, he added, thought about Zen that way (Imamura

1998: 229).

It would be worth our cultivating a sense of puzzlement as well. How did Zen come to be

so widely understood as a form of psychotherapy by Eastern means? And why does this

therapeutic understanding of Zen seem to be a Western, even an American understanding,

that is not shared (for example) by Japanese adherents of the tradition?

A few straightforward answers suggest themselves at the outset. Zen arrived in the United

States at a moment when the culture was both deeply preoccupied with its own mental

health, and persuaded (partly through the recent war experience) that talking cures—

Freudian-inspired forms of therapy—represented the most profound and effective way to

minister to troubled and disordered minds. Drugs existed, but the couch (metaphorically

speaking) was king (see Hale 2001).

This fact matters, but it does not, in itself, explain how Zen came to be seen as interesting

or valuable for the American psychotherapeutic project. After all, orthodox Freudian

theory had, since the 1920s, openly expressed distinct skepticism and disinterest towards
all things Eastern and “mystical.” Freud himself had set the tone for mainstream views on

the matter in his 1929 book, Civilization and its Discontents, where he had suggested that

all mystical experiences had roots in infantile experiences of subjective merging with the

world and especially the mother (see Freud 1961). They had no inherent higher spiritual

meaning or value. As he put it in a letter to his friend, the biographer and novelist Romain

Rolland (who had first encouraged him to take an interest in these experiences):

We seem to diverge rather far in the role we assign to intuition. Your mystics rely
on it to teach them how to solve the riddle of the universe; we believe that it cannot
reveal to us anything but primitive, instinctual impulses and attitudes—highly
valuable for an embryology of the soul when correctly interpreted, but worthless
for orientation in the alien, external world (Freud 1992, p. 393; see on this point
also Harrison 1979: Werman 1977).

From this rather discouraging beginning, things had only gotten worse. Some

students of Freud went beyond dismissing mystical experience as a form of infantile

regression. They declared it an induced form of psychotic withdrawal, akin to

schizophrenia or autism! (see Ben Avi 1959 ). As late as 1976, the psychoanalytic Group

for the Advancement of Psychiatry could still conclude:

The psychiatrist will find mystical phenomena of interest because they can
demonstrate forms of behavior intermediate between normality and frank
psychosis; a form of ego regression in the service of defense against internal or
external stress; and a paradox of the return of repressed regression in
unconventional expressions of love (cited in Deikman 1976
http://www.deikman.com/gap.html).

Given this, why would any psychotherapist take a positive interest in an apparently

mystical system like Zen? To understand, we need to realize further that the postwar

period was not just an age of Freud; it was also—for some—a time of intense recalibration

of the actual value of orthodox Freudianism. The unique anxieties and pressures of the

time were such, some people began to say, that it was no longer enough to just focus on
helping patients to tame their unruly unconscious minds. Haunted by the specter of atomic

devastation, burdened by the drive to conform, produce and consume at all costs, many

modern patients—it was said—suffered from problems that were far more existential,

social, and even spiritual in nature than in the past. Psychotherapists needed to respond by

conceiving of therapy in a new way—less as a means of curing mental illness (a medical

model) and more as a way of addressing the supposed root causes of patients’ spiritual

emptiness, anxiety and alienation (an existentialist-humanistic model) (for more, see

Grogan 2008; Engel 2008; Herman 1995).

Why would any of these humanistic psychotherapists conclude that Zen had something to

contribute to their project? The short answer is: because they were all being exposed to a

form of Zen that had already been partially psychologized and Westernized for them. This

Zen was, to a first approximation, the product of the long-lived and highly prolific

Japanese translator and teacher of Zen, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.

That is the short answer. The long answer is more interesting because it plunges us into a

far more contingent and nuanced story that unfolds over some seventy years and involves

many other actors: Soyen Shaku, Beatrice Lane, Paul Carus, Carl Gustav Jung, Karen

Horney, Harold Kelman, Erich Fromm, Alan Watts, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, and

more. Later, a number of these figures would describe the dialogue with Suzuki as an

encounter between the spirit of the East and the spirit of the West, between spirituality and

science, between ancient intuition and modern rationality (see, for example Fromm and

Suzuki 1970.)i In reality, however, everyone involved in this dialogue was modern,

everyone had mixed allegiances to science and spirituality alike, and everyone invoked the

categories of “East” and “West” in different ways in order to advance different agendas.
The Psychological Education of D.T. Suzuki

To see how this all worked, we must start by looking more closely at Daisetz Teitaro

Suzuki. For a generation of Western spiritual seekers in the 1950s and 1960s, he seemed

the essence of the Oriental teacher of ancient wisdom (Iwamura 2010: 27-28).

His books on Zen Buddhism were experienced as catalytic and mind-bending by millions.

They also shaped the creative and scholarly works of some of the most important and

cutting-edge artists, writers, theologians and philosophers of the 20th-century, including

Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Merton, John Cage, and the 'beat Buddhists'—

Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder.

And yet many of those who felt they owed the most to Suzuki hardly knew him. The fact

is, behind Suzuki’s inscrutable Oriental public image was a thoroughly modern man who

had lived for many years in the United States, had traveled widely in Europe, was married

for many years to an American woman, and was as thoroughly conversant with Western

philosophy as Eastern.

The real Suzuki was also a man who, alongside his deep study of Japanese and Chinese texts

and traditions, had spent decades—especially in the first half of his life—becoming deeply

conversant with the latest Western psychological theories. Those years of self-study were

critically important to his development of a way of talking about Zen that would ultimately

draw the attention of some of the leading psychoanalytically oriented therapists of the day. It

was almost surely not Suzuki’s original intent, however, specifically to catalyse a dialogue

between Western psychotherapy and Eastern Zen. What role then did his long-standing

engagement with Western psychology play in his own thinking? The short answer is:

psychology was the language of universality and modernity; and if Zen was to survive, Suzuki
believed, it needed to learn to speak that language. That is the short answer, but we now need

the long answer to make sense of it.

Suzuki’s long life stretched from the 1870s to the 1960s. This meant that he came of age

during a time when the very survival of Buddhism in Japan seemed at risk. In the late 19th

century, the newly established Meiji government in Japan had declared Buddhism a 'foreign'

and corrupt tradition that was incompatible with its own modernizing and westward-looking

goals (see Sharf 1993). Suzuki’s teacher, the Zen Buddhist abbot Soyen Shaku, was among

those actively seeking strategies in those days for preserving the tradition. In particular, he and

others invested considerable time in efforts to distil the rational 'essence' of the Japanese

Buddhist tradition, while downplaying or dismissing all the accreted cosmologies and folk

rituals that might make it appear superstitious or retrograde (see Shokin 1967).

Suzuki was deeply aware of all this work, but initially was not himself involved in it.

However, because he had good English language skills (before becoming Soyen’s student, he

had earned a modest living as an English teacher), Soyen one day enlisted him in a bold

strategic effort: he asked Suzuki to translate into English a talk that he, Soyen, planned to hold

at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, in 1893 (see Switzer 1985).

The Parliament—held to coincide with the World’s Fair in Chicago—was the first time

that leaders and representatives from all the major world faiths had ever gathered together to

exchange views. For many of the American organizers of the Parliament, the gathering was an

opportunity to reaffirm the primacy of the Christian faith in a time when developments in

Biblical criticism and the natural sciences (especially Darwinian evolution) had put it

increasingly on the defensive.

In contrast, the Japanese delegates—and other representatives of Asian countries—viewed the

Parliament as an unprecedented opportunity to showcase the modern relevance and even

superiority of Buddhism over Christianity in an international forum (see Snodgrass 2003). As

an 1893 editorial in a Japanese Buddhist journal bluntly observed shortly before the start of the

Parliament: there is 'distress among Christians conscious of the destruction of the basis of their

faith by the forces at work in civilization. Here,' the editorial concluded, 'is hope for

Buddhism” (cited in M. J Verhoeven 1997: 353; for more generally on the Parliament, see

Eck 1993).

Soyen – who was well-educated in Western philosophical and scientific ideas—therefore

pulled no punches in his talk. He drew parallels between the Buddhist 'law of karma' and the

'laws of nature' studied by science. He made clear that Buddhists believed that everything

happens for a reason. He underscored that they had no need for miracles and no appetite for

blind faith.

This reverse missionary work to the West succeeded, at least in one very important respect: it

converted the German-born philosopher and editor, Paul Carus to the cause. Carus was one of

those many late 19th century intellectuals who had been devastated by the loss of the Christian

faith of his youth, and who had committed his adult life to trying to create some kind of

alternative religion that would be compatible with the new truths of science. Though he had

never shown any serious interest in Buddhism before 1893, Soyen and other Buddhists who

spoke at the Parliament convinced him that the tradition offered a far more powerful

framework for realizing his vision of an integrated approach to science and religion than

Christianity or anything else on offer in the West.

And it happened that he was remarkably well-placed to do something about this conviction.
He was the son-in-law and partner of the philanthropist Edward Hegeler, who in 1887 had

established a publishing house, the Open Court Publishing Company, and two journals, the

Open Court and The Monist, both dedicated to reconciling religion with modern (especially

Darwinian) science. Carus tapped into the family coffers to help Soyen and another young

Buddhist scholar, Anagarika Dharmapala, tour North America. He also invited Soyen and

another Japanese Buddhist scholar to spend a week with him in his home, discussing their

shared interests in purging religion—Buddhism and Christianity equally—of all

“mythological” elements (Verhoeven 1997). In short order, guided by Soyen, he wrote a book

entitled The Gospel of Buddha, published by the Open Court Press (see Carus 1894; Jackson

1968). Soyen promptly asked Suzuki, still back in Japan, to translate Carus’ English-language

book into Japanese for Asian audiences, which he did.

Around this point in time, the thought arose that Suzuki might come to the United States in

order to help Carus with more translation work. Soyen reassured his American friend that

Suzuki was 'honest and diligent', and though 'not yet thoroughly versed in Buddhistic

literature, yet I hope he will be able to assist you' (cited in Leonard 1995: 153). Suzuki, for his

part, was keen both to experience the West for himself, and to learn from Carus. Three years

later, in 1897, he arrived in La Salle, Illinois. He stayed there for eleven years. During this

period, he worked on a series of translations for his employer, and assisted in all aspects of the

publishing and editing business (see Shōjun 1967).

At the same time, he began a process of diligent self-education in Western philosophy and

psychology. A key discovery was the work of William James, especially James’ philosophy of

radical empiricism, in which he insisted that direct, unmediated experience should be the

foundation of knowledge of reality, and his efforts to theorize the psychology of mystical
experience. James had identified four universal 'marks' of a mystical experience: ineffability,

noetic quality, transience and passivity. In his own later writings, Suzuki would engage with

James, almost as if with a colleague, by suggesting that “the psychology of satori” (Zen

enlightenment) could be characterized by eight further markers: irrationality, intuitive insight,

authoritativeness, affirmation, a sense of the beyond, a feeling of exaltation, momentariness,

and an impersonal tone. This last characteristic, Suzuki felt, distinguished Zen mysticism from

Christian mysticism, which often involved 'personal and frequently feelings (Suzuki 1956:.

106).

Suzuki did not limit his psychological education to James. During the years that he was

working for Carus, The Monist published scores of articles or reviews concerned in one

way or another with the new psychological theories of the 'subliminal self' (a term

associated especially with the English psychical researcher Frederic Myers, but also

adopted by James) ; the 'subconscious' (widely used, though given particular specificity by

the French psychologist Pierre Janet); 'unconscious cerebration' (associated with the

English physiologist and philosopher William Carpenter); and the 'unconscious mind'

(widely associated at the time, not with Freud, but with the 'philosophy of the unconscious'

of the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann). Carus himself published pieces in The

Monist in which he spoke often about 'the subconscious treasury of our mind', 'the

subconscious depths of our soul', and more (see, e.g., Carus 1902).

Suzuki’s own early writings directed to Westerners showed a casual confidence with the

gist of all these early 20th century discussions:

Some think that there is still an unknown region in our consciousness, which has
not yet been thoroughly and systematically explored. It is sometimes called the
Unconscious or the Subconscious. This is a territory filled with dark images, and
 naturally most scientists are afraid of treading upon it. But this must not be taken as
denying the facts of its existence. Just as our ordinary field of consciousness is
filled with all possible kinds of images, beneficial and harmful, systematic and
confusing, clear and obscure, forcefully assertive and weakly fading; so is the
Subconscious a storehouse of every form of occultism or mysticism, understanding
by the term all that is known as latent or abnormal or psychic or spiritualistic
(Suzuki [1921] 1961: 32).

By 1907, his last year working with Carus, Suzuki was secure enough in his knowledge of

modern Western psychology to suggest in print that all the most important insights of

modern psychology already existed in Buddhism. 'It is wonderful,' he wrote, 'that

Buddhism clearly anticipated the outcome of modern psychological researches at the time

when all other religious and philosophical systems were eagerly cherishing dogmatic

superstitions concerning the nature of the ego' (cited in Lopez, 2011: 220).

If this was so, then it followed that there might be a way to apply Western psychological

categories as a strategy to teach Buddhism—and soon he would conclude, especially Zen

Buddhism—to Westerners. This would be his project for the next 40 years.

First, though, he needed to complete his psychological education. Leaving the United

States in 1908, Suzuki spent a year in Europe doing research in libraries, and finally

returned to Japan in 1909, where he secured work teaching English at an elite grammar

school (he would not secure a professorship in his area of scholarship until 1921). At the

request of the London Swedenborgian Society, he also undertook a series of translations of

several key works of the 18th century Swedish scientist, traveller, statesman, and religious

philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg; he then capped off this translation work with a

biographical study of the man.

These years of work added a further—more overtly mystical—level of complexity to

Suzuki’s psychological approach. Swedenborg believed that the human mind consisted of
levels, parts of which are engaged with the visible, material world and parts of which have

the capacity, through intuition, to access invisible realities. Part of the task of spiritual

development was to cultivate the generally less developed, intuitive levels of the mind.

Historian Eugene Taylor is emphatic about the importance of the Swedenborgian

worldview to Suzuki’s intellectual development: 'There can be little doubt that the writings

of Swedenborg...defined for Suzuki the standard by which he would first introduce Zen to

the west—namely, not as a religion but as a spiritual psychology that had obvious and

practical consequences' (Taylor n.d., in Studia Swedenborgiana 1974-2006). Indeed,

Suzuki would implicitly endorse Taylor’s appraisal when, as an old man, he is reported to

have suddenly exclaimed to a group of fascinated Western scholars (including Mircea

Eliade and Henri Corbin): 'For you Westerners, it is Swedenborg who is your Buddha, it is

he who should be read and followed!' (Ankerberg 1999, p. 442; also Suzuki et al. 1996: p.

xv. See also Zuber 2010).

In 1911, Suzuki had married an American woman he had met while living in the United

States: Beatrice Erskine Lane. Lane—who moved to Japan to be with him—was a graduate

from Radcliffe College (where, as it happened, she had studied with William James), and

also a passionate Theosophist. Theosophy was the 'New Age' occult philosophy of its time:

it blended a certain reading of the latest scientific ideas with a mix of Eastern and Western

mystical and gnostic traditions, all in pursuit of the universal truths behind all religions. It

also explicitly framed itself as a psychology—a 'science of the soul' that aimed to counter

the materialistic and nihilistic academic psychologies of the late 19th century (see

Blavatsky 1896). Theosophists were intensely interested, for example, in evidence for

telepathy, clairvoyance and other paranormal psychological abilities. They believed these
abilities were scientifically-validated signs of humanity’s progress towards a state of what

they called 'cosmic consciousness.' For Theosophists, in short, it was possible to be

scientifically-minded, psychologically-minded and spiritually-minded at once—there was

no intrinsic contradiction between any of these levels of understanding. Suzuki—who was

active with his wife in Theosophical Lodges in Japan for decades—seems to have taken

this message to heart

In 1921, the couple co-founded (with several colleagues) an English-language journal The

Eastern Buddhist dedicated to teaching the universal and essential truths of Buddhism to

Westerners, in a language that they could understand and accept. Some scholars have

suggested that the journal was modelled in spirit and structure after Carus’ The Monist

(see Jackson 2010: 43). In short order, Suzuki began to use this journal as a vehicle for

most of the articles on Zen that would later make his reputation in the West. In 1927, a

London publisher began to publish some of them in collected form. Suzuki’s reputation

began to grow.

The Zen education of Western psychology

The story we are tracking, though, took a decisive turn when, in 1933, Suzuki decided to

send the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung one of his collected volumes of essays. For

some years, he had admired Jung’s mystical and expansive vision of the human mind.

Quite possibly, he even had Jung in mind when he declared in an article first published in

1921 that 'the study of Zen must be taken up by the profounder psychologists' (Suzuki

1961: 32).
Jung, it turned out, had already read Suzuki’s previous collection of essays. He needed no

persuading of the interest of Suzuki’s work for his own. His warm response was flattering

indeed:

Zen is a true goldmine for the needs of the Western “psychologist.” ... My
acquaintance with the classical works of the Far East has given me no end of
support in my psychological endeavors. Thus I feel deeply obliged to you for your
kind and generous gift (Jung, September 23, 1933 in Alder 1973: 127-128).

Six years later, in 1939, Jung agreed to write a foreword to the German translation of

Suzuki’s first book directed at a general audience, Introduction to Zen Buddhism.ii 'It is no

accident that it is a psychotherapist who is writing this foreword,' Jung observed there. Zen

might initially seem like 'mumbo jumbo,' he said, but he believed that it was in fact a path

designed to overcome the limits of the ego and liberate higher levels of the unconscious.

The goals of the Zen master and the goals of the analytic psychotherapist were, in that

sense, not that different. There was much to learn from close comparative study of the two

traditions, even if in the end (and it was an important caveat) 'a direct transplantation of

Zen to our Western conditions [was] neither commendable nor even possible.' All the

same, he concluded, 'the psychotherapist who is seriously concerned with the question of

the aim of his therapy cannot remain unmoved when he sees the end towards which this

Eastern method of psychic “healing”—i.e., “making whole”—is striving’ (Jung [1939]

1991, p. 26).

Suzuki’s years of refining a vocabulary and finding voice that would resonate with the

universal language of Western psychology had paid off. He had found a new champion.

When, in 1949, the Philosophical Library reprinted the original English edition of Suzuki’s

Introduction to Zen, the publisher included a new English translation of Jung’s original
foreword.

In the years to follow, this book, more than any other, became the most common entry point

for Westerners seeking to understand Zen. This was partly because it was seen as accessible—

'the first book to deal with the mysteries of Zen for laymen,' as one reviewer of the time

approvingly noted (S.S. 1937: 514; see also Blofeld 1960). But it was also because—with

Jung’s endorsement—the book had been culturally positioned as a new resource for the urgent

psychotherapeutic and existentialist projects of the postwar world. In this book, Suzuki

insisted that Zen was less a form of Buddhism than it was a universal philosophy of life – 'the

spirit of all religions and philosophies.' He insisted that Zen was concerned, not with ritual, not

with dogma, not even with belief, but with transformative personal experience. And he

promised his readers would harvest profound existential and even psychotherapeutic fruits

from their efforts to understand the Zen message: 'When Zen is thoroughly understood,

absolute peace of mind is attained, and a man lives as he ought to live. What more may we

hope?' It is striking that all the publisher’s print advertisements for the book listed it, not

alongside books concerned with Asian themes, but alongside works by philosophers and

psychologists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel and the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers ('Back

Matter' 1949).

The 1949 republication of Introduction to Zen was generally welcomed with praise and

pleasure by reviewers from religious studies: 'There is no question that Professor Suzuki is the

greatest living authority on Zen, and this small book is one of the best treatises in the field…”

(Kitagawa 1950: 60). Within the field of psychology, though, the book seems to have had a

more mixed reception. Madison Bentley (an American laboratory psychologist who had

studied under Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Tichener) grudgingly granted that it was
important to understand the 'foreign' beliefs that move 'millions of men.' However, he clearly

found the book opaque, and he observed rather tartly that Dr. Jung apparently believed that

psychotherapists had a 'special aptitude' in grasping exotic Eastern ideas like these. And he

concluded with some pointed references to the recent world war:

References [by Suzuki] to open brutality in the administration of koan, which are
repeated time after time throughout the book, suggest… a reason why the practices of
Zen should have been encouraged in the training of soldiers and should have flourished
(notably in Japan) in times of war (Bentley 1950: 466).

In the end, it was not the experimentalists, but rather a new generation of existentially-

oriented and humanistic psychotherapists who would most resonate to the psychological

teachings embedded in the vision of Zen Suzuki was articulating in his books. These

clinicians were already combing the works of Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Soren

Kierkegaard, and Emil Camus for insights that would help them do their work. Suzuki’s

works found a place on that same part of their shelves. They read his books and, when he

partially relocated to New York City in 1951, many became loyal auditors of his yearly

lectures at Columbia University. In 1957, Time Magazine quoted Suzuki’s wry observation

that 'painters and psychiatrists seem especially interested in Zen':

Psychoanalysts, says Dr. Suzuki, his tiny eyes twinkling under wing-like eyebrows,
have a lot to learn from Zen: “They go round and round on the surface of the mind
without stopping. But Zen goes deep” (“Zen” 1957: 68).

Some of the psychoanalysts in question, such as Karen Horney, were major figures in the

field. An early dissident from orthodox Freudianism, Horney first discovered Suzuki’s

writings in the 1940s, and was particularly impressed by his description of the authenticity

or 'whole-heartedness' of the typical Zen master (Horney 1945: 162-163, 183). Here, she

thought, were lessons in living from which the West in general—and neurotics in
particular—could surely benefit. When Suzuki came to New York City in 1951, she

arranged to be introduced to him, and they became fast friends. A year later, they traveled

together to Japan so that Horney could observe life at a Zen monastery and give some

lectures at the Jikeikai Medical School in Tokyo (Suler 1993: 20; for more, see Dockett et

al. 2003; DeMartino 1991).

Horney seems to have been profoundly moved by the experience, but what might have

been a new chapter in her own analytic theorizing was cut short by cancer. Nevertheless,

in her final (posthumously published) lectures, she urged her colleagues to engage with

this tradition. In particular, she suggested that the 'whole hearted attentiveness' of what she

called the Zen practitioner could be a model for the kind of listening attitude that the

psychoanalyst needed to be effective in a clinical setting:

That attention should be wholehearted may seem banal, trite, and self-evident. Yet
in the sense that I mean whole-hearted attention, I think it rather difficult to attain. I
am referring to a power of concentration. …This is a faculty for which Orientals
have a much deeper feeling than we do. Wholeheartedness of attention means being
there altogether in the service of the patient, yet with a kind of self-
forgetfulness…Self-forget, but be there with all your feelings (Horney 1991: 19-21;
see also Miller 2004).

After Horney’s premature death, her student and close collaborator Harold Kelman

succeeded her as editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Dean of the

American Institute for Psychoanalysis. He also took it upon himself to pursue and

significantly deepen her preliminary effort to envision ways to enrich the new humanistic

psychoanalytic therapies with insights from Zen. Psychoanalysis needed to move, he

argued, 'more in the direction of the Eastern master-disciple relation.' If it did, he could

envision a powerful cultural effect on society as a whole in which perspectives from East
and West came together 'in ways heretofore not existent or envisaged ‘ (Kelman 1959: 332-

333).

More and more people were intrigued. By 1959, a new English-language Japanese journal

Psychologia was publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like 'Eastern influences

on psychoanalytic thinking', 'Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism', 'How to get Zen

enlightenment', 'William James and Zen', 'Tao, Zen and existential psychotherapy', 'The

concept of ‘on’ in Ruth Benedict and D.T. Suzuki', 'The contribution of George Wilhelm

Groddeck on Zen Buddhism and psychiatry', 'Affinities between Zen and analytic

psychology', and more.

In these years, however, there was one figure who aimed to stand above the fray and strike

a synthetic note: Horney’s former intimate friend and colleague, Erich Fromm. A

psychoanalyst, sociologist and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Fromm had become

famous in the 1940s for his book, Escape from Freedom (Fromm 1941). There he had

tried, among other things, to understand why people are attracted to authoritarian systems

like Nazism, and discussed the feelings of anxiety and emptiness associated with becoming

emancipated from such systems. Absolute freedom was not easy or even desirable; people

need to feel embedded in some kind of larger worldview in order to live meaningful lives.

Were there any world views on offer that lacked the rigid and repressive qualities that were

so palpably dangerous for society? By the mid 1940s, Fromm had discovered Suzuki, and

by 1950, he had begun to suggest that Zen might be such a world view:

Zen-Buddhism, a later sect within Buddhism, is expressive of [a) …radical anti-

authoritarian attitude. Zen proposes that no knowledge is of any value unless it
grows out of ourselves; no authority, no teacher can really teach us anything except
to arouse doubts in us; words and thought systems are dangerous because they
 easily turn into authorities whom we worship. Life itself must be grasped and
experienced as it flows, and in this lies virtue (Fromm 1950: 40).

Soon after this, Fromm sent Suzuki a copy of Escape from Freedom, and expressed his

hopes for continuing dialogue. Twenty years earlier, it had been Suzuki who was sending

gifts to the psychoanalytic community, hoping to convince them of the interest of his work.

Now the tables had turned. By 1956, Fromm was dining at Suzuki’s part-time home in

New York City, and talking with him about ways in which Zen could contribute to a

wholesale reimagining of psychoanalytic therapeutics and theory (see Friedman and

Schreiber 2013).

By this time, also, Fromm was himself spending considerable periods of time at a new

home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. At one point he suggested that Suzuki consider moving in

with him permanently. When Suzuki politely declined, Fromm conceived instead a major

conference based in Mexico that would try to take stock of the entire current state of the

conversation between Zen and psychotherapy (see Friedman and Schreiber 2013). In

1957, some fifty psychotherapists—double the original expected number—participated in

a week of presentations and discussions. Fromm later recalled the event as a magical time:

what began as a traditional conference with the usual ‘over-emphasis on thoughts and

words' changed over a few days, as people 'became more concentrated and more quiet.'

Suzuki’s unaffected and authentic presence seemed to make all the difference, he said. His

'humanity shone through the particularity of his national and cultural background' (Fromm

1967: 88).

An edited volume of proceedings, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, was published in

1960 (Fromm, Suzuki, de Martino 1960). It contained contributions from only three of the
ten people who actually spoke at the meeting. It was peppered with romantic Orientalist

images of an encounter between a contemplative and life-loving East and a mechanistic

and hyper-rational West. It announced no major new conceptual breakthroughs. And it was

short on details about how integrating Zen into the psychotherapeutic process might

actually improve the experience that patients had in the clinic.iii

Nevertheless, the prominence of its authors, the timeliness of its topic, and the novelty of

its agenda assured the book visibility. In short order, reviews had appeared in the American

Journal of Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Psychology, The Humanist, The International

Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychiatric Quarterly, The Journal of Nervous and

Mental Disease, and more (see Anonymous 1961; Brody 1960; Curry 1961; Hoffman

1964; Morris 1961; Rosen 1961). There was lots of praise. 'An excellent exposition of the

points of contact and contrast in Zen and psychoanalytic therapy', wrote the reviewer for

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 'Enormously stimulating and thought-

provoking,' agreed the reviewer for Psychiatric Quarterly.

There were also more equivocal, even harsh reactions. 'Suzuki adds nothing to his already

excellent accounts of Zen Buddhism,' sniffed a reviewer for Philosophy East and West,

'except perhaps to use the word ‘unconscious’ frequently and in a way which bears no

resemblance to the use of that word by psychoanalysts. …Fromm gives an excellent

account of psychoanalysis and then tries, unsuccessfully, to relate it to Zen Buddhism'

(Wienpahl 1965: 81).

Others worried more generally about the long-term impact of the new rapprochement

between Zen and psychotherapy. Would Zen and related practices like Yoga now be 'put at

the disposition of…careers, …professional habits, publicity and even economic goals?'
(Scaligero 1963: 284). Alternatively, was it possible that the starry-eyed psychotherapists

really didn’t know the devil with which they were supping? In his review, the cultural

anthropologist Ernst Becker (who would become better known in the 1970s for his Pulitzer

Prize winning book, The Denial of Death) pointed out that there actually already existed a

form of psychotherapy shaped by Zen principles: Morita psychotherapy. This therapy was

far from the anti-authoritarian, existential therapy envisioned by the Western

psychoanalysts who fantasized about integrating Zen into their practice. Instead, it

employed traditional Japanese Zen authoritarian tactics designed to break down defences,

including suddenly shouting at a patient and the use of sticks. Becker concluded: 'Surely

no Western therapist would have his utopia created by [such) shock-treatments' (Becker

1961a: 17). iv

Legacies and conclusions

The conversation was just warming up, one feels, when it was overtaken by larger cultural

events. Bluntly put, the Sixties arrived. By the mid-1960s, Psychologia which had been

publishing articles, just a few years earlier, on the relationship between Zen, existentialism

and psychotherapy, now began publishing articles with titles like 'Reflections on LSD, Zen

meditation and satori,' 'Zen and LSD: an enlightened experience,' and 'D. T. Suzuki, Zen

and LSD-25.'

To the extent that people continued to pursue the older conversation on Zen’s implications

for psychotherapeutic theory, it tended now to have a new kind of political, counterculture

edge. The widely-read book by the British-born Buddhist teacher Alan Watts,

Psychotherapy East and West (Watts 1961) helped set the new tone. In that book, Watts
insisted that the primary goal of both Zen and psychotherapy should be to help people

resist the 'brainwashing' of 'armies, bureaucracies, churches, [and) corporations.' By this

time, Gregory Bateson (who learned his Zen from Watts), had also developed his theories

on the double bind in which he compared the family dynamics of the schizophrenic patient

to the insoluble riddles that the Zen adept is expected to solve. The difference between the

two, he said, was that the Zen adept had ways ultimately to transcend his dilemma and

achieve enlightenment. The schizophrenic patient did not and so he went mad (see Bateson

et al. 1956; for more on the link between Bateson and Eastern mysticism, see Pickering

2010). From here, it was a short step to the argument of psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing (also

influenced by Zen) that the schizophrenic was a kind of thwarted mystic. 'Future men will

see … that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite

ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.'

(Laing 1967: 107).

After that, the original Zen moment in psychotherapy largely passed. It passed, not just

because psychedelics had derailed the earlier conversation, but also because, after the

1970s, both psychotherapy and the Asian cultural scene looked different. In the 1960s, the

Maharishi had taught a generation how to achieve 'bliss' by meditating for fifteen minutes a

day; but in the 1970s, the cardiologist Herbert Benson musicalised the Maharishi’s

techniques and reframed them as a method of stress reduction (see Harrington 2007). By

the 1980s, people interested in the mental health benefits of contemplative practices could

look to a broader range of techniques now available in the culture ('just sitting' meditation,

yoga, mindfulness training, breath meditation, body awareness), many of which had not

been emphasized by Suzuki. In the 1960s, the Soto Zen monk, Shunryu Suzuki, founded
the first Zen training centre in the United States. The centre emphasized the virtues of

sitting meditation (zazen) over the koans and paradoxes emphasized by D.T. Suzuki

(trained more in the Rinzai Zen tradition). In the 1980s, Jon Kabat-Zinn developed a

successful curriculum he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (see Kabat-Zinn

1982; Kabat-Zinn et al 1985; Jon Kabat-Zinn1990). In the 1990s, Marsha Linehan

pioneered a therapy for suicidal patients that blended a Zen-inspired concept of 'radical

acceptance' with active cognitive-behavioral work (see Linehan 1993).

Elsewhere within psychiatry, the brain was largely replacing the couch as the primary

target of clinical optimism in psychiatry, and as it did, the Eastern turn in psychiatry took a

biological turn. Books like Zen and the Brain became popular (see Austin 1999).

Scientists published studies on the mental health benefits of sitting meditation (see

Davidson et al 2003). Images of the Dalai Lama of Tibet in dialogue with neuroscientists

largely replaced images of Suzuki in dialogue with psychoanalysts.v

Nevertheless, even if the story of Suzuki and his first interlocutors has been partly eclipsed

by all these new developments, it also partly made them possible. It was Suzuki who, more

than anyone else, first encouraged American psychotherapists to think of Zen as

psychotherapy by other means, and the Asian religious traditions as a resource, not just for

spiritual insights, but also for clinical projects. Even if today we are more inclined to talk

about 'Zen and the brain' than about Zen and the unconscious, we still work with a range of

assumptions about Zen as a psychology and a therapeutic path that he first helped to

articulate.

Some scholars would find great irony in this fact. The argument that has been made more

generally about Suzuki is that his 'Western enthusiasts' embraced his Zen only because he
had taken great pains to decontextualize and 'Westernise' the tradition for them: in the

words of Robert Sharf, 'like Narcissus, [they]… failed to recognize their own reflection in

the mirror being held out to them' (Sharf 1993: 39 see also McMahon 2002). And indeed

we know that Suzuki, for reasons already discussed, spent years seeking ways to translate

key aspects of the Zen experience into the language of Western psychology. But should we

conclude from all of this that the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who participated in

Fromm’s workshop in Mexico, attended Suzuki’s lectures in New York City, and earnestly

read his books were—on some level—dupes?

I think not. While it is true that most of them were probably unaware of the differences

between the 'universal', psychologised Zen that they learned from Suzuki, and the Zen

taught in Japanese monasteries and described in the old sources, it is unclear that learning

the truth would have bothered them very much. Suzuki may have not been a purist in his

approach to Zen, but they were all impure themselves. Like him, they believed that a

tradition they loved was no longer adequate to the times. Like him, they were prepared to

become cultural omnivores in search of resources that would allow them to reframe that

tradition to serve new needs. In pursuing that goal, many read Martin Buber’s I thou

philosophy and Hasidic parables alongside Suzuki’s Zen philosophy and Japanese tales,

and blended insights from what they took to be 'the East' alongside insights from Christian

existentialism, Marxism or continental philosophy. In this sense, the story of Zen and

Western psychotherapy is best seen as a mutually impure, mutually self-serving, but also

strangely sincere and idealistic East-West encounter; one involving people who were

motivated by different goals and probably never fully understood one another.
i
The West, Suzuki wrote (Suzuki 1970) is active, analytical, and intellectual, but it
is also machine-like and 'scientifically objective.' In contrast, 'Asiatic people love life as it
is lived and do not wish to turn it into a means of accomplishing something else.'
ii
The English version of this book, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism had originally
been published in 1934.
iii
This may have been partly a consequence, again, of the fact that the book included
such a limited range of the papers presented at the meeting. One of the speakers at the
workshop, for example, was Charlotte Selver, who founded a technique she called 'sensory
awareness therapy.' Her approach went on to have a significant influence on the 'human
potential movement' of the 1970s. It also influenced the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls.
Tellingly, in the 1960s, Perls later became independently interested in Zen. He developed
an approach in which he used Selver’s techniques of body awareness to help patients
achieve what he called 'mini-satoris'—brief moments of heightened awareness– during the
therapeutic process.
iv
Becker went on to develop a thorough-going critique of the rising Western love
affair with Zen in general (see Becker 1961b). For a discussion of Morita therapy as it was
practiced at the time, see Sato and Kora 1958). Naikan therapy was a second form of
psychotherapy inspired by Zen and native to Japan; it involved a highly-structured and
intensive meditative practice that lasted for one week, and focused on restructuring a
patient’s relationships with his family. 'Naikan helps a person rediscover guilt feelings
resulting from his ingratitude and irresponsibility. It also helps the patient discover
appropriate feelings of gratitude toward those who have extended themselves to the patient
in the past' (Tatara 1982: 229-230).
v
Even as it is true that the 1990s saw a lot of attention in this area turning towards
the brain, we also see an attempt by a new generation of post-Freudian psychotherapists to
pursue a new chapter on the relationship between psychotherapy and Buddhist-derived
contemplative practices, including Zen. See Epstein 1995; Molino, ed. 1999; Young-
Eisendrath and Shoji Muramoto, eds. 2004.

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