Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion

By Ira Helderman

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• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469648538

Ira Helderman

Ira Helderman, a psychotherapist in private practice, holds a Ph.D. in religious studies and is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Human Development Counseling at Vanderbilt University.

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PRESCRIBING THE DHARMA

PRESCRIBING THE DHARMA

Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion

IRA HELDERMAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Lilian R. Furst Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by April Leidig

Set in Minion by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: © iStockphoto.com / justhavealook

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Helderman, Ira, author.

Title: Prescribing the Dharma : psychotherapists, Buddhist traditions, and defining religion / Ira Helderman.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029732| ISBN 9781469648514 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469648521 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469648538 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dharma (Buddhism) | Psychotherapists. | Psychotherapy—Religious aspects—Buddhism. | Buddhism and psychoanalysis. | Buddhism—Psychology. | Psychology and religion.

Classification: LCC BQ4570.P755 H45 2019 | DDC 294.3/3615—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029732

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

ONE

Coming to Terms with Our Terms

TWO

Look but Don’t Touch: Therapizing Religion Approaches

THREE

Research Tested, Science Approved: Filtering Religion Approaches

FOUR

Black Boxes and Trojan Horses: Translating Religion Approaches

FIVE

Keeping Meditation Religious and Psychotherapy Secular: Personalizing Religion Approaches

SIX

With Rigor: Adopting Religion Approaches

SEVEN

Over the Borderline: Integrating Religion Approaches

CONCLUSION

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was created out of relationships. Perhaps such a sentiment would be expected, coming as it does from a religious studies scholar who also maintains a full-time psychotherapy practice. But it seems to me to be merely a descriptive statement; this book was written relationally, through listening curiously and openly and through, thankfully, being truly heard by others as I shared my own curiosities and concerns.

This started with Howard Roback, my benefactor at nearly every stage of my career, and continued through advisers and friends at Vanderbilt University beginning with Volney Gay, Jay Geller, Rob Campany, Bonnie Miler-McLemore, Ruth Rogaski, Tony Stewart, Nancy Lin, and Bryan Lowe.

Furthermore, throughout conducting this research I have been struck by the willingness of others to respond when I would cold call (or, rather, cold email) them, reaching out for support, insight, and engagement. This book would, of course, have been impossible if my interviewees had not decided to participate when I contacted them. I will always appreciate their generosity, for trusting me to hear them: Harvey Aronson, Paul Cooper, Christopher Germer, Steven Hayes, Pilar Jennings, Joe Loizzo, Barry Magid, Melvin Miller, Susan Pollak, Jeffrey Rubin, Ron Siegel, Jan Surrey, Gay Watson, Karen Kissel Wegela, and Polly Young-Eisendrath.

Further, I am grateful to many others in the field of religious studies who also responded when I reached out. A few have become mentors and friends who, from the very first steps that ultimately led to this book, have offered me deep engagement beyond only exchanging ideas or comments on drafts: David McMahan, Ann Gleig, Pierce Salguero, and Anne Harrington.

But this gratitude extends to the many others who have also taken the time to give their perspective in conversation (Linda Barnes, Kin Cheung, Nalika Gajaweera, Lance Laird, Sonya Pritzker, James Robson, Michael Stanley-Baker, and Jeff Wilson), some of whom were also able to give helpful feedback on chapters and drafts of this book (Erik Braun, Francisca Cho, Rainer Funk, Pamela Klassen, Brent Nongbri, and Robert Sharf).

This work has also benefitted immeasurably from the feedback of the two readers at University of North Carolina Press, Wendy Cadge and William Parsons. I am deeply grateful for their thoughtful and considered responses, which helped both open this book up and give it more texture.

And I greatly appreciate all the help of the staff at University of North Carolina Press for the expertise (and patience) of Mary Carley Caviness, Dino Battista, April Leidig, Karen Carroll, and Andrew Winters, and, especially, the guidance, enthusiasm, and encouragement of my editor, Elaine Maisner.

But, of course, it is the relationships that sustain me on a daily basis upon which this book is truly grounded: my family, friends, and circle who have supported me—even through their surprise when, many years ago now, I shared with them that I had decided to take up religious studies scholarship.

And, to my wife, Jennifer Bailey Helderman, whose love and encouragement lifts me up and carries me along, whose own work healing the world never ceases to inspire and amaze me.

Finally, this book is dedicated to the many courageous colleagues, supervisees, students, and friends I have had the privilege of connecting with over more than a decade and a half of working in mental health, who, every day, sit down in their offices and bring care and compassion to suffering people. They breathe between each line of this book.

__________

Interspersed throughout this book are ideas and language that previously appeared in the articles Drawing the Boundaries between ‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ in Psychotherapists’ Approaches to Buddhist Traditions in the United States published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and ‘The Conversion of the Barbarians’: Comparison and Psychotherapists’ Approaches to Buddhist Traditions in the United States published in Buddhist Studies Review.

A final note that, due to the constraints of academic publishing, the references for this book are limited to works cited; the depth and breadth of works that my research is founded upon far exceed those listed therein.

PRESCRIBING THE DHARMA

INTRODUCTION

I sit in my office across from a middle-aged woman as she tearfully explains that she has again reached a point of hopelessness. This woman, let’s call her Sylvia, has come to see me for counseling for years now. Over these years, she has learned to recognize tearfulness as something of a positive sign that, at least for the moment, she is able to experience some emotion rather than a numbness she finds even more intolerable. Sylvia struggles with chronic dysthymic depressive symptoms. For decades now, she has felt worse than miserable, completely empty, like a robot. Immersed in feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred, Sylvia seems trapped in cycles of avoidance and isolation. Hopeless for so long, often the only path she can imagine out of the all-consuming pain is suicide. I am not the first clinician to work with Sylvia. When I first met her, Sylvia disclosed that her previous therapists told her she had treatment-resistant depression—less a clinical assessment, to my mind, than an indicator that those previous therapists were frustrated by their inability to alleviate her agony. Sitting with her on this day, however, I begin to empathize with those therapists’ sense of desperation. Sylvia’s pain is intensely real, as is the potential consequence of incessant suicidal ideation. But Sylvia has already been exposed to multiple therapeutic modalities in the past, all to no avail. It is with some excitement then that I learn—whether from a colleague in a peer consultation group, an academic journal, or through the wider media—that there could be a new possible source of care for Sylvia: Buddhist teachings and practices.

Sylvia is a fictional composite invention of cases I have witnessed in my ethnographic research as well as my own clinical practice. However, these sorts of scenarios are quite common. In fact, it is just such clinical situations that have led a multitude of psychotherapists to investigate whether Buddhist traditions could offer resources for psychotherapeutic healing. It was, indeed, these motives that initially led to my own study of what I was taught was Buddhist doctrine. Years before I ever could have imagined taking on a new path as a religious studies scholar, I began reading literature on the topic and regularly attending continuing education conferences which offered training on how Buddhist traditions could assist or inform clinical work. Over time, I became more and more curious about what exactly I was engaged with.

I was not sitting in my clinical office when, in May of 2009, I truly began to awaken to this curiosity. After taking what had become an annual journey to Boston for a meeting held by Harvard Medical School, I found myself listening to no less a figure than the Dalai Lama. During his talk, the Dalai Lama expounded on the transformational power of loving-kindness compassion and the practices that can cultivate it. He shared at length on Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhist doctrine, on its cosmology, its notions of the cycle of life and death, and the nature of existence. Then it struck me. My eyes scanned the room, fully absorbing the fact that the Dalai Lama’s audience was not made up of nuns, monks, or initiates seeking the supernatural wisdom of the reincarnated Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion. They were instead, like me, psychotherapists—mental health practitioners such as psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors. What did it mean that such healing professionals would seek guidance from a figure like the Dalai Lama? This question ultimately propelled me to change the course of my life and take up intensive religious studies research. That research has culminated in the book you now hold in your hands.

I want to emphasize from the outset, however, that as both a religious studies scholar and a practicing psychotherapist, my intention is to remain, indeed, mindful of people like Sylvia and those who care for them. While the paths that have led psychotherapists across the United States to Buddhist traditions vary, they describe themselves to be fundamentally driven by a wish to remedy the anguish of people like Sylvia. In the pages that follow, I will periodically remind us of this reality and urge us to foreground the actual people who care for those in pain rather than the disembodied social forces like Buddhism and secularism that can often dominate conversations on this topic. And clinicians’ interest in Buddhist traditions, motivated, they say, by a search for improved means of psychological healing, has influenced the entire field of mental health care in the United States and beyond.

__________

Psychotherapists’ attention to Buddhist traditions is often described as a new popular trend, implying that it is superficial and frivolous. But, over a century old, it should today be considered an established feature of the U.S. mental health field. Entire treatment modalities now exist with Buddhist teachings and practices at their core. When psychotherapists research what treatment methodologies are available to them on a resource as open-access as the American Psychological Association’s website, they find these Buddhist-influenced forms grouped alongside any other traditional therapeutic orientation. In fact, some modalities, like Marsha Linehan’s (1993) popular Dialectical Behavior Therapy, have been practiced long enough to hold multiple generations of adherents. Continuing education conferences, like the one described above, were once based on introducing Buddhist thought to the first-time curious. But such gatherings today are often focused on topics produced from decades of clinical experience. Many participants at such conferences voice a need to make adjustments in light of the fact that Buddhist traditions have moved from the margins to the mainstream of psychotherapeutic practice; a formulation that was actually used as the title of a 2017 PBS special on perhaps the most visible aspect of this topic, Mindfulness Goes Mainstream.

There may, in fact, be no better place to see these activities’ impact on the mental health field (and beyond) than the proliferation of therapeutic mindfulness practices, a subject that alone has elicited publications numbering literally in the thousands.¹ (For readers especially interested in this subject, as many clearly are, chapter 4 is largely devoted to therapeutic mindfulness practices as its central case study.) However, to put the topic of mindfulness into perspective, clinicians have actually produced an immense mass of literature on a myriad of other subjects related to interpreting or incorporating Buddhist teachings and practices. The references at the back of this book contain only a small sampling with submissions dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. Whether a volume on mindfulness-based treatment modalities or the psychoanalytic treatment of Buddhist doctrine, these texts are regularly used in university and college classes on psychotherapy and counseling. Furthermore, individual courses or class sections on these topics are not just available to interested students. Today, one can attend a full graduate training program to become educated on how to practice Buddhist-informed psychotherapies. A student can be awarded a master’s degree in Contemplative Psychology from the Buddhist-affiliated Naropa University or receive a PhD in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Systems of accountability and accreditation have also arisen in response to the burgeoning demand for these therapeutic approaches. A therapist can now become certified, for example, as a Mindfulness Facilitator by the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. These are but aspects of the economy that has been built up around psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions, an industry that includes not only training manuals, but audio files and even smartphone apps.

Beyond mental health care, as David McMahan (2002, 2008, 2010, 2012) and Ann Gleig (2012a, 2016, 2019) elucidate, these activities have also shaped Buddhist communities—a fact that will be shown in considerable detail throughout this book. That a Buddhist leader of such prominence as the Dalai Lama would speak to a gathering of therapists is but one signifier of this interaction. From the Sri Lankan monk Anāgarika Dharmapāla to the Zen popularizer Daisetsu Teitaro (D. T.) Suzuki to the Tibetan innovator Chögyam Trungpa, some of the figures most responsible for the introduction of Buddhist teachings and practices into the United States have interacted with psychologists and psychotherapists. However, it should be specified that the communities I discuss in this book are largely non-Asian convert Buddhists. Convert Buddhists is a (somewhat debated) phrase used to refer to people, predominantly of European descent, who are not born to Buddhist parents, but, over the course of their lives, become attracted to Buddhist traditions. However we name them, it is within these highly specific communities that the impact of psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhist traditions is most visible.² And that impact has been substantial. Psychotherapists develop culturally ubiquitous mindfulness practices and popularize neuropsychological research on Buddhist meditation. They help establish fast-growing communities like the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and Spirit Rock in Woodacre, California. In fact, psychotherapeutic ideas have molded common U.S. constructions of the very term Buddhism, shaping the qualities understood to define the word. Hence the double meaning of this book’s title: psychotherapists prescribe Buddhist traditions as a source of healing, as medicine. They also pre-scribe—they help rewrite and reconstruct—the dharma for future generations who may come to it without foreknowledge of psychotherapists’ contributions to its present state.

As a result of their significant religio-cultural import, religious studies scholars increasingly attend to psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions. This growing body of literature is pervaded by contention about how to evaluate these activities. Are they sites of modernity’s secularization, a negative cultural erosion and destructive Americanization of a rich cultural heritage? Or are such anxieties unfounded? Are we witnessing the natural processes of religious transmission into new geographic locations, the spread of the Dharma?

On the one hand, Buddhologists, Buddhist practitioners, and cultural commentators express multiple concerns about secularization. Prominent Buddhist studies scholars like Richard Payne (2006) and Donald Lopez (2012) observe radical transformations of Buddhist doctrine and wonder whether we are witnessing the diminishment of the Dharma. The American Buddhist monk Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu (née Geoffrey DeGraff) (2008) and critical theorists Jeremy Carrette and Richard King (2005) perceive a colonialist capitalization of Asian religious elements. They bemoan the medicalizing secularization of centuries-old religious rituals, the silent takeover of religion. On the other hand, some almost unquestioningly treat these activities as religious phenomena, as a new face of Buddhism in America (e.g., Prebish and Tanaka, 1998). The Buddhologist David McMahan (2002, 2008, 2010, 2012) argues that a psychologization of Buddhist traditions is part of the development of a new form, Buddhist modernism. Following McMahan, Jeff Wilson (2014) and Francisca Cho (2012) assert that there is significant precedent for the behavior of psychotherapists in the history of religious traditions. Buddhist teachings and practices have always been reconstructed, they note, when introduced into new communities (e.g., Wilson [2014], 4–5). If psychotherapists’ responses to Buddhist traditions are analogical to those of, for example, medieval Chinese communities, then we might be witnessing their spread rather than secularization.³

The core argument of Prescribing the Dharma is both founded on and a response to the findings of these important studies. In sum, while helpfully illuminating aspects of this topic in a number of ways, existing analyses, in their methodologies, tend to overlook psychotherapists’ own reportage about how they relate to Buddhist teachings and practices. As a consequence, the variety of approaches that clinicians have taken to Buddhist traditions are often lost in the sweep of totalizing interpretations. Moreover, at a theoretical level, these interpretations often do not take sufficient account of recent scholarship demonstrating that classifications like religion and secular are not objective descriptors. These categories have, instead, been socially constructed by particular communities for particular purposes.

Prescribing the Dharma is the first comprehensive work of religious studies scholarship to elucidate the diversity of ways psychotherapists in the United States have related to Buddhist teachings and practices. Attending to what therapists actually say about their interest in Buddhist traditions reveals this diversity and, moreover, some of the major factors that shape it. I find that clinicians’ treatment of Buddhist doctrine is molded by their own presumptions about what defines the religious and the not-religious and their relative levels of investment in preserving psychotherapy’s qualification as a secular biomedical discipline. Prescribing the Dharma thus, for the first time, reveals the full range of psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist practice while making significant contributions to the study of how socially constructed categories like religion and secular function in the lives of everyday communities.

Methodology: Widening Frames, Amplifying Voices

In studies of psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhist traditions, eye-catching features like the aforementioned therapeutic mindfulness practices or cognitive scientific studies on meditation can threaten, like a black hole, to swallow up the conversation. They are actually only slivers of the wide range of ways psychotherapists relate to Buddhist teachings and practices. This multiplicity can be obscured when we give inadequate attention to clinicians’ own perspectives about their intentioned treatment of Buddhist traditions. The methodologies I employed in my research were aimed toward gaining greater insight into those perspectives. This meant more fully addressing therapists’ sizable number of publications in addition to participating in ethnographic investigation.

William Parsons (2001, 2009, 2010a, 2013) and Ann Gleig (2011, 2012a, 2016, 2019) have previously taken this sort of approach, which has allowed them to contribute much-improved descriptions. While they have currently published only focused articles or chapter-length presentations of their findings, their work is extremely useful for amplifying the voices of the communities they write about. Based on close readings of psychoanalysts’ published views of Buddhist thought, Parsons provides some of the most extensive explication available of psychoanalysts’ comparisons between Buddhist concepts and their own metapsychological theories. Gleig, meanwhile, supplements her own textual study with ethnographic observation of how Buddhist communities employ psychotherapeutic elements. Gleig concludes, in part, that, while contemporary Buddhist communities sometimes succumb to reductive psychologization, they also engage in dialogical enterprises that utilize psychology as a tool to extend, through dialogue, the aims of Buddhism (2012a, 129). Gleig’s and Parsons’s work begins to reveal the diversity that exists in these activities; the chapters that follow map the full range of that diversity.

As both a history and an ethnography, this volume employs multiple interdisciplinary methodologies. Following in the footsteps of Parsons and Gleig, this book is fundamentally a historical work within the religious studies subfield of religion and psychology. As such, my primary methodology was a literature discourse analysis. It was, in fact, by examining the tremendous accumulation of publications that clinicians have themselves produced on this topic that I first discerned the common approaches (e.g., translating religion, therapizing religion, etc.) around which this book is organized. I then more closely read the work of individual therapists who were representative of these approaches. The psychotherapists who will be introduced for individual portraits were not merely selected because they provided representative examples of major ways of relating to Buddhist traditions. All these clinicians also hold additional roles as published authors, public speakers, teachers, and clinical supervisors.

As a result, the individual psychotherapists to be spotlighted in this book wield potential influence over larger psychotherapeutic communities. This is, in part, because the specific therapists to be discussed happen to be widely recognized by both scholars and clinicians as some of the most formative figures not only of these activities, but also of the discipline of psychotherapy as a whole. Some of the earlier thinkers have names that could be familiar, including Carl Jung, William James, and Erich Fromm. Those from more recent decades, however, while well known among communities of therapists and, in some cases, Buddhist practitioners, could be less recognizable to general readers. These range from developers of popular treatment modalities like Steven Hayes (designer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to educators like Karen Kissel Wegela who for fifteen years was director of the above-mentioned graduate program in Contemplative Psychotherapy at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. A therapist like Hayes passes on his views to other therapists in his books or on his web platforms and a figure like Wegela has literally instructed generations of emerging clinicians on best-practice methods for incorporating Buddhist teachings and practices.

Again, the psychotherapists discussed in this book have produced numerous publications that could be incorporated into a literature analysis. And, as we will see, the act of writing and speaking would seem to require clinicians to actively theorize what factors determine their approaches to Buddhist doctrine. I found, however, that much remains implicit (or perhaps even unconscious) in therapists’ publications. Consequently, I conducted, wherever possible, follow-up or expert interviews with the psychotherapists I examine who are still living. These interviews were meant to clarify, expand, and, on occasion, fill in the gaps of these clinicians’ published (and/or public) thought. Not all the therapists I focus on in these chapters were available for such interviews. However, in the end, I completed a total of fifteen in person, by phone, and/or by Skype during 2014 and 2015. As I will discuss further in chapter 1, most interview questions were tailored to address the specific work of the interviewee, but all the interviewees were asked a series of questions about their definitions of our key terms of religion, secular, psychotherapy, and so on.

It could be true that, in ways that will arise throughout this book, the findings of these expert interviews are not entirely generalizable to unpublished clinicians—in part, precisely because writing and publishing may be particular sorts of practices that shape these therapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions so that they are different from those of the average therapist. However, even if these established thought leaders were to have less influence on rank-and-file clinicians than the adoption of their modalities suggests, they still provide representative examples for how psychotherapists have approached Buddhist teachings and practices. I do not make strong claims about, for example, the frequency of use of one set of approaches to Buddhist traditions over another. Further, to better explore the dynamics of influence that these prominent public psychotherapists have on larger communities of therapists, I have also conducted ethnographic observation of just the sort of continuing education conferences depicted in the opening pages of this book. I myself attended these sorts of gatherings in my other life as a practicing clinician and my location might have increased my ethnographic access. But, for this research, I maintained a posture of participant-observation.

Continuing education conferences are generative sites for this research for a number of important reasons. While my research focuses on published and public psychotherapists who are so-called opinion makers in these activities, observing conferences has given me at least a glimpse into the interactions between these figures and therapists whose interest in Buddhist traditions was strong enough to motivate them to attend such a gathering. Further, conference organizers express the stated intention that their meetings introduce participants to multiple viewpoints from speakers representing multiple disciplines—not only mental health practitioners from a variety of therapeutic orientations, but Buddhist practitioners, monks, and teachers and, beyond that, neuroscientific researchers, educators, artists, social activists, and, importantly, academics. The panoply of disciplinary vantage points on these activities are marketed to attendees who are promised a variety of therapeutic perspectives and techniques with which to stock their practices.

In the confluence of perspectives one finds at continuing education conferences, and the legal and organizational structures that undergird them, we can also see the overlapping layers of institutional and authoritative powers that shape psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions. In order to maintain licensure, state laws mandate that mental health clinicians verify their acquisition of a certain number of continuing education credit hours annually as designated by governing disciplinary bodies such as the American Counseling Association. Some therapists work for public or private institutions that pay the registration fees (and at times travel expenses) for approved conferences; solo practitioners pay out of pocket. Meanwhile, each speaker at these conferences holds their own institutional and affiliational allegiances whether they be a corporate trainer, Buddhist studies scholar, or, indeed, the Dalai Lama.

For all these reasons, I observed three conferences and will share details from my experiences throughout the course of this book. The gatherings were selected because, based on their marketing materials, they appeared to be both representative and unique examples of the qualities described above. The first was convened on February 5, 2014, at the William Alanson White Institute in Manhattan. The White Institute is an august psychoanalytic training center founded in 1946 by Erich Fromm. The gathering, part of the White Society Colloquium series on Psychoanalysis and Spirituality, was exemplary of those routinely offered to clinicians. But it was also an instance of dialogue between an academic scholar, the historian Anne Harrington, and a practicing psychotherapist, the Jungian psychoanalyst Polly-Young Eisendrath. The second meeting I observed was the Enlightening Conversations conference held on May 9 and 10, 2014, also in Manhattan. Cosponsored by the Jungian Spring Journal and the popular U.S. Buddhist Tricycle Foundation, this conference was an example of a conference built around conversations between clinicians and Buddhist practitioners.⁴ The third, the First Annual Conference of the Institute of Meditation and Psychotherapy (IMP), was held on September 13, 2014, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Entitled Returning to Our Roots or Uprooting Tradition?: Critical Conflicts in the Interface between Buddhist and Western Psychology, the conference was facilitated by major figures in the development of psychotherapeutic mindfulness practices, but was targeted toward a general audience of clinicians. In contrast, the other two gatherings were aimed specifically for psychoanalytic and psychodynamic practitioners.

More assiduously attending to clinicians’ voices through close examination of their publications as well as through interviews and ethnographic observation brought into focus the variety of approaches that therapists take to Buddhist traditions. However, this multiplicity is often missed for reasons that go beyond the methodological.

Theory: Staying Mindful of the Socially Constructed Nature of Religion/Not-Religion

When reviewing the current literature on this topic, it quickly becomes apparent that the diversity of psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions is not only often obscured because of methodological choices; this multiplicity is also frequently lost because it can be obscured within totalizing binary interpretations that declare these activities to be cases of either secularization or religious transmission. Commentators who herald a spread of the Dharma to the United States fail to sufficiently acknowledge therapists who believe they have been successful in secularizing practices for audiences that are unaware of their Buddhist origins. Meanwhile, those who describe the secularization of Buddhism brush over psychotherapists who advance a Buddhist qua religious path as a superior source of psychological healing.

Common interpretations are limited because of these blind spots, but they are problematic at a more foundational level: their conclusions largely rely on unreflective understandings of what is religious and not-religious. A brief glance at a treatment that is less focused on the question of secularization, William Parsons’s excellent 2009 essay, Psychoanalysis Meets Buddhism: The Development of a Dialogue, exemplifies the difficulty. In his final Concluding Reflections, Parsons takes a revealing turn:

Within contemporary academia the term religion, while understood to be necessary and functionally useful, has nevertheless been subject to intense scrutiny and debate. There are notable figures who have uncovered the term’s hidden assumptions, fought for its qualification, offered substitutions, even called for its dismissal (Smith, 1963). In any event, when Freud wrote about religion, he entered these debates in a clear and forthright manner. For him the only deserving definition was the common’s man’s understanding of religion—an understanding which was western, assumed institutionalized patriarchal forms of socio-cultural power, and whose normative expression was centered in the monotheistic mighty personality of an exalted Father-God. In The Future of an Illusion he defiantly chastised those philosophers who tried to stretch the meaning of words to the point that words like God and religious ceased to bear any resemblance to the Being worshipped by the common-man. (206)

Parsons contrasts Freud’s clear and forthright manner with a contemporary academia that subjects the category of religion to intense scrutiny and debate. Nevertheless, in the remainder of his conclusion, Parsons finds a use for this academic debate.

Parsons argues that the religion Freud critiqued was a very specific construction of the category: a Catholic enchanted worldview. Contemporary academia, however, reveals that there is a wide variety of definitions of religion. Freud’s criticism, Parsons suggests, does not equally apply to religion as defined in the Protestant tradition. Parsons perceives Protestant traditions to hold an inner-worldly asceticism that fits hand-in-glove (2009, 206) with Freudian psychoanalysis. Buddhism, which Parsons defines as also based in a similar inner-worldly mysticism, would be just as exempt from Freud’s assessment. Parsons thus predicts that one can continue to look forward to an increased sophistication in dialogue between these two related healing enterprises (207). Parsons references an intense scrutiny and debate that surrounds the term religion to support his argument that psychoanalysis and Buddhism are capable of dialogue. (We will meet a number of psychotherapists who make similar claims.) Chapter 1 examines in more detail what exactly this intense scrutiny and debate consists of and reviews some of the major lines of argumentation within it. But, for now, let us ask this: What if we took more seriously the now half-a-century’s worth of studies that, as Parsons says, have uncovered the term’s hidden assumptions, fought for its qualification, offered substitutions, [and] even called for its dismissal?

I submit that doing so completely reorients our analyses of phenomena like psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions in the United States. Parsons’s reference to academic debates about the category of religion may be evidence of what one increasingly hears within those debates: that the socially constructed, mutable nature of concepts like religion and secular has long been established now and does not bear repeating. (After all, Parsons cites the work of W. C. Smith from the early 1960s.) And yet the current literature on this topic—and many others—is rife with the unreflective use of the classifications religion and secularity, Buddhism and science. For the most part, these terms are treated as if they have universal and self-evident definitions. Scholars continue to unreflectively refer to the use of Buddhism in secular settings or instances when practitioners go beyond the strictly secular. Lacking serious scrutiny or debate, these classifications often seem to take on a life of their own. Buddhism becomes an active entity that can, as Parsons says, dialogue with Psychoanalysis. This academic tendency is, of course, not unique to studies of psychotherapists’ interest in Buddhist traditions. The entire academic subspecialty to which both Parsons’s and my own work belong, religion and psychology, like many others (e.g., religion and science), relies on the same method of framing religion.

As will be explicated at greater length in chapter 1, fields such as religion and psychology or religion and medicine are premised on the assumption that there is a self-evidently recognizable sphere of life, religion, that is self-evidently differentiated from other spheres of life that are not-religious or secular. And yet cracks in the very foundation of constructions like religion and psychology are always just beneath the surface. The first essay of the seminal Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (Jonte-Pace and Parsons, 2001), written by the leading historian of psychology of religion David Wulff (2001), thus begins in the following manner: If we set aside ‘religious psychology’—the psychology that, in varying degrees, is implicit in the historic religious traditions—the psychology of religion constitutes the oldest form of encounter between psychology and religion (15). Wulff acknowledges that, centuries before the academic field of psychology existed, human beings contemplated the nature of cognition, mental images, dreams, and the like. He indicates that this contemplation can be uncovered, though it is only implicit, within the historic religious traditions. He then names it a particular type of psychology, religious psychology.

Wulff evokes a past before ‘religion’ —a time when (as will be explained further in the next chapter) the modern concept of religion had not yet been invented. Perhaps what we today call psychology was once inseparable from what we today call religion. Touching the edges of this point, however, Wulff announces his intention to set it aside in order to introduce psychology of religion as the oldest form of encounter between psychology and religion. Through the magic of linguistics, psychology and religion are now transformed into bifurcated entities that encounter each other.

The Chinese religions scholar Robert Ford Campany has critiqued similar scholarly representations of an encounter between Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China.⁵ Interestingly, such an encounter is frequently presented by both scholars and clinicians alike as an analogy for the contemporary interface between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Campany argues that a consequence of treating concepts as reified entities in this way is the obfuscation of the agents who really and nonmetaphorically do things: people (2003, 319).

We are necessarily speaking figuratively when we describe religions as entities that can make or do things. Metaphorically we talk as though they can and do, just as we personify love, countries, decades, months, seasons, nations, movements, and markets, and doing so saves words and ink; but literally they do not. When we study aspects of the history of the relationship between two religions, what we are studying—whether we recognize it or not—is the extant record of what certain people (whether or not their names are known) produced with reference to or in the presence of the productions of certain other people. One cost of the personification is that we lose sight of these people as they are swallowed up in isms. (2012b, 102)

This book is not intended as a corrective to the entire subspecialties of religion and psychology or religion and science, much less religious studies as a whole. I only propose a new way of framing psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions. It is impossible to entirely avoid personifying metaphors; I have already used them on a number of occasions. And it is also impossible to completely dismiss classifications like religious and secular. In fact, a major finding of my research is that these categories are deeply intractable in the social interactions of contemporary communities. Nonetheless, studies that track the movements of reified entities, the triumph of the therapeutic or the spread of Buddhism, remain limited.

Instead of fixating on whether communities like psychotherapists contribute to religious transmission or the scientization of society, the goal should be to clarify how communities themselves think through such ideas and adjust their behavior in response to them.⁶ The terms religion and secular undergo a constant construction and reconstruction within the multiple overlapping social spheres that psychotherapists operate in. Where scholars once portrayed psychotherapists as creating dialogue between religion and psychology, we should today examine how psychotherapists participate in the reconstruction of those terms and their definitions. Doing so, first and foremost, provides an improved depiction of psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions, but it also offers a better understanding of how these categories influence behavior on the ground.

Blurring Boundaries: Audiences for This Book

As may already be clear, when readers move through each of the following chapters, they will find themselves reading an intently interdisciplinary book. This is, from my perspective, unavoidable given that this topic itself sits at the intersection of multiple disciplinary locations and has been touched on in literature written by a wide range of both scholars and practitioners. An interdisciplinary project such as this offers both opportunities and challenges and it is worth clarifying my disciplinary commitments from the start. At a first level, as referenced above, this book is written primarily from the subfield of religion and psychology, which remains a vital discipline for the larger field of religious studies. At a second level, however, scholars from additional subfields of religious studies have also previously taken an interest in this (and related) topics: (a) Buddhist studies scholars have written the largest amount of material on these activities; activities that (b) I utilize to explore larger historical issues in religious studies concerning the construction of categories of the religious and not-religious; issues that are often also examined by (c) the anthropologists and sociologists of contemporary U.S. religious activities whose methodologies I, in part, borrow from. Throughout the chapters that follow, I will periodically highlight when I have ventured into an area that will be of special interest to scholars from one particular discipline or another. At the same time, in each of the chapters, my aim is to balance a consideration of more specialized material with a larger religious studies discussion.

Achieving this balance is also intended to better speak to a general readership that, at a third level, will likely also find their way to this book. Readers