I want to begin this morning talking about the first chapter in Bonds of Love, the first bond, and we’ll continue the discussion of that chapter some more next week. I’d like to outline a few main ideas and try to link them up to the discussion we’re about to have on the nature of sangha.
The chapter shows the evolution of psychoanalytic theory from classical Freudian analysis through ego-psychology to Jessica’s own formulation of relationality and intersubjectivity, and it focuses on the changing way the infant-mother dyad was pictured. The original Freudian model, even if it was not based on much actual research into infants, created a powerful set of metaphors that dominated thinking for a long time and only began to be transformed when actual infant research started being done a half century later.
The model we begin with is of a helpless infant dependent on the mother or more specifically the breast for milk and sustenance, and the infant is imagined to be existing in a kind of self-enclosed bubble, really only preoccupied with issues around gratification or its frustration. The infant was described as being in an autistic self-enclosed world or one of symbiosis, one of merger with the mother or the breast. And it was only gradually in its development through frustration, through its inability to control the breast, control its own gratification, that it was forced to acknowledge and come to terms with outer reality and the reality of the separate existence of the mother.
Now, this model put a premium on what came to be called separation and individuation, that the infant begins in this merged state of non-separation and as it grows up, its development is marked by its capacity to separate and become more and more autonomous. So Freud did talk about an early state of non-separation, a kind of primal oneness merging with the mother, but it's the kind of picture that confused a lot of people talking about non-separation in a Buddhist context. Are they talking about the same kind of merger? Is that what non-separation means? Is that what oneness is supposed to be? In that model, oneness would be a kind of regression, for better or worse, a kind of return in consciousness to this very early symbiotic state, and Freud himself, when asked about religious experiences like that, referred to them as the oceanic feeling, and could only think of them in terms of this kind of regression.
So what we have is a picture of the infant in its own world preoccupied with feeding and needing to find a way to come to terms with reality that frustrates it and ultimately separate from the mother and become more and more autonomous. This becomes the dominating metaphor to think about growth and development. Now, a lot of this began to change roughly after the time of the second world war, when people started doing studies of infants who had been separated from their mothers, and there was a lot of observation and description of what in a way ought to have been obvious to all the mothers of the world, but I guess needed documentation for male pediatricians to believe it – that infants didn’t just need their mothers for milk. They needed love and attachment, and even if you provided good nourishment and physical care for infants but didn’t give them handling and attention and responsiveness, they would not thrive. It shouldn’t have been news but it was.
In any case, there followed a whole generation of infant researchers who started looking at mother-baby interaction and started thinking about the way the baby and the mother look at each other face to face, see each other, respond to each other, and think about that interaction as primary, not simply thinking about – this as what goes on between feedings. And there a whole different picture of infant-mother relationship developed that got away from the picture of the baby as the passive recipient of milk or maternal care, but as an active agent in its own right eliciting attention from the mother, making its own needs and feelings known, engaging in an active way in responsiveness for its own sake, in the beginnings of play and connection.
The mother, similarly, was not seen just as either the provider or the frustrator, but as a subjectivity in her own right, whose joy or frustration or responsiveness or ability to play or improvise, all these things became part of an ongoing back and forth between baby and mother out of which a sense of self develops, and here the self is not one that starts off deep inside, buried in a world of fantasy about gratification or impotent control, but it’s a self that is born out of interaction and responsiveness. Mommy is who makes me smile. I am who makes Mommy smile. I get a sense of who I am by what I’m able to do, what I’m able to elicit, what impact I’m able to have, both on the world, starting with control of my own body, or pushing a ball, or hitting a mobile over the crib, to eliciting responsiveness in the mother.
So a sense of self and a sense of agency doesn’t just emerge out of symbiotic fantasy. It comes as the precipitate of interaction. And with that whole process of mutually creating and self-creating interaction, both for the baby and the mother, the mother is also developing a whole sense of identity. Am I a good mother or am I a bad mother? It’s all in terms of how the baby is responding or not. This back and forth is what Jessica called mutual recognition, an idea that she took from Hegel.
When we see that development in terms of interaction, we don’t think of the developmental arc so much any more in terms of separation and individuation. We’re not seeing development as having autonomy as its goal. There were these famous experiments by Margaret Mahler that described a stage where the infant and the toddler being able to take its first steps would tentatively take steps away from the mother, go a certain distance, and then look back, and she thought of that as the baby looks back anxiously to make sure mother is still there, to make sure I can get back into mother’s arms. As development proceeded, the baby became more and more confident that they could tolerate the separation. Separation became the model for development.
But Kohut looked at those interactions and said, when the baby looks back after taking a few steps, it's not necessarily looking back in anxiety. It’s looking back to see the delight in the mother’s eyes, the big smile. Look! You’re starting to walk! It’s wonderful! Baby’s looking back not just for reassurance but for affirmation and delight. So one of the points Jessica makes in this chapter is that we’re not just simply growing out of dependency, but we’re growing into more and more complex modes of interaction. From a Buddhist perspective, one of the things we’re saying is that autonomy is a myth. It's a kind of curative fantasy. That what we are developing is more and more sophisticated versions of mutual dependency, of interdependence, that we’re always connected in one form or another, but those forms will evolve and change at different stages of our life. They’re not going simply from dependency to independence. They’re just going to different varieties of connection.
So let me tie that to the idea of sangha. So often in stories we tell, sangha takes a back seat in the relationship between the student and the teacher. That relationship is where the real action is, and sangha is often reduced to a kind of means to an end or just simply the context in which the student-teacher relationship can take place, and if we’re not careful, the whole meaning and point of sangha for its own sake is lost.
There’s often a sense of the relationship of the teacher to the student or to the sangha as a kind of one-way street of provision, in a way that’s analogous to that early picture of the mother-infant interaction, where the infant is the passive recipient of milk, of nourishment. Joko famously derided that sense of the student-teacher relationship when she talked about students who acted like they were little baby birds sitting in their nest with mouths open waiting for the momma bird to come by and drop a worm in. We’re just helpless and passive. All we can do is sit here and hope to take in some of your wisdom. Right?
What’s going to be an alternative to that kind of picture? Joko herself, I think, often simply created a contrast between dependency and autonomy, as if the goal was to become more and more independent of the teacher. You can think too often that the whole point of practice was for students to become teachers, that it was this dichotomized world in which you're either the recipient or the giver, and the point is to grow up and switch positions, and anything else in the middle was okay but clearly a failure of fully being what you’re there to do.
Now, in monastic settings, it’s clear that in some way the sangha is an embodiment of a whole form of life that you’re participating in, and we can say that in the original Buddhist sangha the form of life was designed to embody the teaching, particularly of impermanence and non-attachment. Home-leaving. No permanent abode. Living on alms. Not having possessions or close relationships. All these lessons of basic teachings were meant to be built into the structure of daily life. And in Dogen you also have the sense of the monastic form of life being the embodiment of the teaching. How do we translate that into lay practice?
See, here the sangha is our embodiment of the integration of practice and everyday life. It’s a kind of permeable boundary where the relations that we have in the zendo and the relations we have outside have a fuzzy boundary. They merge into each other. Different kinds of relationships develop. Friendships develop. People find that they don’t just have Buddhism in common, but they have other concerns in mind, concerns and interests that create a whole additional set of bonds. Sangha doesn’t just exist as the vehicle for the teacher to communicate with students one-on-one. And it doesn’t just exist as a kind of peer pressure to keep everybody on track. I remember when I first started sitting, and you know, we would often sit in a lot of pain for a lot longer than you would ever manage to sit on your own. It seems like sangha was all those other people not moving, and I’d better not move either. That’s what sangha was.
So our challenge is to bring all these relationships and this form of life into the foreground and not just treat it as a means to an end. I think one of the great benefits of the post-covid zoom era has been the blossoming of discussion and study groups on-line. These are not groups that I lead, but discussions that are led by all of you. I think we have five different groups going right now. Excuse me if I’m forgetting anybody. I think it’s a model of how the sangha takes an initiative to make connections happen, to make teachings happen, to make relationships happen. It moves the student outside of that kind of passive recipient mode into actively creating what they need to really integrate practice into their daily life.
Sangha, like the baby in the model of mutual recognition, has agency and has impact. It sets its own agenda and finds its own sense of self in being able to make things happen. Another Hegelian catch-phrase speaks of the I that is a We and a We that is an I. The I realizes itself by encountering other Is, by realizing it’s part of something. I realize that who I am is not definable apart from who We are. The We, the sangha, realizes that it has its own identity. It’s a collective identity that’s different from and greater than the sum of its parts, and yet it has its own agency as a We. It can function like an I in having its own agendas, making things happen. That’s the kind of balance I think we’re striving for when we think about sangha.