I want to continue discussing some of the themes in the first chapter of Bonds of Love, the first bond, which, from a Buddhist perspective, are all focused way or another on the issue of interdependency and how we all are caught up in a curative fantasy of autonomy as a way to flee the implications of interdependency, where the emphasis seems to be on dependency, something that we want to be free of. Both Freud and Hegel, as presented here, offer developmental fables about our beginning in a primary state of imagined autonomy or omnipotence, and having to one way or another grow out of that into a kind of awareness and acknowledgement of our dependence on the material world and on others.
In Freud, you have a developmental fantasy of the infant starting in this kind of solipsistic world of omnipotent fantasy in having to confront the reality that he does not have control over the breast, does not have control over the world the way he feels he’s developing control over his own body and so forth. And in Hegel, you have another kind of philosophical fable about the emergence of self-consciousness into full awareness only through its encounters with other consciousnesses.
And in all these fables we have a sense of a collision, of an unwanted reality that has to be faced. It’s interesting that in Hegel, the self that is trying to be just pure consciousness, fully self-confined, in control of itself, not dependent on anything to be itself, even before it has to confront the reality of other minds, it has to confront the reality of its own physical limitations and needs. Hegel says that when a consciousness bumps up against a reality of otherness, its first impulse is to try to negate it, hide it, to conquer it and master it. And when consciousness first encounters another consciousness, it’s affronted. This is out of my control. I want to eliminate it and reduce it to just a thing, not something that has its own motivations and autonomy and awareness. And in Hegel's fable, there’s a fight to the death, and the consciousness that is willing to sacrifice everything, to sacrifice it’s life, to prove that there’s nothing I will be dependent on, not even life itself, will win the battle and establish domination in the form of the master-slave duality.
When even before he imagined this taking place interpersonally, so to speak, he says that fight happens inside, that the mind essentially has to go through that struggle with its own body and its own physical needs, and that there’s a way in which we all try to institute a kind of master-slave relationship between the mind and the body. I want this body to be under my total control. I don’t want to be dependent on it. I don’t want to have to be confined by its needs and desires. And we see in this kind of struggle this early curative fantasy of pure control and autonomy, something that often gets formulated as a spiritual quest, where spirituality is the cultivation of a pure awareness independent of the body, and we see this curative fantasy, or struggle, play out in our traditional fable about the life of Shakyamuni Buddha.
He begins as a prince with everything under his control, leading a perfect life of satisfaction. Yet one day he encounters old age, sickness and death, and he initially recoils from these things. These are unacceptable. He has to find some way to master them or escape them. This is precisely the kind of encounter Hegel was describing, where one part of the self wants complete autonomy, doesn’t want dependency on the physical body and all the ills that that entails. And so in the traditional story, Shakyamuni enters into a kind of Hegelian struggle to the death with his own mind and body. He pursues a kind of extreme aestheticism to free himself from bodily need and desire; he tries all techniques of meditation and essentially mind control to free himself of emotion or thought itself, a kind of desperate pursuit of purity and autonomy.
As often is the case, these things can come to an end only when we give them up as failures. We push them as far as they can possibly go, and somehow they break. We realize finally that it’s impossible. And something has to shift, where we see that what we thought was the solution is actually the definition of the problem, that the whole pursuit of freedom from dependency is the omnipotent fantasy of the ego. It is the self-centered dream, the dream of a self that is not dependent.
The corresponding developmental fantasy that we attribute to Freud, then, elaborated by Winnicott, is the infant that thinks of itself, as he says, His majesty the baby, the baby in the world fantasy, the fantasy of autonomy and self-definition, self-mastery. Now with Freud, baby is more or less subject to a rude awakening and just is going to have to suck it up and come to terms with the fact that you’re a baby, kid. You need your mother. You can’t make it on your own. And by and large, with Freud, this is the reality principle which simply has to be adapted to, accommodated to.
Winnicott tried to rewrite that fable in a way that looks at the leading edge, the developmentally positive edge of the recognition of others and the recognition by others, as part of how we grow and develop. Jessica is using Winnicott here to try to articulate this alternative that she calls mutual recognition, and it’s something that turns out to be good news, not bad news, but just a kind of stoical resignation or acceptance of limitation. To see things that way is to hold on to the ideal of autonomy and grudgingly admit that you can’t master it even though you still wish you could. Instead, think in terms of recognition or interdependence as a way of opening yourself up into the world in a way that turns out to be joyous, that opens up the possibility not just for struggle but for love.
In Winnicott’s fable, the omnipotent baby has to go from what he calls relieving the use, and this is very unfortunate vocabulary to our ears. I don’t know if these are Britishisms or why he chose these words, but he used them in almost what seems like the opposite sense to how we ordinarily use those words. He says the baby starts out by relating to objects, but as things, just as things to be manipulated, to stay under his control. In many ways it’s reminiscent of what we read in Buber as an I-It relationship, a purely instrumental connection with lifeless things. The baby needs to develop into what Winnicott calls the use of the object, which is the recognition of the other as a separate person or subjectivity. Again, he uses some very strange language. He says the way the baby develops into the use of the object is via destroying the object. But what he means by destroying, is destroying the object that’s in your fantasy, destroying your own sense of omnipotence, and destroying your sense of the other as a thing. It’s only when those fantasies are destroyed, that the possibility of real otherness opens up.
I think a very immediate analogy comes to mind with the phrase, If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him. This is very much a kind of Winnicottian notion of destroying the object. The buddha that you meet on the road is your fantasy. You’re carrying around some idea of what a buddha is. Everybody has their own self-centered fantasy of what that kind of perfect being must be like, what kind of equanimity or self-mastery or compassion buddha must embody. And like Winnicott’s baby, as long as we’re holding on to that fantasy of buddha, not only can we never encounter a real buddha, but we can never possibly see ourselves as a buddha because we’ve created this idealized fantasy that is so otherworldly that it’s the farthest thing imaginable from our own imperfect self, and then we’re back in the world of dog, buddha nature, and a big gap of separation. So if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him. The baby has to destroy the object in fantasy in order to actually encounter the other person as an emergent reality.
Now that emergent reality is grounded in the actual otherness of another person. It means recognizing difference. Too often, in Buddhism, as we’ve been talking about the alternative to separation, the experience of the isolated mind, the only alternative offered is often non-separation as oneness, as the elimination of difference. I remember reading an interview someone had with an Indian guru, I don’t know who it was, but the interviewer asked him, How should we treat others? The guru’s answer was, There are no others. Now that sounds wonderful, but it’s precisely seeing oneness, or a complete lack of differentiation, as the solution to separateness and isolation.
But what we’ve been exploring in Buber and now in this theory of intersubjectivity, is another alternative. I-Thou mutual recognition preserves otherness but opens up a world of interconnection and interdependency. The alternative to separation isn’t oneness, its interconnection, with the intent to preserve their identity and at the same time all mutually interdependent. And that interdependence isn’t simply abstract and philosophical. It entails real human needs, not just physical needs for food and shelter, but human needs for love and recognition, attention, attachment, all those things that from the perspective of the curative fantasy of autonomy, are precisely the problem. Those are the things that we have to return to, see them in a new light.
I think I will end by reading to you a little section that Jessica quotes from Winnicott, and offer it as a prompt for the small group discussion. Think about how this relates not just to baby and mother or patient and analyst, but also student and teacher. “The subject [patient] says to the object [analyst]: “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!‘ I destroyed you!” “I love you!” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” “While I am loving you, I am all the time destroying you in [unconscious] fantasy.”