[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Psychology research

[Dan Lusthaus]

Bruce,

As I think I may have mentioned on this list previously, I worked for five 
years in a psych hospital, so I understand well the difference between 
praxis and theoria (as did Marx) and how little immediate relevance the 
experimental vanguards have for day to day issues, when it trickles down at 
all.

I probably don't need to tell you that the disdain you express for the 
researchers is not unlike the disdain direct care staff typically hold for 
the psychologists, and for similar reasons. Occupational hazard, I guess.

There is a lot of silly R&D, and repetitive experiments that add nothing 
meaningful to the pool of knowledge in brain research (and most forms of 
R&D, since the same types of "proposals" get the $), but amid all that there 
is actually some very exciting, novel work being done. Some mappers may be 
dodos, but the cutting edge folks are aware of the shortcomings, keep 
pushing the technological envelop, and are developing anything but a 
simplistic model of what is located where -- lots of interactions. But it 
often starts by simply noting that when people have thought-type-X or 
emotion-type-Y, regions Q,Z, and M light up like Xmas trees. Why, and how 
that correlates comes next. R&D doesn't usually have immediate applications 
in the trenches -- that takes awhile -- but the important research 
eventually does provide useful materials for praxis.

Freud did not reduce everything to Eros and Thanatos -- that's comic book 
Freud. On the other hand, read up on the asavas in Early Buddhism, and 
you'll see that it too subscribed to kama-asava and abhava-asava as primary 
forces. Everyone with a theory is a reductionist of some sort. Part of 
Freud's genius was recognizing how basic forces/drives diversified in 
countless ways, and uncovering some of the "laws" (= understandable 
patterns) of that diffusion. Eros is a thirst for life, aesthetic 
satisfaction, pleasures and happinesses of all sorts, not "erotica" in the 
narrow sense. There would be no pleasure-pain conditioning possible without 
it. That another primary urge is the release from tension (aka thanatos) is 
also hard to deny. Rest, relaxation, sexual climax, the "oceanic" drive, 
world peace, etc.; as well as the self-destructive, darker urges -- all 
forms of tension release or the desire for it. Hardly reductionistic when 
you think about it (or look around). Freud was not a reductionist, the 
reason being that he thought that tension was a sign of life, and thus the 
wish for release from all tension was unrealistic. That immediately 
complicates everything. (Kind of like saying life is duhkha, now grow up and 
carry on.) Along with the pleasure principle there is also a reality 
principle -- which entails that the "I" (he never used the Greek terms ego 
and id, that was added by his English translators -- he talked about the 
"I", the "it", and what [seems to lord] "over me" *Uber-ich* [aka 
"super-ego"]) mediates between the it (those impersonal drives that seem to 
move me more than I can control or move them, so they are "it"-s, drives and 
impulses one disowns in various ways) and the conscience, parental and 
societal advice and dictates, etc. that lord over me, trying to make me 
behave, think, etc., like a "good" boy. The I is healthy when it finds a 
middle way. Healthy, not necessarily ecstaticly happy or enthralled. To 
pursue that would entail letting the erotic pursue thanatos. It gets more 
complicated from here, not reductionistic.

Does naming or simply recognizing that cure anyone? No. But it can put one 
in the neighborhood for working some things out.

As for attraction to teenage girls -- it would be a disorder if a healthy 
straight male was NOT attracted to them. Or is that just my it talking?

(who wants to play super-ego?)

Dan