Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 12

Buddhism and Morita Therapy

Towards the end of Karen’s life, she began a big project of fusing traditions of the East and West, which still continues today with Buddhism and Western Psychology. At the time, it wasn’t an easy task. “Karen was drawn to [Daisetz Suzuki] and a curious friendship developed which was to last until her death. During 1951, she invited him to her home a number of times, along with some of her colleagues. Suzuki, Richard DiMartino and Karen were also guests in Cornelius Crane’s apartment and Ipswich home several times. Suzuki recommended to her Eugen Herrigel’s book Zen in the Art of Archery. She was deeply affected both by the book and by her discussions with Suzuki and she tried to relate Zen ideas to her theory, but found it most difficult.”

There was a dividing line between expressing your emotions authentically but also being able to let them go. “DiMartino recalls their searching conversations during the rides home from Boston. She tried to compare the Zen notion of Dukkha, or the basic suffering and mental pain of existence, with her own concept of basic anxiety. However, as they explained to her, the Zen concept was more complex, with a transcendental aspect. It included three distinct states. Mental anguish was the subjective experience of ordinary imperfect existence. Then there was the separate painful experience of life’s changes. This was frightening because change was usually interpreted as being for the worse. It contained an element of fear of the unknown, of mortality. And third was an awareness of the conditional state of life, of not being free. This last aspect made more sense. It could be related to the need for freedom she saw as a neurotic trend, to escape from the intolerable inner restrictions against feelings, needs, wishes, or impulses. But this, of course, was quite different from her ‘basic anxiety,’ which was rooted only in human relations: the feeling of the child toward subtly rejective parents. She knew of the existential philosophical idea of “Angst der Kreatur,” namely the helplessness felt by everyone as part of being only human in a world of powerful and inexorable forces. This was closer to the Zen concept. She also felt that a central problem of neurosis was the shift from one’s feelings to other compulsive ways of functioning: from experiencing—or in Zen terms, from being—to an overemphasis on appearance or thinking. She quoted one of Suzuki’s aphorisms: ‘Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be realized.’ She was so inspired by him that she began to think of going to Japan to see that culture for herself. She broached the idea to Crane, who began to make the necessary arrangements.”

Karen was looking for concrete examples of Eastern philosophies to connect to her work, but found much of it abstract and mystical. “In the meantime, she organized a workshop for about a dozen members of the group, plus DiMartino, Dr. Otani, a master of the Shin sect, Suzuki, and Nokamura, his young secretary. They met at the home of Joan Harte, a candidate. There they discussed such questions as the Koan the unanswerable question—the nature of consciousness and awareness, the possibilities of immediate experience and many others. What impressed them about Suzuki as much as his knowledge was his habit of dropping off for ten minute catnaps in the middle of a discussion. He would wake up and continue as if he had never stopped talking. Karen mostly listened, very intently; she said little. She attended only about three of these meetings, though fifteen were held. She never remained for the social amenities after the discussion, apparently wishing to avoid social contact with Harold Kelman…She continued to immerse herself in Zen during this time. In October, a young Japanese physician, Akahiso Kondo, was invited to an evening at the Norman Kelmans’, along with the Wenkarts, the DeRosis, Suzuki and Karen. Kondo, now a leading psychiatrist in Tokyo, had been attending both Suzuki’s classes at Columbia and Institute courses at the New School.”

Kondo was to be interested in Karen’s work and became her guide in Japan. He emphasized uncertainty and insecurity, which was similar to Karen’s basic anxiety. Intuition for Kondo was a final goal where intellectual activities become practical but trusting that skill is acquired gradually and that one will know what to do with an intuitive clear vision and so over-intellectualization is defeated. “Kondo was soon accepted as a special analytic candidate. He found Karen’s theoretical views entirely congenial with Zen concepts. In one class, she gave him an ordinary weekly assignment to write on, Intuition in Zen and Psychoanalysis. Imagine his surprise the following week when he found himself reading his paper in front of a large audience of students and faculty. It was a specially convened ‘interval’ meeting. Speaking for the first time before an American audience, he soon discovered himself, and an inner store of self-confidence. The paper was later published in the Journal…Brigitte, Karen, Crane and his wife, and Suzuki went together. It was the highlight of her life, perhaps even to be the end of her search. Kondo had planned a series of meetings with important Japanese analysts and DiMartino had arranged visits to several Zen monasteries, where Suzuki’s prestigious name gained them an immediate welcome. Karen said that her purpose there was ‘to study Japanese culture by getting into direct contact with people and places, by intensive discussion with a few well selected persons, and by leisurely devoting time to the appreciation of nature—rather than by a heavy schedule.'”

Japan of course had more than Zen Buddhism to interest Karen Horney, and Morita Therapy became an analogous method that was to spread to the West. It also targeted a pathological idealistic self. Instead of free association, Morita Therapy focused on removing sensory over-excitement followed by low intensity work with gradually ratcheted challenges up to a normal working activity level. Patients were to accept an imperfect unfair reality and learn to work with what was in their control to make changes based on their real skills, opportunities, and energy levels. “While standing in the reception room at the Jikai-Kai Medical School, Karen instinctively picked out Morita’s portrait from the many others hanging there. Some were astonished; some responded with a knowing smile. It added to her reputation as one endowed with some intuitive power. The lecture she gave, New Developments in Psychoanalysis, presented her theory by contrasting it with Freud’s. She particularly stressed the notions of constructive growth and self-realization, therapeutic attention to the whole person, the interweaving of intrapsychic and interpersonal factors, and the emphasis on immediate experience in therapy. These she related roughly to Zen principles. It was reported soon afterward that her lecture, especially her openminded attitude, was a breakthrough in the acceptance of psychoanalysis by the Japanese, and the introduction of Morita therapy to the West.”

The 100 years of Morita therapy. In the light of Ikigai – Verfasst von Motoki Tonn: https://finde-zukunft.de/english-blog/apv8f5n5zrjnze9grkhnb02azn8glm

Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v704o9a-cultural-psychoanalysis-karen-horney-pt.-6.html

Karen wanted a balance between behaviour and consequences to be allowed to work with authentic emotions as they arose naturally. By following a growth path, one could avoid getting into trouble by being purely candid in an irresponsible way. The patient would deal with setbacks quickly by staying in motion and facing things as they are in constructive ways. “Horney suggested that analysis should assist the patient to authentically experience more, and separate from an idealised or fixed image of the self; she suggested that therapy should increase the patient’s awareness of when he or she is just talking about something or is really in the middle of something, and should assist the patient to live with and be aware of all the real feelings without embellishment and condemnation.”

It took Karen much time to accept that what she wanted to learn was in fact effortless. The environments were just inspiration to relax over-efforting and over-intellectualization, which was counter to the Western way of Psychoanalysis, which is full of intellectualization. “Much of her stay was spent in Kyoto, where she wanted to be among the common people. She took to wearing the pointed straw hat and plain loose dress of the Japanese farm women. A folk festival intrigued her immensely, as did the Kabuki Theatre. Visiting a bride’s school, she appreciated how the young women were educated for their marital duties. If only Western women could be trained for marriage, there would be fewer divorces. But she also commented that such education in how to behave was basically artificial and did not change the women’s real attitudes. A tour of Kyoto’s red-light district may have recalled to her mind a similar excursion she had made at eighteen, when she went to Hamburg to see things for herself…In spite of the hot weather, they visited many temples, shrines and monasteries, of both the Zen and Pure-Land sects. Karen, intensely curious, asked many questions, which were answered by Suzuki and Kondo in running discussions. She seemed to be in an intense ferment, digesting and trying to integrate what she saw and heard with her own ideas. The more abstract concepts like the Koans and the spiritual nature of consciousness seemed to make her uncomfortable; she found them too metaphysical. ‘How does one learn the Zen discipline?’ she asked, trying to make a comparison with psychoanalytic training. In answer, Suzuki described the learning principle as ‘the individual being like a sponge…which fills itself with air by its very nature, so the person takes in the atmosphere of the monastery and of Zen naturally. One doesn’t have to learn it.”

By doing things with mindfulness, energy is preserved, and it is further preserved when it is spent on doing an action well, and often slower to avoid unnecessary hurry, as opposed to ruminating and comparing with an ideal self-image. Absorption in activity as opposed to fixation on an identity makes enough progress to make people feel alive again. “The discipline involved in the training and daily lives of the monks intrigued her. How could this help in assimilating the Zen teachings? She saw this only through her Western eyes; it was admirable how they learned to cook, to serve, to garden, to eat and drink tea in a certain way. It was all useful. She could understand the explanation only with difficulty that what they were doing was irrelevant and immaterial. The importance of their actions lay only in the doing itself. Kondo tried to make clear that as the inner awareness takes over, one becomes the act, whether drinking tea, fencing with a staff or shooting the bow. Action, consciousness and life itself were held to consist only of the successive and fleeting moments of existence. Existence was evanescent, insubstantial; solidity or substance was delusion (maya). Each instant had to be caught in passing, since no one moment would ever be repeated. A deed, once committed, could never be undone. Suzuki used the sumiye ink paintings to illustrate: once the line is drawn, it cannot be erased or gone over. This was a total responsibility for one’s actions much like her own concept of self-responsibility. To be conscious of an experience in thought, to state it or write it down, destroyed it. Indeed, the goal of all their labors and actions was to make the Zen disciple transcend and leave behind his logical and abstract thinking, by focusing on his down-to-earth physical body. This fitted in with Karen’s emphasis on the patient’s having to experience his emotions fully during analysis.”

Ikigai: https://rumble.com/v1gvo41-ikigai.html

Meditation and Free Association had some differences where meditation had the advantage of appreciating mental rest. Free association had the advantage of being able to detect internal conflict and contradictions so as to resolve maladaptive thinking, which then leads to mental rest. Of course, for modern people in the world of the internet, both are encouraged to be developed to prevent imbalances. Insights into futile defenses taught the unconscious to let go of them and to become more decisive. Insights in Buddhism taught students that over-intellectualization drained energy. There was lots of awareness of tension and release over the problem of ruminative vicious circles of thinking. “Karen also asked what happened during meditation, and what it accomplished. The answer was that it could also permit the student to free himself from his misleading trust in his thought processes. The student usually meditated on a question that had no logical answer. It was not a state of passive self-emptying. On the contrary, it was a mental struggle, involving a high degree of tension, conflict and doubt. With perseverance, it could provoke a mental crisis, ideally accompanied by flashes of that intuitive spiritual insight known as satori. The word ‘Zen’ itself, derived from the old Chinese Chan sect of Buddhism, yielded the word zazen, meaning ‘to sit and meditate.’ Suzuki wrote that ‘Zen devoid of satori is like a sun without its light and heat.'”

At times they ended up at cross purposes, and at other times there was synergy. One is part of an integral of a whole in society and self-realization could be a way to find a purposeful role to contribute that reduces friction. “She tried to define this concept of satori in terms of her own psychological thinking. Even for Suzuki, it was difficult to define in simple words. He could only describe it as an ‘intuitive way of looking into the nature of things, in contradistinction to the logical or analytical understanding. It means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistically trained mind.’ Opposites were harmonized, integrated into a unified whole. But it remains a mystery and miracle nonetheless, even though it happens every day. Karen finally arrived at an equivalent for herself: ‘to break through the shell of egocentricity. Beyond this, the Zen concept of enlightenment, referring to a total point of view arrived at through repeated episodes of satori, could only be analogous to, though not exactly the same, as her own concept of self-realization.'”

Karen could also compare her role as a therapist to that of the Zen master. “The relation of the disciple to the roshi or ‘master’ also impressed her. She agreed with its purpose—’to absorb wisdom’—but seemed to value the relationship even more. It was maintained by the student after he left the monastery. It was also unique in that the disciple could choose to remain as long as he wished, provided he was found meritorious, or could leave intermittently to return to his family, or could return to live there after the age of sixty-five. She felt this arrangement permitted both freedom from discipline and the possibility of periodic re-immersion in the training, which she likened to re-analysis, as urged by Freud.”

The environment did enchant Karen and she was able to immerse herself more into these brief Samadhi states. “Most of all, she was fascinated by one enchanting spot, the temple garden of Daigo-Sanbo-in (Temple of Three Treasures) in Daigo, just outside Kyoto. She returned there several times with Brigitte, DiMartino and Kondo. It consisted of an irregular pond, small pine trees and irregularly shaped rocks, all arranged in a design expressing esthetic harmony and simplicity. The sound of a small waterfall was calculated to counterbalance the silence by imparting a dynamic liveliness. It was all meant to enhance the visitor’s contemplative spirit. On her second visit, Karen sat off by herself and became absorbed in the view; she remained for half an hour unmoving, in total concentration and meditation, oblivious to everything around her. Her Japanese friends felt admiringly that she had attained the ultimate spiritual attitude, a total oneness with nature. Kondo expressed it as, ‘Nature becomes me and I become Nature.’ He believed this confirmed his previous feeling of communion with her. When she rose and rejoined them, he recalls how her ‘face was beaming and lit with delightful contentment.'”

When Karen returned she had difficulty conveying her insights in a Western world of hyper-intellectualism and day-to-day experiences of being decapitated in abstraction and disassociated from sensation in the body. People stuck in regular Western ways of thinking and perceiving, without any experience with meditation or Yoga are more fixated on identity and contracted on fixed points of interest, attraction, and aversion. “Kondo and his wife had been invited back on a scholarship sponsored by Crane. His paper on Morita therapy was presented in October at the Academy meeting. Karen gave an extended commentary.’ Although she explained the Morita therapy as a product of the Eastern cultural background, it was more than that. She reported on what she had learned and experienced in her contacts with people and ideas in Japan. She tried to convey the subtle meaning of nature there, referring to her own inward turning and feeling. Most of the audience had difficulty in grasping her explanations. After all, she was describing subjective and personal experiences only she had felt.”

There’s an element of a monk’s life that is of a dropout or “Dharma Bum” by Jack Kerouac, that Karen tried to reconcile. The self-realization goal for her belief in constructive forces probably matched Morita Therapy much better than Buddhism. “A second such meeting was held in November, at which she developed the idea that the Japanese emphasis on nature was equivalent to her own reinforcement of inner constructive forces. In the East, the growth observed in plants acts as a stimulating external example for the individual. Their closeness to nature could prevent or alleviate the alienation from self found in the West to a much greater extent. Our stress on intellect and disregard of the body made it harder for us to know our true feelings and face inner emptiness. This step would be required as a preliminary to self-realization. In Japan, where the intellect is less emphasized, the habitual meditation and self-discipline would make it easier to accept one’s emptiness.”

In a way, there was an answer to what Solomon questioned about constructive forces, as to whether they would arise spontaneously, and for him they did, but not always. “DiMartino was present at these meetings. One burning question was still not clear to her and she asked him whether Zen could provide an answer. After you break down the patient’s idealized self-image and other defenses, are specific efforts needed to stimulate his constructive capacities or do they emerge automatically? In his reply, he compared this notion with the Zen concept of death and rebirth. Both are aspects of the same spiritual experience. It occurs as part of human existence; nothing needs to be built. That answer satisfied Karen, too, and the issue was left there.”

It’s possible that a person could do the right thing and still not feel truly alive. Harold Kelman preferred to compare self-realization to the Hindu idea of kairos, which is a state of readiness for “the man who knows the right place and the right time for taking action and for deciding on a course fitting to the occasion.” Despite the fear of discernment, preferences, and the like in Buddhism, to stir up detectable levels of stress, both Buddhism and Psychoanalysis trust in the cultivation of skillful means. Even modern reviews of Morita therapy know the value of rest, and the introduction of appropriate activity at the right timing for the patient. It can be beneficial for depression based on narcissistic collapse. “These participants highlighted how accepting and allowing difficulties as natural phenomena and shifting attention from symptoms to external factors had facilitated symptom reduction and a sense of empowerment.” You can also sense that when people find personal projects that allow them to see them to their end, especially if they can connect it as much possible to areas of work that feel overly coercive, that the intrinsic desire to act naturally comes up. Projects where one has control over most of the procedures and there’s an expectation that one has the skill to see it through, are the activities that bring meaning, knowledge, and satisfaction.

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

Ikigai: https://rumble.com/v1gvo41-ikigai.html

In Karen’s final lectures, she left behind a task for future therapists on how to integrate both letting go and the full expression of emotion. The complexity of the world and its pressures on humanity requires a flexibility for each individual to choose the right time and place. Therapy itself requires more than intellectual insight, but an emotional experience to unblock the patient. “When Freud made his therapeutic experiments in hypnosis—a reliving of certain past experiences is considered central. Then, as Freud went on with his research, building his theories, there was a swing more toward the intellectual side. Analysis became more a question of understanding, a question of appeal to reason. If, at that time, one would have asked, ‘How come the patient gets better and changes?,’ the answer would have been that the patient realizes that a certain attitude is infantile (using Freud’s terminology), or that a repetition of certain infantile attitudes toward experiences has been better understood. The patient’s mature judgment will tell him that such attitudes are not rational, that it is no longer good to continue such attitudes. At that time, analysis made an appeal to reason. Later, that appeal, that overrating of reason and intellect started to change. The first change came about through Ferenczi’s and Rank’s paper, at which time psychoanalysis was still quite grounded in the notion that infantile experiences needed to be relived. But the important part of the paper was not its concentration on infantile experiences, but its emphasis on emotional experiences. Nothing becomes as real to us as that which we directly experience. We can hear about hunger or war or the beauty of mountains or of labor pains, but they lack the same reality to us as when we, ourselves, experience pain or hunger or thirst or beauty or love, or whatever. The very same—something not being as real—applies to what goes on inside the analysis, too. Very often, it is difficult to distinguish real feelings from inferences because a patient may be quite productive and quite interested in something and yet, after some hours, you notice that nothing much has really taken root or really meant something to him in a deep way. In every neurosis there is a check on vitality. The mere getting in touch with something wild in oneself, I believe, does have a liberating effect. I now believe that such a wholesome experience can be therapeutically valuable only if it is without condemnation, without justification, without embellishment, and without an interest in the reasons for the feeling—just the experience of the emotion itself. All of this—experiences of liberation and of intense emotion—points to an aspect of therapeutic effect. Such experiences give the patient a stronger feeling of ‘I’. It is actually the expression of accepting oneself as one is and not just with one’s intellect, but of accepting oneself feelingly at the time: ‘This is me!’ This is unaccompanied by fringe intellectualizations or judgments. The feeling of liberation which occurs quite often after such strong experiences has something to do with a feeling of peace, a feeling of self-acceptance on a very deep emotional level, of being at one with oneself…Later on [the patient] might be more interested in understanding this [emotion] and do something about it. But, at the moment, there is nothing changed—just the experience of such acceptance…Of course, I also feel it is important to avoid going overboard with the value of emotional experience, as if such experience is all there is to analysis. I don’t think that is right. There is plenty of other work to be done, such as seeing connections and realizing something intellectual—anything that has to do with the whole of us. But I believe that nothing works as effectively as experience.”

Analysis can then move forward in Karen’s method, but with an understanding of how the person carries their self-esteem in a damaging way. “It means analyzing the ‘shoulds,’ but doing so from the viewpoint of how little that person accepts himself.” Some patients are so blinkered in the fact that they don’t accept themselves that it takes an analysis of their behavior to show concretely that it is the case that they devalue themselves. “This occurs so very often. You need not even go so far as to the idealized image. People fix in their minds their independence because independence is a good thing, or accepting criticism because being able to accept constructive criticism is a good thing—so they get positively uninterested in how they really are.” When people are so divorced from their feelings, it may take therapeutic interventions that directly reward with even small acknowledgements of their feelings. “One is to encourage the expression or the taking seriously of fleeting and abortive feelings. I explicitly said it was so good that [the patient] really felt this, that she was worried about something. She was aware of a feeling and could express it seriously. Or, similarly, if you approach the patient with some comment or observation, he may express, ‘I feel a vague uneasiness—as if I want to get away from what you are saying.’ That means it is good not only to go after his wish to run away, but to explicitly encourage such awareness of feeling…The analyst could tell [the patient] first that the most important thing is the true experience of this fear of criticism in his daily living, that he live with it, and that we’ll find out in time what it means. Now this is a critical question, of course: Can the patient do it? Is the patient far enough along to accept himself? I think the crucial factor, really, is to experience without embellishment and condemnation… If we put this emphasis on feeling and live with something and experience it, we are freed from any judgmental inclinations we may have. Even if we don’t feel any judgmental attitude, the simple fact of analyzing the bad consequences of some attitude, like the fear of criticism, what it does to a person, or whatever, will lead a patient to immediately feel, ‘So this fear of criticism is not good.’ Although we do not condemn the feeling, he will believe that we do.”

Karen also warned that the feeling of aliveness must be based on constructiveness so as to not give license for the neurosis to continue as a surrogate. “Since it is through our feelings, of course, that we feel our aliveness, our feelings of meaning and worth will be connected with positive values that are strongly defended…I feel any real emotional experience has something of a totality in it. The German word Erlebnis, which has to do with an alive feeling, also captures this sense of totality of feeling. Leben has to do with aliveness, with life. It is a good word because it means something is emotionally alive and includes the totality of us. It is to be compared, for instance, with orgasm. A really good orgasm is not just a localized feeling but something that comprises all of our being.”

If there’s a connection between Karen’s view and that of Buddhism, it is the understanding of a conceptual self that one has to defend, which means the danger of defending aspects of the conceptual self that are not justified by reality and facts. They may be full of shoulds and overly ideal. In Buddhism, contact at the senses leads immediately to rumination over endangerment and a fear of missing out. They call it papañca, and in psychology it’s translated as rumination.

perception > name & form > contact > appealing & unappealing > desire > dear-&-not-dear > stinginess/divisiveness/quarrels/disputes

Thanissaro Bhikkhu understood the types of thinking that were problematic, and it requires a deep interest in consequences to quiet the alarm. Consequences are obviously the karma of bad actions, but even at the level of papañca, there already is some pain. “What are these perceptions & categories that assail the person who papañcizes? The root of the categories of papañca is the perception, ‘I am the thinker.’ From this self-reflexive thought—in which one objectifies a ‘self,’ a thing corresponding to the concept of ‘I’—a number of categories can be derived: being/not-being, me/not-me, mine/not-mine, doer/done-to, signifier/signified. Once one’s self becomes a thing under the rubric of these categories, it’s impossible not to be assailed by the perceptions & categories derived from these basic distinctions. When there’s the sense of identification as a being that needs to feed, then based on the feelings arising from sensory contact, some feelings will seem appealing—worth feeding on—and others will seem worth pushing away. From this there grows desire, which comes into conflict with the desires of others who are also feeding because they, too, engage in papañca. This is how inner objectification breeds external contention…How can this process be ended? Through a shift in perception, caused by the way one attends to feelings, using the categories of appropriate attention. As the Buddha stated, rather than viewing a feeling as an appealing or unappealing thing, one should look at it as part of a causal process: When a particular feeling is pursued, do skillful or unskillful qualities increase in the mind? If skillful qualities increase, the feeling may be pursued. If unskillful qualities increase, it shouldn’t. When comparing feelings that lead to skillful qualities, notice that those endowed with thinking (directed thought) and evaluation are less refined than those free of thinking and evaluation, as in the higher stages of mental absorption, or jhāna. When seeing this, there is a tendency to opt for the more refined feelings, and this cuts through the act of thinking that provides the basis for papañca.”

The Ball of Honey Madhupiṇḍika Sutta (MN 18) – Dhammatalks: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN18.html

Intentional Breathing – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/morning/2019/190618-intentional-breathing.html

The quickest diffusion of rumination is to notice how it feels in the body, which is mindfulness, and wordlessly, being in the experience of feeling tones related to this rumination, noticing how the mind is hurting itself. Noticing, detecting, or appreciating that there’s pain in over-thinking is to get the mind to choose to let go of it and to instead enjoy being at rest. Without enough awareness at the sore spot, the mind will spring to action and only find rest only through common manipulations of the environment, which may make things worse. This is often enough to break the chain and bring back relaxation. It’s still a preference, but a preference for calmness, because calmness allows a thinking that is less desperate and probably more considerate towards oneself and others. When the mind is free of preferential thinking, and the alarm motivating a desire to change the environment in some way, is deactivated, then dysregulation moves toward emotional regulation, which is a relaxed well-being found in flow states, like the Jhanas. You can then extrapolate that into flow states involved in skillful activity, which is why all psychology talks about developing skills so that the environment becomes less dangerous, or less alarming. The Jhanas themselves show that even at the level of being in a body in the first 4 stages is conceptual in that the mind needs to locate sensations in a mind-body map. It’s an encasement that justifiably needs to be protected and is open to the feeling of being alarmed. The escape into nirvana is to escape the regular 4 dimensional consciousness.

The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html

From Horney’s point of view, and that of Morita Therapy, the reification of the self is only problematic when it moves into unjustifiable concerns, like catastrophizing, and she even sees the value in defending the self and “fighting,” which is advocating for one’s interests when justifiable. This leads to the worldliness where satisfaction is typically found in being able to achieve social cohesion. Social cohesion is achieving the usual community contribution, family, home, education of the next generation, and retirement. When that is endangered, which it often is, the sense of lack and comparison with others turns into self-hatred and projection of that into a hatred of the world, and a resentment of it. That hatred is usually translated into politics, in which psychology has been enmeshed with from the beginning, for better or worse.

Alternative lifestyles can allow for different ways to emotionally regulate, where hobbies, meditation, and contribution to society can replace the need to have a family, which is essentially a finding of purpose that isn’t only about family formation. The wealth then is a spiritual wealth where one cherishes peace, working well with society, by having a good sense of boundaries, and finding a sense of purpose in life. Purpose in life is finding areas of the environment where one can take the current state and make it better in some way, which Socrates included in the definition of virtue. This thinking that is permeated by calm avoids distortions, and any rumination and anger has to be justified because one’s reasonable boundaries were invaded, where fighting and advocating for oneself remains constructive. Justification is being able to explain the anger and the actions taken that were motivated by it. It has to be clear and distortion free, which is difficult to achieve when people find themselves in situations and environments that are complicated and require verification of who’s boundaries are being intruded by whom. This is why there are legal systems that imperfectly adjudicate through this complexity.

And finally, both Horney’s vision and that of Buddhism agree that one must give up perfectionism, a “tyranny of shoulds,” and dehumanization. It’s true we have to fight people who are purposefully being destructive and evil, but behind every mistake, there’s a possibility of an adorable cute human being involved in an accident, or behaving stupid and ignorant, while trying to figure things out, just like you. An imperfect society can only function when there’s mercy.