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64 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
In the dream we see the struggle of the intellectual rational mind as it opens to this profound insight.
If all of this is true, how important to know! It is vital and crucial information of the highest order, which must be integrated into every aspect of therapy.
In Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis,2 Erich Fromm discusses the differences in aims and goals between the psychological and spiritual approaches, in this case Freudian psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. He examines the implications and significance of their differences and emphasizes the importance of integrating the two points of view. He writes:
The aim of Zen is enlightenment: the immediate, unreflected grasp of reality, without affective contamination and intellectualiza- tion, the realization of the relation of myself to the Universe. This new experience is a repetition of the preintellectual, immediate grasp of the child, but on a new level, that of the full development of man’s reason, objectivity, individuality. While the child’s experience, that of immediacy and oneness, lies before the experience of alienation and the subject-object split, the enlightenment experience lies after it.
The aim of psychoanalysis, as formulated by Freud, is that of making the unconscious conscious, of replacing Id by Ego. To be sure, the content of the unconscious to be discovered was limited to a small sector of the personality, to those instinctual drives which were alive in early childhood, but which were subject to amnesia. To lift these out of the state of repression was the aim of the analytic technique. Furthermore, the sector to be uncovered, quite aside from Freud’s theoretical premises, was determined by the therapeutic need to cure a particular symptom. There was little interest in recovering unconsciousness outside of the sector related to the symptom formation. Slowly the introduction of the concept of the death instinct and eros and the development of the Ego aspects in recent years have brought about a certain broadening of the Freudian concepts of the contents of the unconscious. The non- Freudian schools greatly widened the sector of the unconscious to be uncovered. Most radically Jung, but also Adler, Rank, and the other more recent so-called neo-Freudian authors have contributed to this extension. But (with the exception of Jung), in spite of such a widening, the extent of the sector to be uncovered has remained determined by the therapeutic aim of curing this or that symptom; or this or that neurotic character trait. It has not