Eve is plagued by a waking nightmare.
‘I do not exist. All you see is a shell with no being inside, a mask covering nothingness. I am no one and no thing. I am the unborn, the non-existent.’
– from Pickering (2019).
Dr. Judith Pickering is a psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst in Sydney, Australia. Her patient ‘Eve’ is an “anonymous, fictionalised amalgam of patients suffering disorders of self.” Eve had a psychotic episode while attending a Tibetan Buddhist retreat.
“She felt that she was no more than an amoeba-like semblance of pre-life with no form, no substance, no past, no future, no sense of on-going being.”
Eve's fractured sense of self preceded the retreat. In fact, she was drawn to Buddhist philosophy precisely because of its negation of self. In the doctrine of non-being (anātman), “there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in living beings.” The tenet of emptiness (śūnyatā) — that “all things are empty [or void] of intrinsic existence” — was problematic as well. When applied and interpreted incorrectly, śūnyatā and anātman can resemble or precipitate disorders of the self.
Dr. Pickering noted:
‘Eve’ is representative of a number of patients suffering both derealisation and depersonalisation. They doubt the existence of the outer world (derealisation) and fear that they do not exist. In place of a sense of self, they have but an empty core inside (depersonalisation).
How do you find your way back to your self after that? Will the psychotic episode respond to neuroleptics or mood stabilizers?
The current article takes a decidedly different approach from this blog's usual themes of neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. Spirituality, dreams, and the unconscious play an important role in Jungian psychology. Pickering mentions the Object Relations School, Attachment Theory, Field Theory, The Relational School, the Conversational Model, Intersubjectivity Theory and Infant Research. She cites Winnicott, Bowlby, and Bion (not Blanke & Arzy 2005, Kas et al. 2014, or Seth et al. 2012).
Why did I read this paper? Sometimes it's useful to consider the value of alternate perspectives. Now we can examine the potential hazards of teaching overly Westernized conceptions of Buddhist philosophy.1
When Westerners Attend Large Buddhist Retreats
Eve’s existential predicament exemplifies a more general area of concern found in situations involving Western practitioners of Buddhism, whether in traditional settings in Asia, or Western settings ostensibly adapted to the Western mind. Have there been problems of translation in regard to Buddhist teachings on anātman (non-self) as implying the self is completely non-existent, and interpretations of śūnyatā (emptiness) as meaning all reality is non-existent, or void?
. . .
This relates to another issue concerning situations where Westerners attend large Buddhist retreats in which personalised psycho-spiritual care may be lacking. Traditionally, a Buddhist master would know the student well and carefully select appropriate teachings and practices according to a disciple’s psychological, physical and spiritual predispositions, proficiency and maturity. For example, teaching emptiness or śūnyatā to someone who is not ready can be extremely harmful. As well as being detrimental for the student, it puts the teacher at risk of a major ethical infringement...
I found Dr. Pickering's discussion of Nameless Dread to be especially compelling.
Nameless Dread
I open the door to a white, frozen mask. I know immediately that Eve has disappeared again into what she calls ‘the void’. She sits down like an automaton, stares in stony silence at the wall as if staring into space. I do not exist for her, she is totally isolated in her own realm of non-existence.
The sense of deadly despair pervades the room. I feel myself fading into nothingness, this realm of absence, unmitigated, bleakness and blankness.We sit in silence, sometimes for session after session. I wonder what on earth do I have to offer her? Nothing, it seems.
ADDENDUM (June 18 2019): A reader alerted me to a tragic story two years ago in Pennsylvania, where a young woman ultimately died by suicide after experiencing a psychotic episode during an intensive 10-day meditation retreat. The article noted:
"One of the documented but rare adverse side effects from intense meditation retreats can be depersonalization disorder. People need to have an especially strong ego, or sense of self, to be able to withstand the strictness and severity of the retreats."
Case reports of extreme adverse events are rare, but a 2017 study documented "meditation-related challenges" in Western Buddhists. The authors conducted detailed qualitative interviews in 60 people who engaged in a variety of Buddhist meditation practices (Lindahl et al., 2017). Thematic analysis revealed a taxonomy of 59 experiences across seven domains (I've appended a table at the end of the post). The authors found a wide range of responses: "The associated valence ranged from very positive to very negative, and the associated level of distress and functional impairment ranged from minimal and transient to severe and enduring." The paper is open access, and Brown University issued an excellent press release.
Footnote
1This is especially important given the appropriation of semi-spiritual versions of yoga and mindfulness, culminating in inanities such as tech bro eating disorders.
References
Blanke O, Arzy S. (2005). The out-of-body experience: disturbed self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. Neuroscientist 11:16-24.
Kas A, Lavault S, Habert MO, Arnulf I. (2014) Feeling unreal: a functional imaging study in patients with Kleine-Levin syndrome. Brain 137: 2077-2087.
Lindahl JR, Fisher NE, Cooper DJ, Rosen RK, Britton WB. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLoS One 12(5):e0176239.
Pickering J. (2019). 'I Do Not Exist': Pathologies of Self Among Western Buddhists.J Relig Health 58(3):748-769.
Seth AK, Suzuki K, Critchley HD. (2012). An interoceptive predictive coding model of conscious presence. Front Psychol. 2:395.
Further Reading
Derealization / Dying
Feeling Mighty Unreal: Derealization in Kleine-Levin Syndrome
A Detached Sense of Self Associated with Altered Neural Responses to Mirror Touch
Phenomenology coding structure (Table 4, Lindahl et al., 2017).
- click table for a larger view -