ABSTRACT
How may Buddhism fit and not fit in the domain of psychoanalysis? This chapter explores the question through the psychoanalytic writing of Daniel Stern, Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan and the Buddhist constructs of Beginner’s Mind and the dualistic fixation. As Buddhism has gained popularity in the West over the last forty years, it has departed from its cultural and religious roots and has become appropriated in the larger cultural project, including the therapeutic project of psychoanalysis. A body of evidence has grown demonstrating evidence of the parallels of the beneficial effects between the two systems in mediating mental states or self-states that constitute our subjectivity. Yet there is a distinction between the two domains. The psychoanalytic project explores our subjectivity and seems to require a subject. The Buddhist project of renunciation of self includes an exploration of our subjectivity but goes far beyond into a subjectless realm. In exploring the intersections and superimpositions of one system on the other, we may ask what may be gained and lost in the co-evolution—or progressive collapsing—of these two overlapping yet distinct domains.
