First up was John Ryan Haule, with a paper entitled "Psychoanalysis and Social Virtuosity: Jung and Ch'an Buddhism." Haule followed Peter Hershock's analysis of Ch'an Buddhist practice in Liberating Intimacy. Hershock sees Ch'an practice as an education in social virtuosity, with the master being the liberated virtuoso who teaches the student freedom from suffering. This freedom come from dropping personal narratives and instead following an improvisational path of creative spontaneity. According to Hershock, this teaching especially occurs in fa ch'an, dharma combat. For Haule, this was the bridge to Jung. In Jung's therapeutic technique there is no explicit mention of Ch'an virtuosity, but Jung and Jungians employ similar methods to help the analysand break away from constricting personal narratives. Like Lin-chi, demanding the student to "Speak! Speak!," Haule described Jung spontaneously using the evolving face-to-face situation to wake the analysand up. In this activity, Jung considered he was acting as the "Superior Man" or "Great Man," and he used those Confucian and Gnostic terms. Haule concluded that this work in analysis demands drawing on wholeness but abandoning attachment to theology and dogma. It is dharma combat itself.
          David Need now presented the main ideas of his paper titled "On the Limits of the Self: a Consideration of Buddhist and Psychological Notions of Wholeness and Health." In contrast to the often dry readings at AAR sessions, Need talked to his audience with only occasional reference to notes. He argued that Buddhism and Western psychology share a tendency to conceive of the self as "whole," at least ideally. For Need this tendency is not only inaccurate, it is potentially immoral in its inaccuracy in describing lived experience. Need argued that Buddhist notions of the perfected self inherit Vedic models of heroic wholeness and these notions persist into Mahaayaana Buddhism. Further, Western readings of Buddhism have been shaped by rationalist tendencies stemming from the Enlightenment and Western perfectionism. On the side of psychology, models of the self have again grown out of Enlightenment ideals. Ironically, Need sees post-Freudian models of the self as undercutting a useful brokenness Need sees in Freud. Exceptions might include the work of Jacques Lacan and D. W. Winnicott, but Need felt that most current work on Buddhism and psychology has accepted the discourse of wholeness and has fallen prey to the same problems that plagued earlier work. Need ended his presentation, though, with the hopeful example of Julia Kristeva's work integrating Lacan and Winnicott into a vision of a permeable and relational self that seems to hold promise for explaining Buddhist experience without employing the language of wholeness.
          Lynken Ghose followed with a presentation of the main ideas in his paper, "A Study in Buddhist Psychology: Mental and Emotional Healing in Buddhism." Ghose began with a definition of mind rooted in Buddhaghosa and the Nikaayas, a definition giving mind a distinguishable energy. He then claimed that affect, especially the residues of blocked affect are the primary cause for mental disease. Reviewing the Pali Canon, Ghose found evidence that Buddhist practice or understanding heals both physical and psychic disease, though the Canon is equivocal on the subject of physical disease and even some mental maladies such as insanity and epilepsy. Ghose found correspondence between the restrictive, numbing, dark kilesas and Western psychological conceptions of unhealth. In contrast of course, the mind of the Buddhist sage is free of the kilesas and characterized by joy, empathy, compassion, and satisfaction. Ghose argued, following A'svagho.sa, that these qualities must be persistent, that the sage must not have emotional volatility but rather ongoing positive affect at all times. If this is so, Ghose speculated, then Buddhist practice must also be characterized by a "correct meditative attitude" of no repugnance at the negative, no impulsion to the positive, no indifference to the indeterminate. Such an attitude has something in common with Western psychological methods of healing.
          The final presentation was given by Michael Mitchell and entitled "Buddhist Practice Through the Lens of Psychology: An Example." Mitchell introduced the basics of object relations psychology, especially in distinction to Freudian notions of instinct and the monadic self. Since object relations views selves as fundamentally fluid and created from representations of others, it has great applicability to Buddhist experience. But here Mitchell made the crucial observation that these internal representations, created as they are from our perceptions of our experiences with others, are in fact internal "*mis*-representations." That is, our selves distort our past and our present experience, causing us suffering. Mitchell compared this view to the first two Noble Truths, suggesting we need a letting go, a detachment from these distortions of self. This process of letting go runs parallel in psychotherapy and in Buddhism. In psychotherapy there is a decathecting of the libidinal energy trapped in object representations. In Buddhism there is, especially in mindfulness meditation, an acceptance of reality as it is. For Mitchell these practices have the potential to progressively free us from our limited and distorted realities.
          A presider's comment: as I hoped, the discussion after each presentation and the free-flowing discussion for the last half an hour of the session proved to be lively and at times provocative. While I cannot detail the many themes that surfaced, I can mention one that recurred frequently. That was the vexed question of anatta and its implications for soteriology and for mental health. The audience was overwhelmingly in agreement that psychotherapy and bhaavanaa work toward similar goals. Further, that relational models and Buddhist models of the self have deep affinities. Yet no firm agreement on terminology was in the offing; not among the psychologists, not among the Buddhists. Indeed, the only tense point in the discussion came in an argument between two Buddhists, one of whom held an unusually strong view of anatta. This actually delighted me, though, since exposing the majority non-Buddhist audience to the differences and tensions in Buddhist psychology and practice can only deepen further reflection in psychology of religion.