Zen Buddhism and displacement behaviour

Korean symbol for Zen

There are many psychiatrists who feel that the perspectives offered by Eastern philosophy are helpful and support the efforts of Western practitioners in mental health.

Whether it be in promoting meditation or yoga or simply utilising basic breathing techniques - eastern exercises that assist coping, focusing and relaxing are all useful tools.

Behind these approaches is an eastern philosophy that takes a very different stance from the Western scientific tradition.  In the West the only valued perspective is the objective one.  To understand something one must take a detached viewpoint and aim at removing oneself - one's feelings, emotions, biases and prejudices - from understanding the world.  In contrast, the Eastern tradition upholds that nothing can be truly know or understood without engagement, feeling and immersing.

Overcoming detachment is important to feeling more engaged with the world and with one's emotions, so it is unsurprising that eastern philosophy was so approved of by Jung, much to Freud's annoyance.  He believed in the hard scientific notion that psychology should stick to hard facts and not align itself with ideas and concepts that threatened to take it beyond the realm of science.

Detachment means that one places oneself outside what one is focused upon.  The object - that which is focused upon - must be held distinct from subject - that which is doing the focusing.  This goes to the heart of western scientific understanding that was philosophically enshrined by Rene Pascal's 'I think, therefore I am'.

This object-subject distinction is something that is part of the human experience.  We always feel a certain reflective distance from the world which means that in certain exceptional circumstances we speak of 'letting ourselves go', or 'forgetting myself '.  Usually this implies we have had a good time and this forgetfulness has allowed us to lose self-consciousness or detachment and allowed us to enter into the world with less reticence, shyness or embarrassment. In fact, we may long to feel that freedom all the time!

The problem for people with mental disorders is where the object-subject relationship between world and self becomes fraught with problems.  Freud wrote about the super-ego (or basically, conscience) that imposes an ideal morality upon the ego.  This torturing voice of self-criticism means that the individual cannot relax or feel at peace and my develop compensatory behaviours in order to achieve this.

This lack of harmony between the object (how we perceive ourselves) and subject (that which does the perceiving) is surely important to understanding self-directed or displacement behaviours too.  Automatic behaviours aim at bypassing the subject-object character of consciousness.  People lose themselves in automatic hair pulling, for example, and derive a sense of wholeness from it.  In short, they derive release from it but when they regain their subject-object awareness they later regret it whilst still longing for the peace that hair pulling brought them.  This viscious circle can go on for years!

Maybe Eastern approaches can and are being brought to bear on hair pulling and other unwanted behaviours.  Offering people alternative ways to switch off their minds, of attaining mental peace and a relief from the pain of subject-object detachment is important.  And in this stressful environment of modern living such relief may be ever harder to find for many people.