Engagements with the World: Emotions and Human Nature

By Ron Leifer MD MA

After fi fty years of futile research on mind and behavior, trying to fi nd their causes in the brain,
without success, psychiatrists and psychologists are turning their attention to the emotions, also
looking for their causes in the brain, also without success. The problem is that there is no generally accepted
theory or paradigm for understanding the emotions. William James suggested that such a paradigm must
meet two criteria: (1) it must explain each individual emotion (i.e., anxiety, anger, depression, etc.), and (2)
it must relate all the emotions to each other. This book presents such a paradigm. It is based on the accepted
biological principle that all organisms from the lowest to the highest function in two biological motives,
which I call bipolar reactivity. All organisms seek pleasure and/or that which sustains and promotes life, and
all organisms seek to avoid pain and/or that which threatens or disables life. Interestingly, this biological
principle corresponds to a basic principle of Buddhist psychology that the pain we cause to ourselves and
to each other is caused by the Three Poisons: desire, aversion, and ego. Desire and aversion link humans
to the great chain of being, and ego distinguishes humans from all other beings and recognizes our unique
capacity for symbolic reactivity. I have used this paradigm for fi fty years in my practice of psychotherapy and
have found it very useful for understanding my patients mental and emotional pain and helping them to
understand and heal themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483620008

Ron Leifer MD MA

Ron Leifer, MD, MA, is a psychiatrist with fi fty years’ experience as a nonmedical, noncoercive psychotherapist. He received his psychiatric training at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, where his mentor was Professor Thomas Szasz, MD, author of the classic In the Name of Mental Health. After publication of this book, the state commissioner of mental health and the chairman of the department tried to fi re Szasz but failed because he had tenure. Leifer and his friend and colleague Ernest Becker, future Pulitzer Prize winner for The Denial of Death, defended Szasz and became outcasts in the department. While he was a resident, Leifer earned a master’s degree in philosophy at Syracuse University where his mentor was the Cambridge philosopher of language, A. R. L. Louch. At the same time, Leifer received his fi rst meditation instruction from the Hindu monk Ahehananda Bharati, who was chairman of the department of anthropology. Noticing Leifer’s interest in Buddhism, Bharati suggested that he fi nd a Tibetan lama teacher. Leifer then became the student of Khenpo Khartar Rinpoche, abbot of the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery in Woodstock, New York. He later became a full-time student at Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, New York, where he studied Buddhism in the Tibetan language. His interest then turned to a synthesis of Western psychology and Buddhist psychology, the result of which was the publication of his second book, The Happiness Project (Snow Lion, 1996), and Vinegar into Honey (Snow Lion, 2006). This book is the third of the trilogy.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Ron Leifer, MD MA.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013906138

ISBN:

   Hardcover   978-1-4836-1999-6

   Softcover   978-1-4836-1998-9

   Ebook       978-1-4836-2000-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/14/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

132275

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One What Are Emotions?

Chapter Two Emotions In The Context Of Human Nature

Chapter Three Desire And Aversion

Chapter Four Fear And Anxiety

Chapter Five Anger And Aggression 1

Chapter Six Grief, Depression, Sadness, And Hope

Chapter Seven Guilt, Obligation, And Freedom

Chapter Eight Pride, Shame, Self-Esteem, And Humility

Chapter Nine Greed, Envy, Jealousy, And Gluttony

Chapter Ten Emotions, Personality, And Character

Chapter Eleven The Energy Of Life

Post Script

Endnotes

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche who taught me to see for myself.

I would like to thank Mack and Carol Travis for their friendship and generosity without which this book could not be published.

I would also like to thank my caregivers, Eini Raupers and C. J. Ward, without whom I could not have lived and could not have published this book.

INTRODUCTION

One great question underlies our experience, whether we think about it or not: what is the purpose of life? From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.

—HH the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

One of the ironies of our present human condition is that we think of ourselves as rational beings, yet we are driven by emotions that we only vaguely understand. After more than a century of interest in the mind and behavior, psychologists are now turning their attention to emotional states. This book has two related aims. First, to present a new, scientifically sound paradigm, based on a view of human nature that is consistent with the Buddhist view that accounts for the variety and characteristics of particular human emotions. Second, to present it in a way that the reader can understand and apply to achieve a balanced emotional life.

The ideas presented here have their origins in, and synthesize, four streams of thought that have shaped my life experience: medicine and biology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, philosophy and Western thought, and Buddhism and Asian wisdom.

From my youth, my driving emotion has been curiosity—a desire to understand myself, other people, and life—to know what to do and how to live. In college, I was most drawn to courses in philosophy because they address my own pressing personal questions. Who am I? What does it mean to be a human being who is born, grows old, and dies? What is the meaning and purpose of life? What is the nature of this mysterious universe in which we live? What is real, and what is illusion? How ironic that most adults regard these profound questions to be the unanswerable preoccupation of immature adolescents and drop them, not realizing that the questions themselves open the mind even if the answers are elusive.

The ideas presented here have been strongly shaped by my training in medicine and psychiatry and, equally importantly, by the discordance between them. Medicine is based on a deep respect for the biological sciences and a reliance on them for an objective understanding of diseases of the body. But Homo sapiens sapiens—man the doubly wise—is not merely an animal. We also have a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual dimension that must be understood from both the objective and the subjective point of view.

Psychiatric training not only taught me to think like a psychiatrist but also to see the logical flaws, deceptive semantics, and social functions of the medical model of psychiatry. I was fortunate to have as my mentor at Syracuse Dr. Thomas Szasz, a Chicago-trained psychoanalyst and premier critic of psychiatry, whose classic book, The Myth of Mental Illness, I read and discussed in seminars with him.¹ I have been his colleague and friend for more than fifty years. We differ on many issues, but I agree with his critique of the medical model of psychiatry.

The medical model views painful emotions—like anxiety, anger, depression, guilt, and shame—as symptoms of an underlying mental illness or disorder. In my view, the medical model is neither a fact nor a theory. It is an ideology that justifies the medical identity of psychiatry and disguises its social functions. The medical model has little to offer for understanding the human personality and the fundamental questions of the purpose of life and the means to happiness. Negative emotions like anxiety, anger, depression, and guilt are not diseases, nor are they symptoms of a disease. They are particular forms of human distress and unhappiness that I shall view here through the lens of the new paradigm.

One of the most profound influences on my life and thought was Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1974 for The Denial of Death, two months after he died.² I met Becker in 1958 when he joined the department of psychiatry as assistant professor of anthropology. We shared the same intense interest in the fundamental questions, as well as many of life’s pleasures, and became close, lifelong friends. We both attended Szasz’s seminars and lectures and were influenced by him for better and worse.³, ⁴ We both rejected the medical model in favor of a new, interdisciplinary view of human suffering that would explain, in nonmedical terms, the problems with which psychiatrists deal. Becker’s synthesis of psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology in The Birth and Death of Meaning is a pillar of the new paradigm presented here.⁵ The ideas in this book are extensions of his and have the same aims: to understand the root causes of human suffering and to search for their remedies.

In 1961, after my residency, I was appointed to the medical school faculty as an assistant professor of psychiatry. At the same time, I undertook a master’s degree in philosophy at Syracuse University under the tutelage of the British philosopher of language A. R. Louch.⁶ Like many of his illustrious Oxford colleagues, Louch was interested in the human mind and the explanation of human action. He was critical of the idea of a social science based on causal explanations. In his view, human actions are intelligible only in terms of desires, fears, motives, intentions, and purposes. His ideas supported the views of Szasz, Becker, and me that the medical model, which attempts to explain mind, emotions, and behavior in causal terms, is invalid and that a new paradigm is required that views the human individual as a moral agent.

I completed the master’s degree in 1964 and was appointed by Professor Paul Meadows, who was an admirer of Szasz and Becker, as an instructor in the department of sociology at Syracuse University where I taught courses on human development and social deviance. I published numerous articles critical of the medical model in psychiatric journals and wrote my first book, In the Name of Mental Health: The Social Functions of Psychiatry,⁷ which views psychiatry not as a medical discipline but as a covert form of emotional regulation and social control.

This book was perceived as a threat by my psychiatric colleagues. Basic Books agreed to publish it, but then its editor, Irving Kristol, informed me they were withdrawing their offer because psychiatrists they hired to review it threatened to boycott the company if they did. Jason Aronson, of Science House, eventually published it. The main opposition to the book came from the chairman of my department, David Robinson, who fired me because he believed, that with Szasz and me in the same department, publication of my book would mark Syracuse as an antipsychiatry center, and funds for residency training and research would be cut off by the National Institute of Mental Health. I applied for faculty appointments to other departments of psychiatry but was rejected because of my association with Szasz, who was also repressed and rejected by academic psychiatry because of his critical writings.⁸

At the same time that I was being blackballed by psychiatry, I was also becoming alienated from mainstream American society and tending to identify with the civil rights and antiwar movements of the Turbulent Sixties. I became a member of CORE, marched with the people on the streets, and was the first white professional in Syracuse to volunteer to be arrested in support of civil rights. One of my closest friends and inspirations was the vice president of national CORE, Rudy Lombard, who lived with me when he was a graduate student at Syracuse University. Rudy was a hero of the civil rights movement, having won an appeal to the Supreme Court to desegregate Woolworth’s in New Orleans and leading voter registration drives in the South. The civil rights movement was energized by people with a strong compassion for the oppressed and a fervent desire for social justice, which I shared and which merged with my sympathy for the victims of involuntary psychiatry.

While teaching at Syracuse, I attended the Vietnam teach-ins and marched with the war protesters on campus. The university police photographed the marchers, and like many of my protesting colleagues, I was dismissed from the faculty. By 1966, I was a critic of medical-coercive psychiatry, racism, and the Vietnam War and had been fired from a medical school and a university. These were times of crisis but also times of opportunity. As one door of perception was closing, another was opening.

In 1962, Becker introduced me to his friend and colleague Agehananda Bharati, an ordained Hindu monk and professor of anthropology at Syracuse University.⁹ Over the years, Ageha and I spent many hours together sharing good music, good food, and good conversation. Ageha had an international reputation as a scholar, a linguist, a philosopher, and a critical analyst of South Asian religions. He became my first meditation teacher. He taught me traditional Shamatha and Vipassana meditation and introduced me to his very sophisticated interpretations of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. The seeds of Asian spiritual arts and wisdom had been planted in my mind, but they took decades to sprout.

In 1966, having been blackballed from academia, I decided to take a sabbatical retreat. I thought of traveling to India to study with an Asian master, but first, I wanted to shed the shackles of academic thinking by experiencing a more earthy and raw side of life. My wife, Betty, and I rented our house, bought a truck and camper, and toured the country, witnessing firsthand the ugly racism and culture wars of the sixties. After a stay for a month with Becker and his wife, Marie, in San Francisco, we drove down into Mexico for a year of new experiences, new people, and exciting adventures.

A Mexican I met in Acapulco asked if I would help the people of his village, many of whom were sick and needed medical attention. My friends and I made several trips in my truck thirty miles up the road to Zihuatanejo then thirty miles off the road over hills and streams to a remote village in the mountains of Guerrero. With my black medical bag in hand, I went house to house, examining and talking to the villagers who were suffering from endemic streptococcus infections, goiter, and poor sanitation. On several return trips, I brought penicillin and iodized salt and gave them basic lessons in public health. The Mexican authorities were not happy, to say the least, with the presence of Americans in the rebellious, marijuana-farming regions of Guerrero. When I heard they were looking for us, we escaped from Mexico in a hurry. There is nothing like being an alienated fugitive to free one’s mind from conventional thinking.

I tell this history not to brag or complain but to point to a vital factor in my personal evolution that shaped the evolution of the ideas in this book. Being condemned and expelled from academic psychiatry was traumatic at the time, but it was a blessing in disguise because it freed me from the confinement of conventional psychiatric thought and practice. I was a proud, patriotic American boy during World War II. It was painful to feel alienated from mainstream American culture, but my disappointment was palliated by the freedom it gave me to address the fundamental problems of life in a new way. Disillusionment can be emancipating.

In my later Buddhist studies, I learned that dropping conventional and habitual thought is a necessary precondition for opening the mind to the realities of life. Zen masters teach no-mind—the dropping of discursive thought and personal identity. When an American student asked the Tibetan lama Chögyam Rinpoche Trungpa what was needed to understand the Buddhist teachings, he answered, A new mind. When Leonard Cohen was studying and practicing Zen Buddhism, Sasaki Roshi told him, I not Japanese, you not Jewish. My expulsion from psychiatry and my alienation from American society taught me that I was not fundamentally a psychiatrist or an American. It was my first lesson in dropping my personal identity and my habitual beliefs. Buddhist training reinforced the realization that I was just a human being going nowhere with an open mind. My alienation undermined my usual narratives and beliefs and prepared me to see life in a new way. One must empty the cup before filling it again. As the Zen masters say in their typically mystifying metaphors, First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is a mountain. Which means? First there is an ordinary person, then there is an enlightened person, then there is an ordinary person.

When I returned from Mexico in 1968, I resumed the private practice of psychotherapy. I saw an average of twenty emotionally distressed patients a week and spent many weekends with Ageha, meditating and discussing Hindu and Buddhist views on mental and emotional distress. The common ground of Buddhism and psychotherapy was becoming clear. Noting my interest in Buddhist psychology, Ageha advised me to seek a Buddhist teacher, preferably a Tibetan lama, many of whom had recently come to this country. In 1980, I discovered Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Woodstock, New York, and became a student of its abbot, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, with whom I took my refuge vows.

Rinpoche gave me the same basic meditation instructions in Shamatha practice that Ageha had given me and, like Ageha, instructed me to practice them for two years before I could go on to ngondro, the preliminaries of Tantra. In my weekend and weeklong retreats at the monastery, I met and received instruction from many high lamas. I was particularly fortunate to have received teachings from the Kagyu regents Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, Tai Situ Rinpoche, and the Sharmapa, with whom I took the Five Lay Precepts vows.

Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche saw that Buddhism and psychotherapy share a common interest in suffering and the relief from suffering and predicted that Buddhism would come to America through psychotherapy. In 1986, he commissioned a small group of psychotherapists to organize a thousand-person conference on Buddhism and psychotherapy. The conference took place in New York City and was a huge success. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche and Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche attended together with eminent American Buddhist teachers who entered into dialogue with psychiatrists and psychotherapists. I invited Szasz and R. D. Laing, who appeared on the same stage for the first and only time. I also invited Alan Ginsberg, a student of Trungpa Rinpoche, who sang his songs and read his poetry to the delight of the packed auditorium.

At the time, the lamas were teaching basic Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths, rather than the more advanced teachings they are now making available to Western students. The first two Noble Truths struck me like a vajra lightning bolt that illuminated the questions I had been asking all my life. The First Truth is the truth of suffering. Buddha taught that everyone suffers. We all suffer the trauma of birth. We all suffer from changes that separate us from what we love and confront us with what we fear. We all suffer from not getting what we want and getting what we don’t want. We suffer from sickness and, eventually, from old age and death. It became evident to me that the common ground of Buddhism and psychotherapy is their concern with emotional suffering and the means of its relief.

The significance of the First Noble Truth is that our painful emotions are the obstacles on the path to happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, but everybody cries. The path to happiness begins with the awareness of suffering and the desire for relief. By happiness, we are speaking here not of some transcendental enlightenment or about getting everything you want but about achieving peace of mind. The painful truth that many do not want to see is that peace of mind cannot be achieved without opening to and working with painful emotions such as anxiety, anger, or depression. In this sense, the purpose of this book is to show the reader how to achieve peace of mind through an experiential understanding and release from emotional suffering.

The Second Noble Truth teaches the causes of suffering, which are very simple, very specific, and very profound. These causes are popularly known as the Three Poisons, usually known as passion, aggression, and ignorance. Passion is sometimes called desire, lust, or attachment. Aggression is sometimes called aversion or hatred. Ignorance is sometimes known as delusion or illusion. The inner meaning of these terms, which are often poor translations from Sanskrit or Tibetan, is not immediately clear. One must study and analyze the texts and listen and reflect on the explanations of the lamas to understand them in Western terms and context. This was confirmed when I later became a full-time student at Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca and studied Buddhism in the Tibetan language.

In my studies and discussions with various lamas and geshes, it became clear that the Three Poisons can be understood in simple Western terms as desire, aversion, and ego or sense of self. Passion has the dual meaning of desire and suffering. Aggression and hatred presume an aversion to the unwanted. Ego has two meanings. It refers to ignorance of the facts of life as well as to the projection of lies, fantasies, and fictions, including