The Trauma of Everyday Life

face of Islamic conquest a thousand years ago.
    Gotama rather quickly mastered the transcendental practices—he found two highly realized masters but left each disappointed with the scope of their accomplishments. Despite learning to stabilize his mind and evoke prolonged mystical states of oneness or merger, he was unable to find lasting relief in these oceanic meditative states. In some way, he was mimicking his mother’s flight to the heaven realm, leaving behind his earthly preoccupations for the exalted abode of the gods. These experiences reinforced his tendency toward dissociation by removing him even more completely from his body and everyday mind, but they removed him in a way that left his preoccupation with the traumatic underpinnings of life untouched. When he returned from the sublime states of meditation, he was still there, with the same profound sense of dis-ease that continued to torment him. Upon questioning his teachers, he found that they, too, had not been able to conquer their most fundamental fears. They could suspend themselves in states of hypnotic equipoise, but they did not emerge from those states any more enlightened than when they entered them. Each offered to have him stay and take over his role as guru, but Gotama was not so inclined. Like a well-analyzed patient of our own time who, while finally clear about the childhood origins of her neuroses, still loses her temper with her husband and children, Gotama became disillusioned with the traditional approaches available to him. He turned, in frustration, to the competing ideology of his time, that of self-punishment and self-mortification.
    If a therapist were to comment on the Buddha’s going forth, he would most likely frame the commentary around the contrast between the Buddha’s self-described delicate nature and the violence of his leaving home and subsequent ascetic practices. Trying hard to be a good son, to satisfy the demands of his father and stepmother, the Buddha constructed a “caretaker” self that we might label as “false,” created for the benefit and protection of his parents but lacking in authenticity and therefore “delicate.” Winnicott wrote a case study in 1969 of just such a patient, who was dominated by a scream that could not be expressed. She, too, had dissociated her earliest feelings and was troubled by her broken dreams. “It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient’s sessions that if she could scream she would be well,” wrote Winnicott. “The great non-event of every session is screaming.” 6 The Burmese master who counseled Sharon was making much the same point. In encouraging her to cry her heart out, he was countering her inclination to make crying the “great non-event” of every meditation session. Like the Burmese teacher, Winnicott felt that if his patient could cry her heart out, her psyche would grow.
    In a beautiful passage in Winnicott’s case history, dated though it might now seem, he described the theory behind much of his clinical work. “If we take the situation in which she is a child playing while her mother is occupied with some activity such as sewing, this is the good pattern in which growth is taking place. At any moment the child may make a gesture and the mother will transfer her interest from her sewing to the child. If the mother is preoccupied and does not at first notice the child’s need, the child has only to begin to cry and the mother is available. In the bad pattern which is at the root of this patient’s illness, the child cried and the mother did not appear. In other words the scream that she is looking for is
the last scream just before hope was abandoned
. Since then screaming has been of no use because it fails in its purpose.” 7
    Winnicott revealed something important about therapy in his case study. The best the therapist can do with a patient like this, he remarked, is to “give understanding.” Like the Buddha with Yasa, he did not take the position that the situation was fearful and horrible but instead made room for a feeling that had been, over the years, dissociated. A compassionate attitude toward the bad pattern “points toward” the good pattern that had been long forgotten. “Profound understanding leads of course towards screaming, that is to say towards screaming again, this time with hope.” 8
    Winnicott went on to describe how, some time into her therapy, his patient dreamed herself screaming and then