The Trauma of Everyday Life

began to notice significant relief in waking life. Much as I began to dream on my retreat, Winnicott’s patient, safely ensconced in her relationship with him, found that she was also able to remember, and make use of, her dreams. Coincidentally to this process, she reported being able to sing at a community event. Dreaming of screaming led to her singing. And Winnicott described how she was then able to speak up when he was late to a session. Her anger was no longer felt to be impotent but could be martialed in service of the therapeutic relationship. “We need to dream our scream for it to become real and we need to experience our dream as part of the real-izing process,” 9 wrote Michael Eigen years later about this case.
    Winnicott’s case study illuminates something critical about the Buddha’s path. While he was not yet ready to dream his traumatized self, the Buddha, without realizing it at first, acted out his trauma in the pursuit of self-punishment and self-mortification. Like Yasa running from his disturbing vision of sexuality the Buddha became consumed with how fearsome and horrible human needs could be. Winnicott’s case study describes how therapists now understand the evolution of this kind of shame. The raw vision of one’s helplessness and dependency, the feeling of groundlessness, as exemplified in his case study by the mother who was not there to hear her child’s scream, is too overwhelming to bear, too primordial to symbolize. It cannot be held by the mind. Something has to take its place, and this often takes the shape of a neurotic symptom or set of symptoms, a fear or a phobia or an obsessive determination to control one’s body or mind. A conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with oneself or one’s world, painful though that might be, is more tolerable than staring into the void.
    The bulk of Gotama’s six years of wandering were spent in the company of five companions practicing austerities, the same five to whom he later gave the teachings of the Four Noble Truths and who then watched as he settled Yasa down and gave him hope. The general idea of their asceticism was that since pleasure led to attachment, the elimination of pleasure could break the hold of this illusory world and release one into the realm of pure spirit. By depriving the body of its everyday needs one could build up a kind of spiritual power or “heat” that could bring one into contact with the divine. If indulging one’s needs for comfort, food, safety, or sex led to bondage, then a refusal to yield to one’s desires must lead to freedom. Ascetic practitioners were widespread in the wilds of India in the Buddha’s time—they can still be found, as Allen Ginsberg discovered on his first trip to India, on the periphery of Indian society today.
    One of the most interesting things about reading traditional accounts of the Buddha’s austerities is how aggressive he sounds. He is far from the delicate creature he once was. No longer clad in the expensive silks of Benares, he becomes as fierce as any matted-haired, fire-worshipping, snake-garlanded ascetic of his time. As the Buddha implied when he reflected upon his own delicate nature, he was raised in such a way that the most troubling feelings were kept apart from everyday life. As legend came to describe, walls were built around any intimation of death, destruction, or loss. In his ascetic practices, the Buddha turned all this around. If he had been shielded from distress in his childhood, he flung himself into it in the forest. One can almost hear a therapist like Winnicott describing the Buddha’s “ruthless rejection of his own female element,” with his “unwelcome male element threatening to take over his whole personality.” 10
    Ascetic practices brought Gotama’s aggression out into the open and gave it a means of expression. In making his own body/mind the object of assault, he found a safe object to attack, albeit one that was under constant threat of collapse. Gotama’s spiritual pursuits had him hitting his head against the wall of his own suffering, trying to find relief through the attempted destruction of his own support. His ideal during this time, as recounted in the Pali Canon, was to become like a “dry, sapless piece of wood lying on dry land,” ready, at the first opportunity, to burst into flames. The imagery is almost too perfect. Draining himself of all of what is called
rasa
in Sanskrit—the juice,