The Trauma of Everyday Life

has not happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to. The only way to ‘remember’ in this case is for the patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that is to say, in the transference. This past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now, and becomes experienced by the patient for the first time. . . . This is the equivalent of remembering.” 16
    A person in therapy uses the therapist in much the same way that an infant uses a parent, as a provider of protective ego coverage, so that feelings that would otherwise be too frightening can be slowly passed back and forth and made known. Meditation, as the story of the Buddha’s life makes clear, does something similar. It also creates a holding environment in which unknown and unexamined aspects of the past can be experienced for the first time in the here and now. My vision of myself on the videotape, like my dreams on retreat, gave me another opportunity to turn my implicit memories into narrative ones. Winnicott, who liked to frame things as “male” or “female,” would have seen my predicament as emblematic of too much “male” energy. For him, there needed to be a balance between doing—the male element—and being—the female element. In my fight against doing and being done to, I was locked into a dissociated aggressive response. In search of attunement and responsiveness, I was nevertheless vulnerable to my own aggression. In the face of my wife’s nursing of my daughter, I could not contain myself. Not only did I enact my own trauma, I created trouble for them.
    The Buddha dramatized a version of this as he journeyed toward his enlightenment. The events that unfolded after the recovery of his childhood memory and the abandonment of his ascetic practices brought him face to face with the childhood trauma he had not yet fully experienced. In Winnicott’s formulation, it had not yet happened because he had not been there enough for it to happen to him. But with his mind rejuvenated by his childhood memory and his body replenished by the offering of the maiden, Gotama was ready to make more room for himself. Emerging from between the rock and the hard place that had so constricted him, he was poised to remember that which he had no conscious recollection of. The first sign of this came in the form of five great dreams. While they are traditionally viewed as prophetic, these dreams seem as related to the past as they do to the future. They suggest that the Buddha, like the rest of us, needed to connect with his history. With no videotape to come to his aid, his implicit memory yielded up its treasures in the only way it could. His dreams, as Freud would later confirm, were the royal road to his unconscious.

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    Dreams of the Buddha

    O nce, when asked, “Who are you?” by a bedazzled admirer, the Buddha replied simply, “I am awake.” This famous statement is often misinterpreted. While it speaks of his uncovering of the Four Noble Truths—of suffering, its cause, its relief, and the path to its release—it can make it seem as if the Buddha never slept, as if he never dreamed, as if perpetual alertness was his main attribute. The Buddha was certainly awake, but he was not on guard. He was attentive to all who came his way, alert to their traumas and to their reluctance to admit to their traumas, and he was equally attuned to himself. In awakening to his true nature, the Buddha did not neglect the reality of those around him. A concern for others defined his attention.
    One of the most important steps in the Buddha’s awakening came in his sleep. Right after remembering his childhood joy under the rose-apple tree, after taking his meal of rice pudding and being abandoned by his five former friends, after throwing his begging bowl into the river and watching it float upstream, he had a series of dreams. They are recorded in one of the original collections of Buddhist sutras * but have been given scant attention over the years. The dreams were catalytic for the Buddha’s growth and development. Not only did they reveal much about his own history of trauma, about who he was before his enlightenment and what he had to recover to get there, but they helped open him to a dormant capacity of his mind, one that he was then able to use to help others with their suffering. In dreaming himself into wakefulness, the Buddha remembered, and took possession of, a quality of human