The Trauma of Everyday Life

reflect it, so that the brain does not know if you are doing the action or if I am. They are vehicles of empathy, automatically tying people together, mixing up experience between self and other. When I see my baby grimace, my mirror neurons give me the immediate sensation of grimacing. I know what she is experiencing without having to think about it and, if I am positively engaged, I will automatically do something to help her. “The human brain cannot develop and sustain itself without relatedness, which is a continuously active condition of mental life,” 5 writes one contemporary researcher. “How well the infant-caregiver relationship maintains positive engagement and regulates the infant’s fearful arousal will have escalating consequences.” 6 Parents make use of implicit relational knowing to help their infants cope with difficult feelings. An attuned and responsive caregiver senses what a baby is experiencing and strives to make things tolerable. He does this not by thinking about it but by simply knowing and responding.
    The Buddha’s dreams put him back in touch with his own capacity for knowing. After reconnecting to the joyful and creative element encapsulated by his childhood memory, he found a maternal energy infusing his imagination in his dreams. He moved from a position in which he was a lonely, isolated individual struggling to subdue his unruly self to one in which he was irrevocably aware of the intrinsic relational backdrop of his being. Despite the early loss of his biological mother, he now saw his rootedness in relationship as primary. As Michael Eigen, one of the few contemporary psychoanalysts who does not shy away from the mystical aspects of the field, has described it, “If you penetrate to the core of your aloneness you will not only find yourself, there will also be this unknown boundless presence. Is it you? Is it other than you? What is it? An unknown, boundless presence at the very core of your aloneness. No matter how deep you go, you’ll find it there.” 7
    The Buddha’s dreams, envisaged when he was awakening, reveal his version of this unknown, boundless support. Coming on the heels of his memory, they are evidence of his psyche in upheaval. No longer driven by an ideology of subjugation, the Buddha can be seen in the process of reconfiguring himself. What is most apparent in the dreams is the opening up of his self. It is as if all the doors and windows are thrown ajar. The sun and the wind and the waters and the earth and the birds and the plants and even the bugs and dirt come streaming in. The lonely, isolated individual struggling with the feelings of being an ill-fitting axle in the wheel of life suddenly finds himself supported by the very world that was heretofore felt to be threatening. And this happens through the depiction in narrative memory of the connection with his mother that he had previously been unable to acknowledge or articulate.
    The Buddha’s mother, an enlivening presence stripped away before she could be really known, pervades his dreams and becomes the substrate of his enlightenment. She imbues his imagination and, in so doing, returns to him a capacity for relating in a maternal way. The Buddha’s genius lay in his ability to take this capacity, newly returned to his mind, and deploy it in his spiritual search. He took the hint from his dreams and used it to balance his striving. Out of his implicit memory he found the female element he needed to make a stable path for himself. A comment from the artist Marcel Duchamp makes clear that this opening of a channel from implicit to narrative memory can have just this quality of joyful recovery. “Art cannot be understood through the intellect,” wrote Duchamp, “but is felt through an emotion presenting some analogy with a religious faith or a sexual attraction—an aesthetic echo. The ‘victim’ of an aesthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and, helpless, submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint. While exercising his taste, he adopts a commanding attitude. When touched by the aesthetic revelation, the same man, in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.” 8
    The Buddha, before his aesthetic echo, was in the classic position of a traumatized individual acting out dissociated feelings without knowing what was being expressed. In his renunciation of desire, as enacted first