will also note my increasing respect for the “communication psychology” of Gregory Bateson and his associates, particularly Jay Haley, which goes hand in hand with my growing preference for discussing these matters in a language that is more scientific and less metaphysical.
He will find, therefore, that I place more weight upon the connection of the Eastern disciplines with forms of psychotherapy whose philosophy is social, interpersonal, and communicational than with those which stress “the unconscious” and its archetypal images. Even though the discussion of this interchange between East and West has so largely been carried on by those who follow the latter trend, I cannot help feeling that it is becoming more and more of a backwater in the development of Western psychiatry, despite the debt which we shall always owe to Freud. Psychoanalysis in particular and “depth psychology” in general seem to me to be increasingly out of touch with all that has been going on in the sciences of human behavior during the last thirty years, and many of us are wondering seriously how long it will be possible for psychology, the study of an alleged psyche, to remain a department of science.
In addition to the influences mentioned above, this book has not been prepared without a great deal of discussion with persons actively engaged in psychotherapy. During the past few years I have had the privilege of conducting seminars upon its subject and of being a guest lecturer at many medical schools, hospitals, and psychiatric institutes — including the Yale Medical School, the Langley-Porter Clinic of the University of California, the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Palo Alto Veterans’ Hospital, the Stanford Medical School, and many state psychiatric hospitals. My thanks are due to all those responsible for these opportunities.
Alan W. Watts
San Francisco, 1960
I. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND LIBERATION
If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. This may seem surprising, for we think of the latter as a form of science, somewhat practical and materialistic in attitude, and of the former as extremely esoteric religions concerned with regions of the spirit almost entirely out of this world. This is because the combination of our unfamiliarity with Eastern cultures and their sophistication gives them an aura of mystery into which we project fantasies of our own making. Yet the basic aim of these ways of life is something of quite astonishing simplicity, besides which all the complications of reincarnation and psychic powers, of superhuman mahatmas, and of schools for occult technology are a smoke screen in which the credulous inquirer can lose himself indefinitely. In fairness it should be added that the credulous inquirer may be Asian as well as Western, though the former has seldom the peculiarly highbrow credulity of the Western fancier of esotericism. The smoke is beginning to clear, but for a long time its density has hidden the really important contributions of the Eastern mind to psychological knowledge.
The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people. But it is increasingly apparent to psychotherapists that the normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease. A complex of societies of vast material wealth bent on mutual destruction is anything but a condition of social health.
Nevertheless, the parallel between psychotherapy and, as I have called them,1 the Eastern “ways of liberation” is not exact, and one of the most important differences is suggested by the prefix psycho-. Historically, Western psychology has directed itself to the study of the psyche, or mind, as a clinical entity, whereas Eastern cultures have not categorized mind and matter, soul and body, in the same way as the Western. But Western psychology has to some extent so outgrown its historical origins as to become dissatisfied with the very term “psychological” as describing a major field of human behavior. It is not that it has become possible, as Freud himself once hoped, to reduce psychology to neurology and mind to body. It is not that for the entity “mind” we can substitute the entity “nervous system.” It is rather that psychology cannot stand aloof from the whole revolution in scientific description which has been going on in the twentieth century, a revolution in which conceptions of entities and “stuffs,” whether mental or material, have become obsolete. Whether it is describing chemical changes or biological forms, nuclear structures or human behavior, the language of modern science is simply concerned with changing patterns of relationship.
Perhaps this revolution has affected physics and biology far more deeply than psychology and as yet the theoretical ideas of psychoanalysis remain untouched. The common speech and the common sense of even educated society has been so little affected that it is still hard to convey in some nonmathematical language what has happened. It seems an affront to common sense that we can describe the world as patterns of relationship without needing to ask what “stuff” these patterns are “made of.” For when the scientist investigates matter or stuff, he describes what he finds in terms of structured pattern. When one comes to think of it, what other terms could he use? The sensation of stuff arises only when we are confronted with patterns so confused or so closely knit that we cannot make them out. To the naked eye a distant galaxy looks like a solid star and a piece of steel like a continuous and impenetrable mass of matter. But when we change the level of magnification, the galaxy assumes the clear structure of a spiral nebula and the piece of steel turns out to be a system of electrical impulses whirling in relatively vast spaces. The idea of stuff expresses no more than the experience of coming to a limit at which our senses or our instruments are not fine enough to make out the pattern.
Something of the same kind happens when the scientist investigates any unit of pattern so distinct to the naked eye that it has been considered a separate entity. He finds that the more carefully he observes and describes it, the more he is also describing the environment in which it moves and other patterns to which it seems inseparably related. As Teilhard de Chardin has so well expressed it,2 the isolation of individual, atomic patterns “is merely an intellectual dodge.”
Considered in its physical, concrete reality, the stuff [sic] of the universe cannot divide itself but, as a kind of gigantic “atom,” it forms in its totality. . . the only real indivisible. . . .The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts. . . . It is impossible to cut into this network, to isolate a portion without it becoming frayed and unravelled at all its edges.
In place of the inarticulate cohesion of mere stuff we find the articulate cohesion of inseparably interconnected patterns.
The effect of this upon the study of human behavior is that it becomes impossible to separate psychological patterns from patterns that are sociological, biological, or ecological. Departments of knowledge based upon what now appear to be crude and primitive divisions of nature begin to coalesce into such awkwardly named hybrids as neuropsychiatry, sociobiology, biophysics, and geopolitics. At a certain depth of specialization the divisions of scientific knowledge begin to run together because they are far enough advanced to see that the world itself runs together, however clear-cut its parts may have seemed to be. Hence the ever-increasing discussion of the need for a “unified science” and for a descriptive language common to all departments of science. Hence, too, the growing importance of the very science of description, of communication, of the patterns of signs and signals, which represents and elucidates the pattern of the world.
Although the ancient cultures of Asia never attained the rigorously exact physical knowledge of the modern West, they grasped in principle many things which are only now occurring to us.3 Hinduism and Buddhism are impossible to classify as religions, philosophies, sciences, or even mythologies, or again as amalgamations of all four, because departmentalization is foreign to them even in