A Course for Troubled Times

Dorothy Austin on Psychoanalysis,
Meditation, and Spiritual Practice

Dorothy Austin © 2000 Stu Rosner

One of the 63 Extension School classes canceled on September 11--the first meeting of the fall term--was Dr. Dorothy Austin's RELI E-1065/W Psychoanalysis, Meditation, and Spiritual Practice. When students met a week later, many spoke of a world that had changed forever. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, had taken loved ones from members of the Harvard community, and many more were stricken by feelings of anger, helplessness, vulnerability, and fear.

When class met on September 18, Dr. Austin welcomed nearly 100 students and invited them to share their reasons for enrolling. The catalogue announced a course on the writings of psychoanalysts Adam Phillips, Mark Epstein, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Nina Coltart, and Michael Eigen, "whose encounter with Buddhist meditation had given rise to the revision of psychological understanding and practice, and the wider cultural movement of spiritual practice." Students would explore "the epistemological arts of bare attention, self-observation, inquiry and investigation; the commitment to nonviolent conduct; the working through of difficult mind-states and emotions; the cultivation of skillful means; a theory of the self and the suffering of everyday life; the role of effort and practice in therapeutic work; and a consideration of the self as self-healer."

In spite of the class size, many students spoke up. One said, "I know that peace begins with me. I know I might sound like a bumper sticker, but I'm really trying to put this to work in my family and at work. I need to be better at dealing with frustration, anger, and rage." Another student, a professional dancer, had been in a serious car accident and feared he would never dance again. "I hope that the loss I feel will open my mind to new ways of being in the world," he said.

Reflecting on the popularity of her Extension School course, Austin cited the number of students who wrote about traumatic experiences and critical events that brought them to a new appreciation of their lives. "Some had suffered a great loss, the death of a parent or a child, a serious life-threatening illness. Invariably, it proved to be a wake-up call."

Many class members reported that they had tried meditation previously without formal instruction. Some of them wanted to learn about its philosophy and practice from a teacher who knew psychological theory as well. A pre-law student wanted to understand her learning style and increase her concentration. A pre-medical student wanted to examine his motives and aptitudes as a potential healer. And a graduate student with three small children wanted a better understanding of how to quiet her mind and organize her thoughts and feelings. Still others simply wanted to learn more about Freud and psychoanalysis.

To study the teachings of Freud and the Buddha side by side seemed natural to many students. "If you think about it," said one student, "Freud and the Buddha had a theory of mind, a theory of suffering, a method of self-investigation that doubles as a therapeutic technique, and the important realization, from firsthand experience, that there is a way out of suffering. To me, that's very powerful and worth learning." Another said that if she took away only one thing from the course, it was the realization that she could become mindful, that she could rein in her mind and work through difficult mind states. Such self-awareness often yields social rewards. "People may have this erroneous idea that meditation will make you preoccupied with yourself and withdrawn from the world. On the contrary, it makes you less distracted, much less judgmental and critical, and more caring. You realize how precious life is. You don't want to lose the opportunity to do something worthwhile with your one precious life. That's what came to me in the midst of this course."

After the first meeting, each session of RELI E-1065/W began with a 10- to 15-minute period of silent meditation. To structure the meditation, Austin presented techniques that have been in continuous use in Asia since the time of the Buddha. These practices, variously called bare attention, mindfulness or insight meditation, are remarkably free of religious and cultural associations. "Sit in an upright, relaxed position, direct your attention to the breath, notice the in-breath and the out-breath, notice the quality of the breath." The room is quiet. After a time, the instructor's voice is heard again. "If the mind is lost in thought, gently return to the breath."

Some students reported that 15 minutes of "just sitting" seemed like an eternity. Others found the process to be natural and familiar. Austin recalls her own first experiences of meditation when she was a child. "If I felt distressed, or out of sorts, I would go out in the backyard and lie on my back and simply look up at the sky and watch everything passing, the clouds moving across the sky. I didn't know anything then about Buddhism, but I knew that this was a useful practice whenever I felt overwhelmed by events. It gave me peace and some measure of equanimity. Years later, when I went to a Dzogchen retreat and Tsoknyi Rinpoche directed us to go outside and look up into the sky, I realized I already knew something about this!"

The message of the course is that each person has intellectual and spiritual resources they may not realize they have. One student said that he had looked at himself in the mirror while he was shaving and said to himself, "You're not bad looking, you've got some talents, but guess what, it's not happening for you. You're asleep." On the first night of the course, when students were speaking of why they had come, he stood up and said, "I think this course might give me a chance to take a hard, mean look at some of my habits." Everybody started laughing at the good-natured, self-deprecating way he said it. So Austin asked if there were any others who needed to take "a hard, mean look at their habits," and the class laughed again--a laugh of self-recognition and agreement that they could seek one another out in the course of the semester.

Dorothy Austin holds a doctorate from Harvard in religion and psychology, followed by a postdoctoral clinical fellowship in psychology in the department of psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. It was while she was at The Cambridge Hospital that she came to know and work with the famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson and his wife, the artist and writer, Joan M. Erikson. In 1982, Austin was appointed director of The Erik H. and Joan Erikson Center, where she developed research, training, and teaching opportunities for scholars, teachers, clinicians, and artists, in psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and the humanities. Well-versed in the Eriksons' writings and thought, Austin team-taught a course at Harvard with the Eriksons on "The Life Cycle" in the mid-eighties. Later, she was instrumental in saving Erik Erikson's papers from a dumpster and seeing that they went to Harvard's Houghton Library, where they have been catalogued and preserved.

In 1990, Dr. Austin accepted an appointment as associate professor of psychology and religion at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where she held a joint appointment in the Graduate and Theological Schools for nearly a decade. In 1997 she and Professor Diana Eck were appointed co-masters of Lowell House in Harvard College, and in 1999 she became associate minister in The Memorial Church, chaplain to the University, and lecturer in religion and psychology at Harvard Divinity School. She is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church.