I have a favor to ask readers of this blog. First, let me procrastinate.
When Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, casual readers must have been sorely disappointed. The book appeared during “one of the most significant moments in the history of ideas on dreams” (Lusty and Groth, 10). Books on dreams and dream interpretation had been proliferating at an extraordinary rate for decades already. The ideas emanating from these books, moreover, were finding their way into fields ranging from the fine arts to the hard sciences. The period from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, in short, witnessed “the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices” (Lusty and Groth, 10). The bulk of these books, often first serialized in popular magazines, however, offered the same kind of simplistic revelatory, predictive pseudo-knowledge and facile moral guidance as today’s popular dream guides. Indeed, as he complained to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud detested having to read through even the much more limited literature on dreams by serious writers such as Aristotle and contemporary scientists: “If one only didn’t have to read, too! The little literature there is already disgusts me so much.” Slogging through dream studies, he griped, was “a horrible punishment” (Gay, 106).
We might wonder, then, why Freud chose such a personally unappealing topic, one that attracted a decidedly undiscerning audience. We might find an answer in his opening salvo, where he immediately obliterates all pretense to easy consolation and even easier solutions to life’s vicissitudes—the very stuff that the average reader would have expected from a book with the title Interpretation of Dreams.
In this volume I have attempted to expound the methods and results of dream-interpretation; and in so doing I do not think I have overstepped the boundary of neuro-pathological science. For the dream proves on psychological investigation to be the first of a series of abnormal psychic formations, a series whose succeeding members—the hysterical phobias, the obsessions, the delusions—must, for practical reasons, claim the attention of the physician.
What forbidding and nasty-sounding words: pathological, abnormal, hysterical, obsession, delusion! And what dark omen of the real this physician portends!
Working on A Critique of Western Buddhism, I feel an affinity to the Freud of Interpretation of Dreams. I, too, find it unbearable yet necessary to read Western Buddhist writing. (I know that sounds uncharitable. But it is true.) I also see an astonishing parallel. Like Freud with his dream material, I still hold out that there is something there that just may advance productive thought, thought that enables us to progress toward what Marx calls our real and sensuous interests. But I might be dreaming.
This leads me to the purpose of this post, namely to get your recommendations on which authors, living or dead, constitute a representative selection of contemporary Western Buddhism? More specifically, which authors do you see as the most consequential thinkers on what I am calling x-buddhist first names for the real: impermanence (anicca); no-self (anatman); suffering (dukkha); emptiness (śūnyatā); dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda); wisdom (prajñā); things as they are (yathābhuta); and liberation (nirvāṇa)?
I have my own ideas. But I am curious to hear what others think.
It will be impossible to disable the common Western Buddhist strategy for deflecting criticism, namely, the appeal to exception. The appeal to exception, come to think of it, fits in well at the dawn of the Trump era:”your example is irrelevant because my teacher/text/sangha/mind offers an alternative meaning.”
So, please, suggest away!
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Sources
Natalya Lusty and Helen Groth, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2013).
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).