interview

Andrew Cohen: How would you define the word "ego" in your role as a psychologist? And how would you define the word "ego" in your role as a teacher of Buddhist psychology and meditation?

Jack Engler: In the psychoanalytic tradition, ego has a very positive connotation. It's a collective designation for a whole set of very important psychological functions. Functions from thinking to feeling to reality testing—a whole set of capacities that are essential to human life. And very often people have deficits in these different areas of functioning. In therapy, one thing you're trying to do is develop what's traditionally called "ego strength." As a psychologist, part of my effort is to help people develop capacities that may be underdeveloped or may have been derailed earlier in development or may have been compromised by subsequent trauma. So ego, in this sense, is a positive thing. That's the way I think of it in psychology.

But a lot of people who come to me for therapy don't think of ego that way. They think of ego in a spiritual context, where it's a bad thing. But talking about ego in a spiritual context, to me, is even more problematic. It gets talked about almost like it's an alternate personality within me that is bad; it gets reified as some part of me that I have to battle with, that I have to transcend. I think spiritual language reinforces a lot of dualistic thinking when we talk about ego that way—unless we're really careful in how we define it. Now instead of "self versus other" it's "self versus ego." And so the struggle just continues in another guise.

If you ask me what I think ego is in a spiritual sense, I guess I would say it's our attempt to grasp ourselves. It's the myriad forms of self-grasping that are doomed to endless frustration and disappointment. I think that's the root of what ego is, and everything else follows from this, whether it's preoccupation with self-image or whether it's attempts at self-aggrandizement or whether it's experiencing self as separate and over/against others. The core of it seems to be this attempt to grasp the self and fix it. Or fixate it, that's a better word. And where does the self-grasping come from? I think it mostly comes out of fear, out of this core, chronic, anxious sense that we don't exist in the way we think we do.

AC: In our research for this issue, we've basically boiled it down to two very rough definitions of ego. In the first definition, the psychological definition, it's really neutral in nature, not positive or negative: ego as the self-organizing principle.

JE: Well, to me, that's positive. Because we need a certain amount of self-organization.

AC: Okay. So we could say that ego in this sense is positive and would be the self-organizing principle that obviously has to be in fairly good working order if one is going to be able to do any serious spiritual practice. And just to put it in a simple way, the other definition of ego is negative, which we're roughly calling "narcissism."

JE: Mark Epstein used that term, too, in his book Thoughts without a Thinker. I hesitate to call it narcissism unless you distinguish between narcissism in a clinical psychological context and narcissism as it's understood at the deeper spiritual level because they're not exactly the same. I don't want to reduce what I think is the very deepest level of spiritual insight to a narcissistic personality disorder.

AC: Yes, it's much bigger than that.

JE: There is a core narcissism that is much more universal and much deeper, which underlies all personality structure. So if we're talking about narcissism in that sense, then I would agree with your definition.

AC: So from the spiritual perspective, we could say that that would be, in essence, what the ego is. Whether it's termed "ego" or the so-called obstacle to enlightenment.

JE: Well, yes, but as I said, I think of it more as self-grasping. To me, self-grasping is a more dynamic, experiential way to describe it. And you can see that in working with people and asking them to observe the moment-to-moment workings of their mind. You can help them identify all the thousand and one forms of the attempt to grasp the self.

AC: Could you define the different aims and goals of psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation with regard to the ego?

JE: I don't see them as inherently different. I just think they work at different levels of mind, at different levels of experience. But the goal is still freedom from suffering, freedom from our inner blocks, freedom from those stuck places where we try to grasp at ourselves or where we become so afraid that we turn back in some way and contract around whatever it is we're trying to protect. In that sense the goal is the same. The path is also very similar. It's what we do when we sit down on a cushion or we look into our teacher's eyes: We're trying to see a clearer reflection of ourselves and face whatever it is that's unfaceable. In therapy it's the same thing: It's meeting a person where they are and then helping them go where they don't necessarily want to go—to see particularly the ways in which they may be contributing to their own suffering, and asking them to look at that. So in principle I don't see a difference. It's just a different level of experience that they're working on. The goal and the method in the broader sense are very similar, very complementary. And I think they're not even linear. But I used to think they were linear—that you do one and then you do the other.

AC: You are well-known for your statement, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody."

JE: Yes, well, I don't see it as quite that linear or exclusive anymore.

AC: Then could you please explain what you originally meant?

JE: In a general way, I would still stand by it—that you have to be somebody before you can be nobody, although it's a provocative way of putting it. What I had in mind when making that statement was that if you are going to go to the depths of Buddhist mindfulness practice, which I was talking about, it requires certain psychological capacities, what in the psychoanalytic tradition would be called certain basic "ego strengths." And those ego strengths form around some stable sense of who you are, some stable sense of identity. And I still believe that's true.

AC: The essence of the statement "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" seems to be that unless one has developed a healthy sense of self-confidence and unless one has a fairly stable sense of oneself, you're saying that it's going to be difficult for that individual to begin to practice mindfulness meditation in the kind of way that's actually going to be able to liberate them.

JE: No, just about anyone can do basic mindfulness practice and derive some benefit from it, unless they're in some kind of acute mental state in which thoughts and feelings are just too disorganized and too chaotic—because then asking a person to look inward and be aware moment to moment of their thoughts and feelings would simply be too overwhelming, it would become a regressive or fragmenting experience. But short of those kinds of states, I believe anyone can benefit from basic mindfulness practice. So I wasn't addressing basic practice then. I was really talking about going to the depths of practice, particularly those experiences of enlightenment that the Vipassana tradition talks about. What those higher stages of practice require is considerable ego strengths. For instance, a basic ego strength is the capacity to tolerate aversive feelings and emotions without becoming undone by them—what in psychology is called "affect tolerance." That's what I had in mind, that kind of thing.

One of the main things I was responding to, though, when I wrote that article was something I had seen in myself and was seeing in a lot of people I was working with, which was an attempt to use meditation practice to do an "end run" around normal tasks of human development.

AC: What do you mean by "end run"?

JE: Thinking that spiritual practice alone can substitute for normal psychological development; that somehow by going deep in practice and getting enlightened, that's going to solve all the nagging neurotic problems that have continued to plague one. So, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" was also meant as a cautionary statement to pay attention to all basic tasks, not just spiritual ones.

AC: You felt that people were trying to avoid facing certain parts of themselves by focusing their attention exclusively on enlightenment and spiritual practice?

JE: That's right. So the intent of my statement was to address that issue. But then, in that article, I tried to elaborate it further in terms of a linear developmental model. I wouldn't do that in the same way today because now I think our spiritual life and our psychological life are much more interwoven. I think the statement still has value in the way I originally meant it, but I would take it out of this tight psychological model of human development where we first have to develop a sense of self and then we will be able to see through the illusion of self.

AC: So in other words, development doesn't have an absolute or rigid structure. You're saying now that the strengthening of the ego in the positive sense—as this organizing principle—and the questioning of its ultimate validity could occur simultaneously?

JE: People who are doing a lot of spiritual practice and who don't have much experience with therapy think that therapy somehow inevitably strengthens self-grasping or ego. But my experience with therapy, when it's successful and done well, is that it does just the opposite. It doesn't bring you to the point of seeing through the inherent illusion of seeing yourself as a separate entity, and it doesn't bring you to the kind of total freedom that spiritual practice promises. That's clear. And it doesn't pretend to. But if it's done well and it's successful, I think it really does relativize the way you hold yourself. You don't hold yourself so tightly and you're not so wedded to concepts of who you are. It begins to loosen up all your fixed ideas of self and in that way can contribute to growth in spiritual practice also. So I don't see one as tightening the ego and the other as loosening it. I see them both working in the same direction. And I see it much more as an interweaving of personal work and spiritual work. It's just that therapy doesn't take it to the depth that spiritual practice does.

AC: Could you please explain what you mean when you say that our evolution, for lack of a better word, is a combination of personal and spiritual work? What do you mean by one, and what do you mean by the other?

JE: Well, personal work has to do with our own individual life history, our own individual narrative, and whatever unfinished business we're carrying from that. It has to do with personality and social functioning, relationship issues, work issues. These issues come up in Buddhist mindfulness practice—and probably from time to time in all practices. The different traditions work with them in different ways, and some don't work with them at all. Zen doesn't, for instance. And that's fine for the goals that Zen sets itself. The ultimate spiritual goals don't have to do so much with personality and personal functioning. They have to do with liberation from all those deep-rooted causes of suffering in the mind—in all of our minds. These universal causes of self-generated suffering—fear, greed, anger, self-deception, shame, doubt—get filtered and expressed through personality and personal history, but they exert an influence at a level prior to their elaboration in individual behavior. They are universal; they're not unique to any one particular individual.

But facing universal issues means facing personal and particular issues. As I've understood it in my own work and as I've seen it in clients who come to me for therapy as well as students in the meditation hall, it basically means, in the simplest possible way, facing whatever we haven't been able to face. Spiritual practice demands that we do that in one way, and personal work and therapy demand we do it in another. To the extent that anything hasn't been faced, it's going to continue to plague us and cause problems for ourselves and others.

AC: Absolutely.

JE: So, in a general way, that's how I understand the interweaving of personal and spiritual work. It's continuing to uncover the blocks, the resistances, the ways in which we cause suffering to ourselves and others.