The Evocation of Death Anxiety on a Meditation Retreat

Abstract

This paper begins an examination of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology and the practice of meditation. It describes in a series of episodes the ordeal of one patient during a Buddhist meditation retreat. She is asked during the course of the teachings to confront her own inevitable death, and in so doing finds herself simultaneously enduring the agony of a psychic death or collapse originating in earlier trauma. The narrative and subsequent discussion, using the language of psychoanalysis, aim to capture the conflictual yet generative aspects of the interplay between these two invaluable disciplines.