INTERVIEW: Dr. C. Peter Bankart
In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell readers that I think Dr. C. Peter Bankart is one of the best guys on the planet.
I’ve been friends with Peter for pretty much my entire existence, and it is a friendship that has meant a tremendous lot. He’s such a pleasure–uncommonly intelligent, riotously funny, and extraordinarily kind.
Peter earned his Ph.D. in experimental personality research with a speciality in behavior therapy from Dartmouth College, and has been a practicing psychologist since 1971. He is a senior member of the faculty at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN, where he teaches in the Department of Psychology and formerly directed the student counseling service. In addition, he has taught at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
Peter’s writings on Buddhism and psychology include (but are not limited to) the books Talking Cures: A History of Western and Eastern Psychotherapies and Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (which he co-edited with Kathleen H. Dockett and G. Rita Dudley-Grant), as well as the terrific article “A Western Psychologist’s Inquiry into the Nature of Right Effort”.
His newest book, published in June by New Harbinger Publications, is Freeing the Angry Mind: How Men Can Use Mindfulness & Reason to Save Their Lives & Relationships. The University of Flores’ Dr. Maurits G.T. Kwee, co-editor of Western and Buddhist Psychology: Clinical Perspectives, had this to say about it:
- The work is more than an appropriation of mindfulness or a combination of meditation and cognitive-behavior therapy. It provides an original palette of procedures from various other sources, which, if practiced diligently, have the capacity to strengthen the real weaker sex: angry men. An unmistakable well of inspiration running as a red thread throughout the book forms the Buddha’s teachings that emphasize the cultivation of acceptance, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and humor. Men tormented by self-angering, a largely neglected target group, as well as professionals of both sexes will profit from the rich clinical experience of a seasoned author when healing the typically macho emotion. On top, readers will gain the invaluable practical insight to foster human interconnectedness that we so much lack in this world. I hope this book will be widely read and thus contribute to have more loving kindness go round on our globe.
I couldn’t agree more. Nepotism be damned.
A few things struck me while reading Peter’s book, so I asked him if I could pick his brain a bit (via e-mail) for the blog. As with all of my past interviewees, he was gracious in his willingness to be interviewed and extremely generous in his responses. See for yourself below.
DANNY FISHER: Peter, in your book you outline three guiding principles in your approach to managing stress and controlling anger: the philosophy of Buddhism, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy (C.B.T.). You write, “C.B.T. operates on a very simple premise: that how we act, and how we feel, depend almost exclusively on how we think” (8). Not knowing much about C.B.T., I’m struck that the theory behind it sounds very similar to the wisdom of the Buddha. (You quote the Dhammapada on page 29: “Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, produced by mind.”) How is C.B.T. unique, though? Can you say more about its special contribution to your approach? What does it bring to the table that Buddhist practice and philosophy might not? Also, what do you think Buddhist caregivers can learn from C.B.T.?
C. PETER BANKART: C.B.T. has been extensively documented as an exceptionally effective psychotherapeutic paradigm, and is now the most widely practiced psychotherapeutic strategy–probably in the world. What makes it unique is that completely scraps the old “medical model” of a “sick” person receiving treatment from a skilled “doctor” and replaces it with the idea that every individual has to take responsibility for creating and managing the world in which they live.
What it brings to the table, I suppose, is twenty-plus years of rigorous empirical testing, and a coherent, comprehensive strategy for alleviating human emotional suffering without drugs or intensive introspection.
C.B.T. is indeed extremely similar to Buddhist philosophy (pointing out this connection has been my major intellectual and academic passion for the past 15 years!). It is also extremely similar to the philosophy of the stoics, and especially Epictetus, who also argued that we all live in a world that is largely of our own construction.
Curiously, C.B.T. doesn’t really find its routes either in Buddhism or in Greek philosophy. In truth its roots are in psychoanalysis which demands first that you recover your past (something not stressed in C.B.T.) and that you then come to rational terms with the reality that exists in your life today. Freud said that the analysts’ aim was to make men “sadder but wiser”–C.B.T. is really all about the wisdom part of that process.
In the 1920s and 1930s analysts roundly denounced Buddhist philosophy as contaminated by superstition. Ideas like reincarnation, transcendence, and deautomatization scared the willies out of the men of science of the between-wars period, and of course the fact that the Western democracies were later at war with a nominally Buddhist Japan (see the book Zen at War for a complete discussion), made it all the less likely that psychiatry would find its way to Buddhism during the golden age of psychotherapy–the 1950s, 60s and 70s (pre-Prozac, essentially).
So C.B.T. brings to the table a sort of un-nuanced Western, pragmatic and extremely persuasive philosophy – that just happens to reinvent the wheel that was discovered both by Epictetus and the Buddha a very long time ago. What Buddhist caregivers can learn from C.B.T. is that the IDEAS are very powerful, and a person (a seeker?) does not need to buy in to the theology or take a side in the schisms, or become particularly transcendent to benefit from the essential teachings. I find that my colleagues who are Buddhists first and C.B.T. practitioners second, are often so wrapped up in their particular school of Buddhism that they worry more about which form of meditation or chanting to prescribe/practice than to remember that their real job is to address all that intolerable suffering out there.
I wish my experience with Buddhist practitioners could lead me to believe that you can be a spiritual person AND a highly focused healer as well–but I rarely run into that in real life.
D.F.: Connected with the first question, what do you think Buddhism offers to the field of psychotherapy that is unique?
C.P.B.: What Buddhism has offered me is awareness of a vast and wonderful literature of teachings, practices, and moral principles that deeply informs my goals (as a human-being), my methods, and my principles. Before I discovered Buddhism I doubt that I had used the word “compassion” more than five times in my entire life. Once I began to explore the depths of compassionate living, suddenly everything else that I was trying to do with my life came into really clear focus.
Mental health professionals are often selected for training on the basis of personal interest and outstanding academic credentials. It’s probably easier to become a therapist than to become a veterinarian, but it is actually more competitive than it is to get into medical school. But nowhere is it important that a person aspiring to be a mental health counselor demonstrate real compassion or even understand what compassion is all about. I remember being amazed by this discovery back in the 1970s when Humanistic Psychology was all the rage. I had expected it to be all about deep caring (I guess I would have called it “love” back then); but instead all I discovered was a raging existentialist rebellion against bourgeois values and medical authority–but there was nothing about the soul…or should I say souls involved in the process? So when I began to encounter Buddhist teachings, and then as I began to actually experience some of the transpersonal and extrasensory growth that came from practice (and as you know, I am about as disciplined as a Unitarian at a cocktail party in my practice)–wow! I feel like I really started to come alive as a healer and a teacher. (Though I remain vigilant against dogma of ALL sorts!)
D.F.: On page 41, you write: “In Buddhist philosophy a lost being is considered a wasted being, and the Buddha was adamant that no being should ever be wasted. So we need to look more carefully at the question of getting to know our angry selves more deeply. To accomplish this quantam leap in self-awareness we need to address the one inevitable fact of everyone’s existence: that we are going to die.” Impermanence, or anicca, is the first of what the Buddha called the “marks of existence”. The others are spoken of as dukkha (suffering), anatta (non-self), and nirvāṇa (extinguishing of obscurations). You do say a lot about dukkha in the book, but can you share with our readers how you understand the relationship of all four marks to the project of freeing of the angry mind?
C.P.B.: No? I think this varies so much from person to person and from crisis to crisis, that I am reluctant to say very much about it. I know of one profoundly angry elderly person whose life is consumed by her struggle against impermanence. But I would find the roots of this despair in her lifetime of narcissism–which really was a blind struggle against anatta. So, I hate to even suggest that these ideas can be pulled apart and separated. You have to wonder if you get 15 minutes alone with Jesus of Nazareth if you wouldn’t want him to really regret not being a little clearer with his disciples (especially Paul) about the whole love-message. And I guess I feel that way about the whole nirvāṇa thing as well. Personally I feel really secure in my understanding of that concept, but can you think of anything that has been a bigger distraction to Westerners trying to understand Buddhism?
I focused on dukkha in the book because it is so supremely obvious in the lives of angry people. How they suffer because nothing is perfect! This may be a particular mind-set that a therapist gets into since she works with dukkha 40 hours a week, but, in truth, rarely encounters much direct struggle with the other fires. I think if the book could have been longer I might have ventured at greater length into issues of self and non-self, but I guess I still believe that the real key to understanding anger is to develop intense compassion for the suffering that all of us are blindly trying to escape.
D.F.: I think you make a good point about developing compassion and its primary importance in freeing the angry mind. I also think you’re right about nirvāṇa and its distraction potential if overemphasized. From your vantage point, are there other particular ideas being overemphasized or underemphasized in the field of what we might call “Buddhist psychology”? Put another way, are there things you’d like to see other thinkers in the field deemphasizing? Things you’d like to see emphasized more strongly?
C.P.B.: I would like to stress that the integration of Western psychology with classical Buddhism is still in its infancy. I don’t know if the two can ever be truly married because the spiritualist/Christian legacy in the West carries so much baggage.
When I attended the World Congress of Cognitive Therapy in Sweden in 2005 the keynote speaker was His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His comments were very revealing of the gap between modern psychology and the world of Buddhism. His Holiness, for example, puzzled over what the concept of “low self esteem” could possibly mean. I think this is a wonderful example of the profound disconnect between the secular Westernized individualism of our science and the deep truths of Buddhist philosophy.
So in answer to your question, I would really like to see greater efforts made to reframe and reconceptualize “the human condition” in ways that don’t just “sound like” Buddhism, but actually reflect an alternative framework for understanding the challenges that human beings face in their daily lives.
In my work I have tried to do this, for example, by abandoning the idea of “controlling and regulating” anger and replacing these concepts with an appreciation of the suffering that the angry person experiences and generates. Rather than focusing on a rational analysis of the person’s grievances against the world, I try to get my clients to focus on acceptance, forgiveness, and connection.
D.F.: What is the most important thing you can say to caregivers who might be reading this about understanding and working with angry men?
C.P.B.: Don’t be afraid of your clients’ emotions! The third leg of my book is really about mindfulness–which involves developing compassionate self-awareness. If you are afraid of your client you will have a very difficult time helping him to experience his life immediately, directly, and vividly. TRUST him to be able to guide and direct his own life once he becomes self-aware. Don’t try to force him to adopt your ethics or your goals. Rather try to lead him to self-discovery and self-respect.
