There are now several common misconceptions about the key Buddhist notion of anatta, or egolessness. To begin with, many new meditators mistake egolessness for the abandonment of the Freudian ego.
Conventional notions of ego, as that which modulates sexual and aggressive strivings, have led many Americans to mistakenly equate egolessness with the kind of primal scream in which the person is finall freed from all limiting constraints.
Egolessness is understood here as the equivalent of that Wilhelm Reich's orgasmic potency, and the ego is identified as anything that tenses the body, obscures the capacity for pleasurable discharge, or gets in the way of feeling "free".
Popularized in the sixties, this view remains deeply embedded in the popular imagination. It sees the route to egolessness as a process of unlearning, or casting off the shackles of civilisation and returning to a childlike forthrightness. It also tends to romanticize regression, psychosis, and any other uninhibited expression of emotion.
Another popular misconception is that egolessness is some kind of oneness or merger, a forgetting of the self with a simultaneous identification with what lies outside the ego, a trance state or an ecstatic union. Freud described the "oceanic feeling" as a sense of limitless and unbounded onesness with the universe that seeks the "restoration of limitless narcissism" and the "resurrection of the infantile helplessness."
Thus, egolesness is identified with the infantile state prior to the development of the ego, that is, that of the infant at the breast making no distinction between itself and its mother but rather a merged in a symbiotic and undifferentiated union.
This formulation is complicated by the fact that there really are states accessible in meditation that do provide such feelings of harmony, merger, and loss of ego boundaries; but these are not the states that define the (Buddhist) notion of egolessness.
Egolessness is not a return to the feelings of infancy - an exception of the undifferentiatyed bliss or a merger with the mother - even though many people may seek such an experience when they begin to meditate, and even though some may actually find a version of it.
A third and more interpersonal view of egolessness suggests a kind of subjugation of the self to the other. It is as if the idealized merger experience is projected onto interpersonal relationships in what the Gestalt therapists have called "confluence," or loss of interpersonal ego - boundaries. This is really a kind of thinly disguised masochism.
The psychoanalyst Annie Reich, in a classical paper on self-esteem regulation in women, describes this very well. "Femininity," she says, is often "equated with complete annihilation." The only way to recover needed self-esteem is to then merge or fuse with a glorified or idealized other, whose greatness or power she can then incorporate.
For both sexes something similar exists in spiritual circles. Meditators with this misunderstanding are vulnerable to a kind of eroticized attachment to teachers, gurus, or other intimates, toward whom they direct their desires to be released "into abandon."
A forth common misconception, popular in the so-called transpersonal circles, stems from a misreading of important papers by Ken Wilber and Jack Engler. The belief here is that egolessness is a developmental stage beyond the ego; that the ego must first exist and then be abandoned. This is the flip side of the belief that egolessness preceeds the development of the ego - here it is seen as that which succeeds the ego.
This approach implies that the ego, while important developmentally, can in some sense be transcended or left behind. Here we run into an unfortunate mix of vocabulary. The system referred to by these formulations is the Western psychodynamic psychology of ego development.
Then there is a jump, or switch, to an Eastern-based, spiritual vocabulary that makes it seem as if the ego that has been formed is the same ego that is being abandoned.
Yet listen to the Dali Lama on this point: "Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming nonexistent. Rather, this sort of 'self' is something that never did exist. What is needed is to identify as nonexistent something that always was nonexistent."
It is not ego, in the Freudian sense, that is the actual target of the Buddhist insight. It is, rather, the self-concept, the representational component of the ego, the actual internal experience of one's self that is targeted.
What is being transcended here is not the entire ego. Rather, self-representation is revealed as lacking concrete existence. It is not the case of something real being eliminated, but the essential groundlessness being realized for what it has always been. In the words of the Dali Lama, "This seemingly solid, concrete, independent, self-instituting I under its own power that appears actually does not exist at all."
Meditators with this misunderstanding often feel under pressure to disavow critical aspects of their being that are identified with the "unwholesome ego." Most commonly, sexuality, aggression, critical thinking, or even the active use of the first person pronoun are relinquished, the general idea being that to give these things up or let these things go is to achieve egolessness.
Apsects of the self are set up as the enemy and then attempts are made by the meditator to distance oneself from them. But the qualities that are identified as unwholesome are actually empowered by the attempts to repudate them!
A final misunderstanding of egolessness is one that sees it as a thing in and of itself, a state to be achieved or aspired to. Here, the need to identify something as existing in its own right is manifest, and the belief in the ego as concrete existent is, in some sense, transferred to the belief in egolessness as concretely existent.
It is not the ego that disappears, but that the belief in the ego's solidity, the identification with the ego's representations, is abandoned in the realization of egolessness.
