Helping readers to reconcile their conflicting thoughts about desire from both a Buddhist and a psychological point of view, Mark Epstein's well-received book now arrives in trade paperback.

It is common in both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis to treat desire as if it is the root of all suffering and problems, but psychiatrist Mark Epstein believes this to be a grave misunderstanding. In his controversial defense of desire, he makes clear that it is the key to deepening intimacy with ourselves, each other, and our world.

Proposing that spiritual attainment does not have to be detached from intimacy or eroticism, Open to Desire begins with an exploration of the state of dissatisfaction that causes us to cling to irrational habits. Dr. Epstein helps readers overcome their own fears of desire so that they can more readily bridge the gap between self and other, cope with feelings of incompletion, and get past the perception of others as objects. Freed from clinging and shame, desire's spiritual potential can then be opened up.

The Baby and the Bathwater

One of my favorite stories comes from the Sufi tradition of mystical Islam. It is a tale that tells us exactly what we will have to face if we endeavor to walk the path of desire. A man sits in the center of a Middle Eastern marketplace crying his eyes out, a platter of peppers spilled out on the ground before him. Steadily and methodically, he reaches for pepper after pepper, popping them into his mouth and chewing deliberately, at the same time wailing uncontrollably.

"What's wrong, Nasruddin?" his friends wonder, gathering around the extraordinary sight. "What's the matter with you?"

Tears stream down Nasruddin's face as he sputters an answer. "I'm looking for a sweet one," he gasps.

It is one of Nasruddin's most endearing qualities that he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. Like desire itself, teaching stories about Nasruddin always have two aspects. Nasruddin is a fool, but he is also a wise man. There is an obvious meaning to his actions, containing one kind of teaching, and a hidden meaning, containing another. The first meaning jumps out from the story right away. It is the basic message of both Buddhism and Freudian theory. Desire never learns; it never wakes up. Even when eliciting nothing but suffering, it perseveres. Our indefatigable pursuit of pleasure keeps us doing some awfully strange things.

Certainly, Nasruddin is modeling our lives for us: Struggling against the tide of disappointment, we continue to search for a sweet one. As his friends must be wondering as they gaze at him incredulously, would it not be better just to give up? In this version of the story, Nasruddin is rendering a conventional spiritual teaching. Our desires bind us to the wheel of suffering. Even though we know that they bring us pain, we cannot convince ourselves to relinquish our grip. As Freud liked to say, there is an "unbridgeable gap" between desire and satisfaction, a gap that is responsible for both our civilization and our discontent.

But Nasruddin's perseverance is a clue to how impossible it is to abandon ship. He is an enlightened teacher, after all, not just a fool. Like it or not, he is saying, desire will not leave us alone. There is a hopefulness to the human spirit that will just not accept no for an answer. Desire keeps us going, even as it takes us for a ride. As Freud was also fond of saying, desire "presses ever forward unsubdued,"2 pushing us to find and make use of our creativity, propelling us toward an elusive but nonetheless compelling goal.

Nasruddin's parable models the solution to desire's insatiability as well as the problem. His desire is undeterred, despite the anguish that it brings. In his unself-conscious weeping, in his implicit acceptance of both the perils and the promises of longing, lies a hidden wisdom in relationship to desire's relentless demands. Nasruddin makes no apologies for his desire; it persists unperturbed despite his apparent suffering. Nor does he fight with his tears in an effort to make them go away. Both sadness and longing are left undisturbed. Though cognizant of his own folly, Nasruddin does not desist. He seems to know that, despite his tears, there is pleasure that comes in the looking.

I am drawn to this story because of the way it embodies both the disturbing and the compelling nature of desire. As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I am confronted every day with clients whose stories resemble Nasruddin's. Over and over again, they engage in behaviors that from any rational standpoint they should abandon. Their frustrations spill out in my office like Nasruddin's tears. I am tempted, at times, to respond as Nasruddin's friends do. "Why not just stop?" I want to say to them. "Why not just throw in the towel?" As a therapist who has been influenced not just by the insights of psychodynamic theory but also by the wisdom of Buddhist psychology, it would be easy for me to take this position. One reading of Buddha's teachings certainly suggests that the only solution to neurotic misery lies in forsaking desire altogether. Much of Eastern thought is based upon the idea that renunciation is the key to spiritual and psychological growth. "Why search for pleasure if that search is the cause of suffering?" ask many teachers from the East. But over the years I have come to appreciate that, while there is a time and a place for this kind of logic, desire can be an important ally as well as a foe.

In defense of desire

In thirty years of trying to integrate the psychological wisdom of East and West, desire has become for me the pivotal concept that links the two, the fulcrum upon which they both rest. When I first discovered Buddhism, I was taken with its nononsense appraisal of the human condition. "All life is suffering," the Buddha taught in the first of his Four Noble Truths. Physical illness and mental illness are suffering; not to obtain what one desires is suffering; to be united with what one dislikes or separated from what one likes is suffering; even our own selves - never quite as substantial as we might wish them to be - are suffering. When I learned that the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness" seemed more to the point. Even the most pleasurable experiences are tinged with this sense of discontent because of how transient and insubstantial they are. They do not offset the insecurity, instability and unrest that we feel.

The Buddha's Second Noble Truth, of the cause, or "arising," of dukkha is traditionally translated as "The cause of suffering is desire." While I now appreciate that this is a mistranslation, it is still the most common understanding of the Buddha's insight. Desire, and all that it connotes, have taken on quite negative connotations for many of those who are drawn to Buddhist thought. In the first decade of my involvement with Buddhism, as I traveled to Asia, did many silent meditation retreats and immersed myself in the nascent Buddhist culture then springing up in the West, I witnessed a general valorization of the state of "having no preferences," a demonization of desire. The world is not a problem for a person with no preferences, we told each other, echoing an overlooked and then rediscovered novel by a contemporary of Freud's, Robert Musil, called The Man Without Qualities.

Upending the usual way of approaching desire in our culture, which is to indulge it either mindlessly or guiltily, this "counter"cultural perspective seemed, at first, fresh and inspired. Putting aside the conventional rush toward comfort and security opened up time and space for spiritual contemplation. However, in actual fact, it often degenerated into a group of people unable to decide where to go or what to do. Even going out to a restaurant posed insurmountable problems. "You decide," one person might say. "It really doesn't matter," another might reply, and a general paralysis would result with no person willing to reveal his or her true preferences. Apathy ruled. For want of desire, life's vitality began to evaporate.

The problem with denying any aspect of the self is that it persists as a shadow. Clearly, it is not possible to eliminate desire by pretending it is not there. It resurfaces, insistently, as Freud indicated in his famous phrase, "The return of the repressed." With a regularity that has been mirrored in more traditional Western religious communities, those who believed they were stronger than their desires were proven wrong. As the French say, "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop." Chase away the natural, and it comes back at a gallop.

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Copyright © 2006 Dr. Mark Epstein

Tags: Buddhism, Psychology & Psychiatry

About the Author

Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City who lectures frequently about the value of Buddhist meditation for psychotherapy. His previous books include Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, and Going on Being. He is a contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and has written many articles for Yoga Journal and O: The Oprah Magazine. More