Mindfulness // Bare attention
“Preliminary practices of meditation, just like beginning psychoanalysis, require the meditator to take his or her own experience as the object of awareness. In Buddhist terms, the attentional strategy is called “bare attention,” while in psycho-analytic terms it is called “evenly suspended attention” or free association. Both require what Freud called the suspension of judgment and the giving of “impartial attention to everything there is to observe” (1909, p. 23). In Buddhist terms, bare attention is defined as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception” (Nyanaponika, 1962). In psychodynamic terms, this self-contemplation is defined as a therapeutic split (Engler, 1986) in the ego (Sterba, 1934), in which ego takes itself as object. As Freud commented in his New Introductory Lectures, We wish to make the ego the object of our study, our own ego. But how can that be done? The ego is the subject, par excellence: how can it become the object? There is no doubt, however, that it can. The ego can take itself as object; it can treat itself like any other object, observe itself, criticize itself, do Heaven knows what besides with itself…. The ego can, then, be split; … The parts can later on join up again. (Sterba, 1934, p. 80)”
— “Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective”, Dr. Mark Epstein M.D.
