2021/11/01

Opinion | This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma - The New York Times

Opinion | This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma - The New York Times

Aug. 24, 2021



Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

“Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.”

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist by training, has been a pioneer in trauma research for decades now and leads the Trauma Research Foundation. His 2014 book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” quickly became a touchstone on the topic. And although the book was first released seven years ago, it now sits at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, a testament to the state of our national psyche.

The core argument of the book is that traumatic experiences — everything from sexual assault and incest to emotional and physical abuse — become embedded in the older, more primal parts of our brain that don’t have access to conscious awareness. And that means two things simultaneously. First, that trauma lodges in the body. We carry a physical imprint of our psychic wounds. The body keeps the score. But — and I found this more revelatory — the mind hides the score. It obscures the memories, or convinces us our victimization was our fault, or covers the event in shame so we don’t discuss it.

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There’s a lot in this conversation. We discuss the lived experience of trauma, the relationship between the mind and the body, the differences between our “experiencing” and “autobiographical” selves, why van der Kolk believes human language is both a “miracle” and a “tyranny,” unconventional treatments for trauma from E.M.D.R. and yoga to psychedelics and theater, how societies can manage collective trauma like 9/11 and Covid-19, the shortcomings of America’s “post-alcoholic” approach to dealing with psychic suffering, how to navigate the often complex relationships with the traumatized people we know and love, and much more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)
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THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Bessel van der Kolk



Aug. 24, 2021
Real conversations. Ideas that matter. So many book recommendations.

Listen to “The Ezra Klein Show”: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen
Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Bessel van der Kolk. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

The Ezra Klein Show Poster
This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma
The author of “The Body Keeps the Score” on how trauma transforms the body and the brain.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00/0:00
This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma
The author of “The Body Keeps the Score” on how trauma transforms the body and the brain.
[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ezra Klein
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So one of the things I do for the show is I try to keep an eye on the best seller lists. And a few months ago, I began to notice something strange. “The Body Keeps the Score,” which is a book about trauma from 2014, was back up near the top of the New York Times list. It’s number one, as I write this, the book’s 147th week on the paperback nonfiction list — 147th. And if you know what this book is, that is wild.

“The Body Keeps the Score,” it is a searing read about the way trauma disconnects our minds and our bodies. And it’s pretty clearly written with a professional audience in mind. This is a book very largely aimed at other psychiatrists. That so many of us are turning to it, it says something profound about where the national psyche is in this moment of, yeah, trauma.

I’ll be honest of my own history of it here. “The Body Keeps the Score” is one of those books people have told me to read for a long time. But I thought I knew what it was about. I’d heard it discussed so many times, and I’d read it written about. So even though I hadn’t read it, I thought I knew it: trauma lodges in the body, we carry a physical imprint of our psychic wounds, it’s all very hard to heal. Got it.

But I was really wrong about that. The core argument is — I want to use the word “subversive” here. Certainly subversive in how it will leave you thinking about yourself and those around you. It is about traumatic experiences: sexual assault, incest, emotional physical abuse, war and much, much more. They can disconnect our body and our mind. That is when an experience becomes a trauma — when it disconnects us.

And this is a part I didn’t understand from the way the book is talked about. The devastating argument it makes is not that the body keeps the score, it’s that the mind hides the score from us. The mind — it hides and warps these traumatic events and our narratives about them in an effort to protect us. Human beings are social animals. And our minds evolve to manage our social relationships.

So when we face an event that could rupture our relationship with the community or the family, particularly for children of the family that we depend on, the mind often talks us out of it. It obscures the memories or convinces us our victimization was our fault or it covers the event in a shame so thick, we refuse to discuss it. But our body — and that’s an imprecise term here. But the parts of us that are more automatic that manage and respond to threat — our body doesn’t forget that. Our mind can’t talk that part of us into feeling safe again. And it’s this disconnection of mind and body where trauma lives.

So how do you reconnect them? Bessel van der Kolk is the author of “The Body Keeps the Score.” He was a leading researcher and psychiatrist active in many of the early battles to understand post-traumatic stress syndrome. But more recently, he co-founded and leads a trauma research foundation and has been studying ways to try to heal these deeper parts of our psyches, everything from movement therapies like yoga and dance to E.M.D.R. to internal family systems therapy to MDMA treatment. We talk about all of it in here.

But I do want to offer a disclaimer: the research on some of these novel treatments, it is really promising. But these are often new studies with pretty small sample sizes. So I don’t want anyone to mistake this conversation for direct advice from a psychiatrist who knows your situation and psyche. So if anything in here connects for you, talk to a professional about it. Don’t just drop the treatments you’re using or the medications you’re taking and run to something new.

But with that said, there is so much to learn from in this conversation. I really haven’t stopped thinking about it since we recorded. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com if you want to send me further guest suggestions or recommendations for things we should read or look at. Again, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Bessel van der Kolk, welcome to the show.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Hi, good being here.

Ezra Klein
You have this very powerful line in the book from the writer Jessica Stern where she says, quote, “Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative. Mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does — it interrupts the plot.” Tell me a bit about how trauma interrupts the plot.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Well, trauma is really a wound that happens to your psyche, to your mind, to your brain. Suddenly you’re confronted with something that you are faced with horror and helplessness. That nothing prepares you for this and you go like, oh, my God. And so something switches off at that point in your mind and your brain. And the nature of trauma is that you get stuck there. So instead of remembering something unpleasant, you keep reliving something very unpleasant.

So the job of overcoming trauma is to make it into a memory where your whole being knows this happened a long time ago, it’s not happening right now. But the nature of traumatic stress is that you keep reacting emotionally and physiologically as if these events are happening right now.

Ezra Klein
What is trauma? Is it the event itself or is it your reaction and processing, or I guess lack thereof, of the event?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
It really is a reaction that you have something horrible that’s going on. And different people have different responses. Although I must say, having done this work as long as I have, I don’t recall ever seeing somebody in my office coming for traumatic stress that I go, oh, this seems like a trivial issue. Like having your child run over by a car, you go like, oh, my God. And usually my response to hearing about people’s trauma is, oh, my God, are you still here?

Ezra Klein
I’ll say that, for me, was the hardest part of reading your book was just being faced with something I already know, but being faced with how much pain people are simply carrying around with them every day. It’s one way reading the book made me just look at the world a little bit differently. It’s just this reminder that you have no idea what somebody is carrying.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
That is so true. And of course, we do need to wear our blinders, and we cannot face up to all the bad stuff that’s happening in the world. But to give an example to what you’re saying here: when we first put this diagnosis of P.T.S.D. in a textbook, we said, this is an extraordinary event outside of the usual realm of human experience. That is the official definition. Nobody talked about how common incest is, nobody talks about how common child abuse is, how common domestic violence is. And it’s really quite startling when you get to see how much people actually are coping with.

Ezra Klein
At various points in the book, you argue that trauma is the most costly public health problem that we are dealing with. This is before the era of Covid, of course. So let’s keep that to the side. But do you want to talk for a minute about that at scale, what it means that so many people are holding these kinds of experiences and pain?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah, that statement actually came from the Centers for Disease Control, when Vince Felitti at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego did this research more than 20 years ago right now where he asked medical patients — insurance carrying, largely college educated white people — did anybody ever hit you very badly, did anybody molest you, did you witness your parents having physical fights? And the data that came back were just stunning, how much really very scary stuff the majority of people experienced in their lives.

And what their studies there slowly showed is how erosive and devastating these effects are on people’s capacity to recover also. The big issue is that people tend to think about trauma as, oh that event, and having a bad memory about something. That is not really what it is. Once you get traumatized, it changes your brain, it changes how you see the world, and it changes how your body reacts to your environment.

And so it’s not the only thing that goes from your survival system into your mind. It goes also into your body, and the stress hormones continue to erode your system. When you have been traumatized, your chances to die much earlier and to have many diseases go up very dramatically. So much of what we can think about, major social issues in the world we live in, are actually — the social elements, the contextual elements are terribly important.

Ezra Klein
Tell me a bit about the conditions under which an event that could be traumatic becomes a trauma. And in particular, I was very struck by how much of your research suggests that trauma is an event plus a kind of instigated social crisis. There are objectively catastrophic events, like 9/11, that were less likely to cause trauma because they were shared by the community. Where, on the other hand, things like child sexual abuse is very reliably traumatic because it disconnects you from your family. So could you talk a bit about the social structure of trauma?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah. So what we tend to leave out of most of our discussions about human functioning is to what degree we are primates. We have brains in order to get along with each other, to be with other people, to connect with other people. That’s really what we are fundamentally all about. And so, much of trauma is about a rupture of the safety of the people who are supposed to protect you and the people who are supposed to come to your help.

So basically, the way that we are wired is that we are wired to not be able to do everything by ourselves, but to be able to look for help and for other people to take over when we can no longer do the job ourselves. And that’s perfectly normal. But if, at that point, the people you can count on most are not there for you, let you down, have been killed, or whatever, then it’s entirely up to you. It’s a much harder thing to deal with terrible situations.

Ezra Klein
I just want to tag something you said there for the audience, because we’re going to come back to quite a bit, which is we have brains in order to get along with other people. I think that’s going to be really, really, really important to this conversation. But this gets to something that I found really rich in the book. So “The Body Keeps the Score” has — I mean, as a book, it’s a phenomenon, as a social meme, it’s a phenomenon. So I felt like I knew what it said even though I hadn’t read it until recently.

But then when I read it, what really struck me about it is how much of the book is about not just how the body keeps the score, but how and why the mind hides the score. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah, brilliant. We are created to survive. We’re also created to be loyal and to be part of a group. And sometimes, in order to survive, you need to keep your realities [INAUDIBLE] the people around you. And so when you go through a terrible reality like 9/11 in New York or terrible natural disasters, oftentimes people get very close together because it’s out there, everybody can see it, people help each other. Part of our nature is to be altruistic and to be generous when people are in distress.

But if your feelings conflict with your loyalty — let’s say, if your own mom or dad beat you up and you don’t feel safe with them — you cannot tell other people about it either because you’re supposed to love your mom or dad. And so you need to keep it to yourself. And then it starts festering inside of you. So the reason why you do psychotherapy is mainly to help people to find words for the reality that they have dealt with. And oftentimes, those are realities that are not acceptable for the people around you.

Ezra Klein
You talk about the difference between the parts of the brain that create the autobiographical self and the parts of the brain that create the experiencing self. Can you discuss that a bit?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah. So we have these layers of the brain that have different functions. So the deepest layer has to do with what Antonio Damasio calls “the housekeeping of your body”: being able to breathe, go to the bathroom, go to sleep, have an appetite, being able to engage in caregiving and sexual relationships — very elementary. We have that in common with all other mammals basically.

But then we have this meaning making systems that come on top of that, starting with the larger limbic system that has a more complex way of organizing your perceptions about reality. So basically, your limbic system is the part of your brain that forms a map inside of the world outside of you. And so your brain gets programmed by experience to know what to expect and what sort of reactions people will have to certain behaviors. And so early experiences very much shape your perceptions of the world.

So if you are terrified of the people who take care of you, it’s very likely that you will either, or combination of, really be extremely compliant with people in power and hope that they won’t hurt you, or you become chronically angry and oppositional or a combination of those two. But that imprint of, I’m not safe with people who say they care for me, becomes an imprint of how you come to perceive the world. And those are not rational thoughts, and this cannot be abolished by pointing out to people how irrational they are, because that’s the way our brain becomes hardwired to deal with the reality in which it gets formed.

Ezra Klein
It was astonishing to me, reading some of the stories in the book. I think all of us have the experience of telling a story about ourself that is not true to how we feel. But you treat patients who, the stories their minds have told or the memories their minds have hidden are really shocking. So why do victims of abuse, particularly child abuse, so often either forget what happened to them or blame themselves for it?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
So the issue there is that we need our parents or caregivers to take care of us. And so the moment we give up on our caregivers as little kids, we’re done for. And so the way the child is wired is to stay as close to the people who are supposed to take care of them as possible. And with that, they will deny the reality of being beaten. Or the imprint is very much like, I’m being beaten or I’m being molested because I’m a bad person. I must deserve it.

So your identity becomes basically, I’m fundamentally a bad and flawed human being. And if I had been a nicer child, people would have loved me and taken care of me. If I’d been a worthwhile child, people would not have done these horrible things to themselves. And actually, when you get into treating these issues, the hardest thing to actually treat in people is this deep sense of being defective, something being wrong with you.

And what many of my patients also deal with is that I must have made the story up. This is too horrendous for people to do it, I cannot believe that it’s happened to me, I must feel this way because I’m crazy. And oftentimes, that gets reinforced by the environment, or you’re just a difficult child, you’re just making up false memories. But the fact is what happens over time, the reality slowly starts filling out.

Ezra Klein
This was a real epiphany for me in reading your book, because you read about cases like this. You read about false memories or you hear about or even know people who blame themselves for horrible things done to them — child abuse or rape or a beating or whatever it might be. And you think, what would happen that brains would be defective that they would do that? That doesn’t make any sense.

But the point of your book, I think, in part is that it does make sense. There’s an evolutionary fitness reason for the brain to do that, which is that it’s a story that allows you to maintain within a family, or maintain within a workplace or maintain within a community. Because if you told the real story, it would rupture your family, it would rupture your community, it would rupture your workplace.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Exactly. These thoughts didn’t come from me, of course, originally. All these thoughts have been thought before. But the great hero here is John Bowlby, attachment researcher, who really showed how children really need to cling to their caregivers and will do anything they can to keep a semblance of connection going so they don’t die or get totally abandoned. And the price they pay for that is very much this very profound sense of self loathing, oftentimes despising yourself, getting into a lot of difficult behaviors because I’m no good anyway. And it’s a deep sense of, I may as well put myself in danger, I may as well take drugs because I’m no good anyway.

Ezra Klein
So then you get into these cases where people are telling a story about something — either telling a story that admits something or telling a story that normalizes something — that their body doesn’t believe. And so you have these kind of two systems, like the kind of cerebral system of what somebody is sitting in front of you saying, and then the fact that they collapse into a ball at the touch of another human being or hide in drugs or have all these other coping behaviors. So can you talk about why the system that is rationalizing isn’t able to convince the body? Because you would think maybe that would be just one system all the way through. You got to live the lie. But part of what you’re getting at is you don’t live the lie, you just tell the lie.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah, you live the lie. You really believe that I’m fundamentally defective and that’s why this happens to me. So people really very deeply come to rationalize their very bad feelings. And that actually allows them to continue to survive to some degree. And that’s a different part of the brain.

But of course, your core survival part of the brain picks up the danger signs and keeps continuing to secrete stress hormones, immunological abnormalities, muscle tension, fibromyalgia — a whole bunch of physiological systems where the body continues to behave as if it’s in great danger while the mind says, don’t pay attention to him, he’s lying, he’s a terrible person. So it’s really the conflict between the body feeling very unsafe and the mind not wanting to accept the reality of what has happened to you is at the core of this, yeah.

Ezra Klein
This is a strange idea to wrap your mind around. How is it possible that your body — which on some level is controlled by your mind. I mean, it’s getting electrical signals from the brain. How is it possible that you can have such disagreements within one system?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Well, because they are somewhat different systems. The system that helps you to sleep, for example, is a system that most of us have very little control over. And so you may rationally know that it’s important to go to sleep now and life is safe and I have nothing to worry about. But something in the back of your brain, your survival brain, seems to give you messages of, I’m in danger.

Very commonly, when people have had sexual molestation or issues like that early in their lives, they are with somebody, they have a sense of desire, and suddenly their body shuts down. And they become very angry or very frozen. And they say to themselves, there’s something deeply wrong with me because I really like this person that I’m with and I’d really like to have a good time. But my body won’t let me because the primitive survival part of the brain is still stuck back then, when they felt in danger. But the frontal lobe may not register that.

Ezra Klein
One of the main ways you say the mind hides the score is through applying shame. You write at one point that for trauma survivors, quote, “Shame becomes the dominant emotion and hiding truth a central preoccupation.” Can you talk a bit about what shame is, what it is as an emotion, and then the role it plays for people after trauma?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah, shame is really a feeling of wanting to hide how you don’t want anybody to see you. Shame comes from having feelings that are fundamentally unacceptable. Like if you’re talking very nicely to me, and I may have a feeling that I’d like to kill this guy, and you think to yourself, what a terrible person am I to want to kill somebody who’s very nice to me. And then you say, I must be crazy, there’s something wrong with me.

As it happens to be, maybe you have a particular accent or a way of talking that may remind me on a very deep level of somebody who beat me up when I was a kid, and I have this intense emotional reaction to you, and I feel like, what’s wrong with you, Bessel, that you have such a terrible reaction to this nice person, and he probably already has picked up that I’m trying to hide something from him because I feel so angry with this person who’s actually being very nice to me. So that’s the confusion and the shame that traumatized people live with.

Ezra Klein
One thing that struck me about that passage is — and I apologize because I can’t remember where I read this distinction. But I once read that guilt is an individual emotion and shame is a social emotion. Guilt is, I feel bad about something I did, and shame is that I am afraid the community will look bad upon me for something I did. And within this context of trauma often relating to things that happened that would create rupture of the community, it seems interesting and also profoundly sad that shame is such a constant companion to that, because it’s a way of fearing that your community will turn on you potentially if the truth were to be known.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Well, we are communal creatures, and we survive terrible things by community. So the people who are able to get themselves together as, for example, New York did after 9/11 — New York had a spectacularly effective way of dealing with the trauma of 9/11. And once you have the community to go with you, you’re not ashamed of yourself anymore because your neighbor may have the same feelings of terror and fear that you have, and you don’t feel crazy, and you don’t feel like you’re worthy of exclusion.

So one of the things that is driving this whole trauma issue is that you feel cut off from your community, you do things that embarrass you, you blow up at people. Your kids want to play with you, and you get angry with the kid, and you feel bad about being angry with the kid, and you start yelling at this child, and you go like, oh, my god, what’s wrong with me that I’m yelling with the child. And you start trying to control yourself with alcohol or with drugs. And so you have these reactions that you hope people will not see. And the longer they last, the more isolated you became.

So one of the things that I’ve seen, much to my distress, is that when we started this field in our particular window of history, it was a very communal issue. It was women got together around “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” My friend Judy Herman was running incest groups. I was running groups for veterans. And they got a lot of comfort and support from each other, and they shared their very scary thoughts and their angry thoughts. They said, oh, I feel the same way. I’ve had the same experiences. I also made people very angry who I feel close to, et cetera, et cetera.

So people to be with, as the 12 step programs so brilliantly have done, give you a sense of not being alone despite the fact that you feel very damaged and ashamed about yourself.

Ezra Klein
I want to put a pin in New York in 9/11 because I want to come back to that and the question of whether or not there are things we can learn as a society, whenever it will be the case that we can begin to recover as a society from Covid and whether or not there are things we can learn in that experience for how to do it well. But I want to ask about another way that we end up hiding what we feel, which is that trauma has a way of numbing people to their feelings, to their emotions, even to very basic physical sensations. And something you talk about, which I didn’t realize, is that when that happens, it becomes hard to construct a coherent sense of a self. Can you talk about how that works?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah. When you are involved in your trauma and you are continuously reacting to stuff, you can’t trust yourself. And you don’t really know what’s right because you keep sort of getting into trouble again, you try something and you freeze, and you try something and you explode. And you do something and you feel terrible about yourself. And you don’t know where that comes from. And so you try to make sense out of this turmoil that’s going on in your sensory system. And if you’re lucky, you are talented and you’re a good basketball player, a good guitar player, a good accountant, and you can hide yourself in your particular talent where you can find a safe area for yourself. But when it comes to the complexity of dealing with teenage children or relationships, that may be too much for you and you keep falling apart. And so your identity becomes like, I cannot be with other people, I’m no good. And so that sense of trust in yourself, predicting yourself, knowing who you are, knowing how you react to things becomes very damaged.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ezra Klein
You have an interestingly complicated relationship to language in the book. You talk about it as both a miracle and a tyranny, and the ability to both put words to things you’ve experienced and also put words to things maybe we haven’t or ways we don’t feel about how we’ve experienced them. And so I wanted to ask it this way, because a lot of us have had experience with therapy have primarily had experience with talk therapy, where you go and you sit in a room and you get asked questions about your parents and you try to answer them. What can that do, and then what can language not do in these cases?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Language, it’s really great when you have kids as you do or grandchildren as I do, how you can see kids develop language over time and you can see how as they develop language, they’re able to communicate about what they like, what they don’t like, and to form common realities with other people. As long as you don’t have language, you really don’t know how to form a sense of community.

So having a language that allows you to define your common reality is terribly important. And of course, traditionally, psychotherapy is very much about developing that language for yourself, which is very important. But understanding why you screwed up doesn’t necessarily stop you from being screwed up. Now I know why I freeze when somebody touches me. Now I know why I get so angry. But the anger and the freeze may still happen.

So you still need to rewire the physiological system. And much of my research has been, how do you get there. And the earlier studies we did was doing yoga. And somehow, yoga helps people develop a more harmonious sense of the internal workings and the internal body sensations. Moving together, dancing together with other people, getting a sense of rhythm, which many people around the world except in the Western world use — drumming together, singing together, making music — helps to reestablish that sense of community and being in sync with the people around you. Later on, sending neurofeedback, playing computer brain interfaces where you can actually play computer games with your own brainwaves and help your brainwaves to become more rational.

And our current research is very much also in psychedelic agents, which turn out to have a very dramatically positive effect on exactly the courses of defectiveness, self-loathing, internal confusion. And our latest data really show that MDMA particularly can really help people to get a much deeper sense of who they are and a deep sense of compassion for themselves.

Ezra Klein
We’re going to go through a bunch of these therapies. But one thing I want to ask about them as a group is that one thing lurking around your book, and certainly that I felt reading it and that I felt in my own life as I’ve looked at various modalities for things that I’ve struggled with, is that there’s a hierarchy of status to different treatments. So it’s very accepted at this point, very rational, to take a pill for depression or anxiety. Talk therapy has a very long history. Nobody looks askance at that. That’s something intellectuals do in New York, and they sit in a chair and talk about feelings. And I don’t want to say anything bad about either of those. But then you start looking some of these other things, like E.M.D.R. which we can talk about, or dance therapy or yoga. And it feels soft. You’re like, well, that’s silly, that’s holistic, that’s — and something I think the book is trying to get at is that maybe we have come to overweight certain kinds of approaches to how we feel and underweight others. So before we get into how these therapies work, can you talk about that meta level of coming to respect therapies that maybe don’t have a lot of social status right now?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Very important point you make. It’s a cultural issue. You hear from my accent, I’m northern European, and North America is still very northern European. The world and northern Europe developed two ways of dealing with bad stuff. One of them was to drink. And so taking a pill is a respectable thing in Western culture to do, and normal people ingest stuff to make themselves feel better.

Nobody feels bad about it. Other places in the world may say, that’s weird. Then the other thing that Western people are very good at is talking. We’re not very good in singing together and moving together. You go to China after a disaster and people are doing qigong together, and so that’s interesting, or tai chi.

And you go to Brazil in [INAUDIBLE] area, and you see people practice capoeira. You go, are they practicing capoeria because it looks good to the tourists, or are they practicing capoeira because it does something to the way they relate to their bodies and their sense of self-control?

So I think to some degree, we are trapped in this post- alcoholic paradigm that the only way to change is through taking pills or by talking. But of course, once you raise kids and you hang around with kindergarten teachers, they don’t do a lot of talking. They’d also do a lot of singing together, and a lot of moving together, and a lot of tossing balls together. And a lot of things that help you get in tune and in rhythm with each other.

And that’s not really the strong point of Western culture. So it all depends on the cultural assumptions you have about what’s helpful to people.

Ezra Klein
This part of the book made an interesting connection for me. I had the journalist Anna Sale on the show a couple of months ago for her book about having difficult conversations, and something she says in that book is that we used to have more institutions, and rituals, and conventions, and structures that guided us through the hard conversations, and hard parts of life.

I mean, things like churches and civic organizations. There is a lot of singing in those places, there is a lot of dancing in those places. I mean, you go to a Jewish synagogue, a lot of singing and dancing. And one point she was making is that as some of these institutions have faded in American life, we’ve been left without a template for these conversations.

But reading your book made me think of it on another level, too. I mean, a bunch of the modalities you just talked about, like capoeira or qigong, I don’t want to suggest they don’t have therapeutic roles, but they’re not primarily seen as therapeutic. They’re just a bigger part of those cultures.

And I wonder if you think that one of the issues with trauma in America is that we have lost institutions that were comfortable with ways of being embodied, even if they didn’t frame them in a “the body keeps the score” kind of framework that we used to have. And so they were playing roles that maybe they framed themselves as religious, or civic, or something else, or communal or ritual, but they were also doing things for how we process difficult issues or allowed us to get in touch with our emotions, that they had these side benefits that we didn’t understand and never knew how to measure.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
That’s, of course, a terribly important point. But at the same time, institutions are dangerous. And sometimes you have to pay a price to keep belonging to the institution. So you may have to keep silent about an elder or a respected person doing bad things to women or to children, or to each other. So yes, there’s comfort in institutions, and yes, there is danger in institutions.

What I’m also impressed by is, in the circle that I live in, which I imagine is fairly rarefied, I see a lot of people exploring things. I see people going on meditation retreats, and singing retreats, and movement stuff, and making music together. So if you’re somewhat privileged in our culture, people oftentimes find ways of reestablishing their sense of connection, their communality.

And again, the issue of privilege and equality is a huge issue. Particularly right now with the pandemic, some people have much better opportunities and have a much easier culture that they fit in that other people do.

Ezra Klein
That point about the dark side of institutions is very important, and very well taken. But let’s talk about some of the things that you explore in the book and that people are exploring. And why don’t we start with one that folks may have heard of, but even if they have, even when I had, it’s very alien, which is E.M.D.R. Can you talk a bit about what E.M.D.R. is?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
EMDR is a very simple and weird technique. It is that you ask people to call up the images in their mind about horrible things that have happened to them, and to remember what they felt like in their bodies, to remember what they saw, what they heard, but you don’t talk about it. Because the moment you start talking to people, you change your story according to what you think that person wants to hear.

Talking always becomes the interpersonal process, and talking makes you adjust your reality to what people are able to listen to. So in E.M.D.R., you keep it to yourself, you see these things, and then you ask people to move their eyes from side to side in response to your fingers.

The first time I heard about it, it sounded like crazy. And my patients started to come back saying, I resolved things, I was able to just leave the memory behind. I did the first National Institute of Mental Health- funded research on E.M.D.R. Our adult onset P.T.S.D. people had like, a 78 percent cure rate. So clearly it had major positive effects.

And so that was my introduction, which I’m very grateful for, of seeing something that’s just on the surface bizarre, but has a very profound effect, that gets us out of this post-alcoholic paradigm of talking or drugs. I said look, this is interesting, this is weird. And so I got very interested in how does it work.

And so two years ago we finally did a study where we looked at what these eye movements cause. And what we saw, it changes the connectivity between different parts of the brain. And so what we saw is that it affected neural networks. And that for me was just so cool, because this really opens up the frontier of where our treatments need to go, is how do we repair these networks where the different parts of the brain are disconnected from each other.

But the result is that when people have this inkling of trauma, they feel it as if it’s still happening now. And what we saw in our neuroimaging study of E.M.D.R. is that the circuits of the brain change, so it allows the mind to go, oh yeah, this has happened to me, but it happened back then, a long time ago. It’s not happening right now. So the E.M.D.R. was my opening that there’s ways of switching neural circuits so your perspective on the issue becomes very different.

Ezra Klein
Why would moving your eyes back and forth open that pathway?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
That’s the question we don’t know, except you go back to what Darwin wrote about and Pavlov wrote about it, about conditioned responses of the brain, start to react with how you move your eyes in a certain direction when there’s danger. And there’s maybe some evolutionary circuits involved with moving your eyes in the direction of threat. We don’t know, because research funding would not really allow people to go into asking these questions at this point. I wish we would.

Ezra Klein
And one of the other things that was interesting ... I’ve not done E.M.D.R. myself, but in people I’ve known who have had a very positive reaction to it, and then in the stories you tell in your book, one of the things about it is that you don’t just tell the story of what happened to you. Oftentimes you begin to alter it.

There’s an imaginative capacity. You’re telling what happened as trauma, and then also people begin rewriting the story, saying things that didn’t happen, and that there’s some healing that seems to happen here and in some of the other modalities that we’ll talk about, from, in an open environment, imagining the way things didn’t play out.

And on some level that’s very strange to me, right? That you can heal yourself not by just understanding what happened, but talking through what didn’t happen. But it seems to be recurrent in these therapies. So can you talk a bit about the role of imagination in healing, and counterfactuals?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
I was hoping for questions like this, this is great. So the way we deal with unpleasant situations is by imagining how we can do things differently. And that’s really the glory about the brain. It’s like, oh, if you get fires in California, but I can imagine what we can do to prevent the forest fires, to anticipate how you can make a difference.

Trauma destroys that capacity to imagine how things can be different because you get trapped in that traumatic moment. So you cannot imagine anymore that things can be different. So a very big issue in helping people to overcome trauma is to experience the possibility of alternative outcomes.

In my own work, I love to use psychodrama for that. We are involved in theater programs where people actually get to play different roles and see what it feels like in our body to take a new position, to imagine being Lady Macbeth. And so to be able to embody the experience of a powerful queen, you go like, oh, that’s what a body feels like that feels powerful. So a very important part, in my mind, of therapy is to help people to embody new realities.

Ezra Klein
There’s a fascinating study you bring up, which relates I think to this very, very famous study where they are still following, actually, but this one class of men from Harvard from decades, and decades, and decades ago. But something the study found is that in the people who were traumatized by their experience in war, their memories never really changed.

They told the same story 40 years later that they told right after it happened. Whereas the people who weren’t traumatized by it, their memories kept changing. The imagination was telling and retelling the story, right? The cliché of the old war stories that never quite happened, or the fishing stories where the fish keeps getting bigger. So if you could you talk a bit about that? About the way weirdly, a healthy memory is actually a less accurate memory? Because what you need in life is not accurate memories but a story that works for you in the world.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Exactly. My friend who ran the sleep laboratory at Harvard, Bob Stickgold, showed very clearly that, with your dreams, your dreams allow you to retain what’s most relevant and to ignore what’s irrelevant, and you slowly change your story about what happens in order to prepare yourself for the future. It’s a very complex mental phenomenon, and our memories are extremely flexible.

For example, I go to family reunions with my siblings, and we all tell stories about growing up. And we look at each other and say, you grew up in a different family for me! Have we all created a different story about our past? And that suits us. That’s the story we like to live with.

But the reality may be very different. What we first found out about trauma is that the problem with trauma is you cannot change the story. And the story is the same damn imprint, the same vision, the same body sensation as you had 10, 20, 30 years ago. And so what we need to do when we treat people is to get the normal processes of the brain to work so you can create a new story for yourself, and not get stuck on the specific sensations of back then.

Ezra Klein
Speaking of family reunions, can you talk about internal family systems therapy? I had never come along this until the book, but it’s fascinating.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Oh well, internal family systems is not about families. It’s about how we all have families living inside of ourselves. It’s a very important evolution, the past 30 years or so. Jung already talked about the same thing, William James talked about the same thing: that we have a multiplicity of minds. Walt Whitman wrote a poem about it, said that “I contain multitudes.”

You strike me as a very loving, and kind, and intelligent, and attuned person.

Ezra Klein
Oh, thank you.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
I hope that’s all there is to you. But only the people know you best know that there is other parts of you that people don’t get to see, and there may be part of us that we may not be aware of sometimes. So that we have different ways of reacting, or engaging, that can be quite different regarding the circumstances.

And what I.F.S. particularly showed us is that when terrible things happen to you, you create ways of being in the world, personalities, that help you to cope. For example, if you get chronically humiliated, you may say to yourself, “Nobody is going to ever humiliate me anymore,” and you become this staff bully who put people down before they can put you down.

You may go home and be a very sweet and gentle person to your kid, but when you deal with a guy in the office, you may become a bully. That doesn’t mean that all of you is a bully. That means that a part of you is a bully that comes out under certain circumstances. So we never know other people until we live with them for a long period of time, because there may be very hidden parts of themselves that we may have developed back then in order to cope with particular challenges that we face growing up.

Ezra Klein
So my understanding of how I.F.S. works in practice is it identifies these almost little personalities in the brain. There are managers, who try to protect you from feeling unsafe, and the firefighters, who respond to moments of crisis, the exiles, who you’re trying to avoid, and that helps people identify these distinct parts of their personalities, and how those parts come out and contribute to different reactions.

And that seems like something that would be helpful even outside the context of therapy. In addition to all the wonderful qualities of mine you listed a minute ago, I do a lot of meditation. And one of the things that years of that is done has make me much more skeptical that there is just one of me in here. When you’re sitting there just watching your mind, the constant question is, well who thought that? Who thought thinking that would be a good idea? I didn’t want to be there.

And the mind has felt to me for a long time like it’s more of a corporation. You know, it has different divisions, and some of them have big budgets, and some small. But family systems seems to get at that too. That one thing that actually causes people frustration and shame is they are told they’re in control or should be in control of their minds.

And then it’s very frustrating, for me as somebody who has struggled a lot with anxiety and obsessive rumination, it’s very frustrating to not be able to control my own mind. Because that feels like I’m failing. And the idea that it’s actually not something I should be able to do, that it’s not just one singular mind, but a lot of different minds or something vying to be heard, there’s some relief in that. And it seems to me some real accuracy in it.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
It’s very helpful in relationships. That you can only survive a relationship if you can really understand how your partner gets very uptight, or angry, or shut off, or something, in response to certain things. And if you start understanding that it is different part. And let’s say if your wife, this probably never happens to you, but perhaps to many other people, someday may say to you, “I hate you!”

And for you to know, oh, she’s now triggered and there was something I did that caused that angry part of her to come out. I know that that angry part is not the most reasonable part of her, so this is not a time for me to start arguing with her that I’m not the most selfish person in the whole world, but you know that that part is out, and you try to help her to know that this too shall pass. And I can see that I do things that really bother you, and I’ll try to work on that.

And she can say, I can try to negotiate with a very angry, frustrated part. A little therapy might help in helping me to know where it came from, so that I don’t get so out of control angry with you when you don’t do the dishes.

Ezra Klein
The single best piece of advice I ever got on marriage is that there is no use in thinking of your partner as a single stable entity that exists separate from you. There’s only your partner in a dynamic with you. There’s only who you also bring out in your partner, that they’ll be somebody totally different with other people. But so the question always, if things are going right or wrong, is, like, which parts of the two of you are being brought out in relationship? Not just, who is this person and do I like them?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
See, and Dick Schwartz extended what you just said in your relationship to yourself. And to really understand that you may have very different reactions at different times, and to really get to appreciate that certain things make me very upset, and to really start making decisions about do I want to give in to that, or do I want to do something about it? Or how to really start getting a perspective on this landscape, and make a discovery inside of yourself.

Ezra Klein
An intervention you discuss glancingly in the book, but it sounds from something you said earlier like you’ve been doing more work on, is psychedelic therapy. It’s been a lot more research since you did the book, it sounds like you’re actually behind some of it. So given what we know now, I’m curious how you understand the role of psychedelics potentially in helping people deal with trauma?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
I think psychedelics are a true revolution. And it’s partially a revolution because we don’t know how they work. There’s all these explanations: oh, the serotonin system or the default mode network. But what has happened in the world we live in is that people pay varied attention to what happens in the mind.

And what we see in our MDMA research is that MDMA seems to really trigger a capacity to look at yourself in a more compassionate way, in the same way that MDMA is being used at parties. And when we do our work, very painful, painful, old things tend to come up. But people are able to go there and not get overwhelmed by shame, or overwhelmed by the horror.

And they’re able to go there and say, yeah, this is what happened to me. Oh my God, that was awful. And actually, I’m working on that paper right now, which I think is a very big deal, actually, is what you see is a dramatic increase in self compassion. People say, I now can really see what I went through, and how awful it was, and how I have survived it.

And what’s fascinating to me is that it gives people a sense of perspective, of who they are, and their sense of self gets very much enhanced. This is who I am, this is what I went through, and this is what I’ve learned from experience. It’s really very dramatic, and I think it’s the sort of thing that may happen with very long term psychotherapy, but I think very profound things can happen in a very short period of time.

Ezra Klein
I’m very fascinated by the space, both for personal and professional reasons. And something I was thinking about, in the context of some of the other treatments you bring up, is the why. And I’m thinking here less about MDMA, which as you say has a profound self compassion effect, and more about things like mushrooms and LSD.

But something that came to mind, so Robin Carhart-Harris, who is at UCSF now and is one of the leading researchers on psychedelics, he’s put forward this model which argues that the mechanism by which psychedelics work is that they sort of relax our mind’s confidence in its own internal models, and pattern matching, and stories, which then allows us to kind of experience some of these deeper emotions we have and begin assigning meaning and stories to them, too.

Which sounds actually a lot like E.M.D.R., sounds a lot like, in a way, what internal family systems work is doing. That ability to begin sensing something else and then trying to tell a story about it that your brain will actually believe, and begin to give weight to. And I wonder if you think there’s something to that, that it’s a relaxing of the model that is helpful here?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Well, certainly Carhart-Harris has done more work on it than any of the rest of us. And I think his formulation approximates what we see here. I think the big thing in terms of trauma, is that when you’re traumatized you live in a very narrow world. A world of fear, and trying to stay under control, and being afraid to get out of control, or being afraid to get overwhelmed.

So your world becomes more and more constrained. Pierre Janet already wrote it about 150 years ago. How you get narrow minded, and what Janet said back then also, he says, when you get traumatized, the mind has a hard time continuing to grow. The mind gets stuck in its effort to try to control itself, it becomes very hard to open your mind up to new things.

So when you’re traumatized, you oftentimes tend to have the same patterns over and over again. You have a hard time learning from experience. Your mind closes down. I think what psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD do is they open up a new universe inside of yourself that somehow you need to cope with.

The way you phrased it is a little bit too deliberately cognitive for my mind. The mind does something to become aware — but even aware is too conscious — of that I’m a much smaller piece in the much larger universe, and a universal experience through these substances, which Carhart-Harris and Pollan and those people who also write about, is how you get to see your relative position in the universe.

At the same time as you experience yourself as quite unique and special, you also get to see the rest of the universe as also being unique and special. And universally, regardless of the culture, you always end up with a feeling of, I’m a part of a much larger universe. But I’m an essential part of that part of the universe.

Which is, of course, the opposite of being traumatized. When you’re traumatized, you go, I’m messed up, nobody else is, everybody’s having a life and I don’t, and you feel alienated. And that sense of what all these mind altering substances do, of opening yourself up, being a part of a larger whole, is very significant also.

Ezra Klein
So MDMA combined with therapy is now in phase III trials in the F.D.A. for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. You have psilocybin at other levels of the regulatory process. There’s very much a vogue for all this. Do you worry that it has risks we’re not paying attention to?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
I think societies have had a very difficult time legalizing and dealing with the outflow of these massive mind-expanding agents. And I’m very curious to what degree we’re able to stay reasonable about it, to be careful about it, to not have it get out of control. And I’m really delighted with Rick Doblin, who runs the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, M.A.P.S., which forms part of his studies. He is working very hard to keep it very careful. But I’m very worried that things will get out of control, yeah.

Ezra Klein
You were very much part of the rise of just pharmaceuticals to treat mental illness. You did one of the early studies on Prozac. And in the book, you have a very complicated relationship with these drugs, which you prescribe and believe they can help people. But you also worry that we overuse them, that we use drugs to ignore signals, or numb signals the body is sending, so that it becomes easier to not do things. How do you think about that space now?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
So I was a very young person. So I worked in the hospital and did a lot of the early studies and did some myself, and there was an enormous promise that chemicals were the answers. And people said, mental illness is a chemical illness, and if we just find the right chemical, we’ll cure it.

And billions of dollars on the chemical studies really haven’t yielded all that much in terms of understanding or treating mental illness. But the sad thing is that psychiatry as a profession became addicted to drugs. And so the notion that oh, if you just find the right symptom, you’ll find the right drug, still prevails among many professionals.

There are chemicals that can be somewhat helpful. They can help you to sleep better, to be less uptight. But they’re chemicals that really interfere with your natural capacity to deal with these things. And for me, very quickly after I did these early studies with not bad results, they certainly did not promise total happiness, really started to concentrate on what inborn mechanisms we have to deal with our own anxiety, and with our depression.

And so I really discovered the world of the body and tantric traditions, the yoga traditions and breathing traditions, and musical traditions that show that we actually are capable of rearranging our own internal physiological systems. And I wish that in every classroom in America they would teach the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and self regulation, from kindergarten through 12th grade, of what can we do to calm ourselves down, to stay focused? What sort of activities can we engage in to feel in control of ourselves?

And so that we get away from this culture of, if you don’t feel right you take a drug, instead of if you don’t feel right you go for a bicycle ride. If you don’t feel right you go to yoga class. If you don’t feel right, you may need to do some body work to help your body to calm, or you need to go to do some tango dancing, or you need to do something to rearrange your relationship to your internal physiological state.

Ezra Klein
Where do you think psychiatry and mental health as a profession is in its evolution? And I mean it in this way, that it all feels very scientific. And there’s a lot of studies and you can read journals. And at the same time, including when reading your book, it’s remarkable how crude the tools we have are. I mean, we have medications that do things that we don’t really understand, but seem to have some help for some people.

We have things like E.M.D.R., which do things we don’t understand, but help some people, or theater therapy, or yoga. We know exercise is good. We don’t always exactly know why. Now we’re exploring psychedelics, which have profound effects and seem to, with the right level of integration, help with trauma. We’re very like, kind of throwing stuff against the wall and finding some things unexpectedly work in ways we don’t fully understand.

So do you think that there are just limits to what we can access in the kind of deep psyche? Or do you think that 100 years from now, or 50 years from now, our treatments today are just going to seem incredibly crude, like we just had not discovered germ theory or something?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
All of the above, and none, to some degree. I don’t think we are throwing everything against the wall. We’re doing actually the opposite. We’re looking for yet another drug doing the same old stuff that we have done. We are looking at yet another talk therapy that will make people into sensible human beings.

We have, as a discipline, completely ignored our early data, when we first started to image trauma in the brain, that trauma sits on the right side of the brain. And so these right brain phenomena are lasting phenomena. And so the time has come to really start looking at what else can we do, because basically the funding has been very much focused on talking therapies and drug therapies.

So no, we haven’t thrown things against the wall. I’m still waiting for the study of comparing tango dancing with cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m a scientist, it’s an empirical question. But I put my money on tango dancing over C.B.T., by and large, for some people. So I think we need to explore much more.

Is the world open for it? Yes and no. For example, I was able to start a foundation, and rather than become a recipient of funding, I’m able to fund some studies. Now the very first study we are funding is a study of touch and trauma. Everybody who knows anything about trauma, is that some of these people have very varied and oftentimes very anomalous responses to human touch.

People have won Nobel prizes about vision, Nobel prizes about audition. Touch is basically off the wall. The main way that people get comfort in life is through being touched. Once you have been touched inappropriately, touch maybe can defeat this. Let’s study touch.

We are synchronous human beings. The source of pleasure in our lives is to be in sync with each other. The reason why I like talking with you is because, whenever you ask a question, I go, “Boy this guy really gets it.” I feel you’re in sync with me, which gives me a tremendous sense of pleasure. So being in sync with people is critical for our sense of fun, of feeling alive. So how can we increase people’s sense of synchronicity with other human beings?

So I don’t know how it will work itself out, because in the world we live in, everything gets monetized. And so we tend to be able to study very expensive technical treatments more than simple treatments. And so where things will go, God knows. But boy, are we missing the boat on exploring a much larger number of options. Yes, up to now we have.

Ezra Klein
On the point of touch, that there are a couple lines in your book that have really etched themselves in me. And one in particular here where you say that “the things that calm adults are the same things that calm children. Being held, being rocked, and being shushed.” And I don’t know. I just found that very moving.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
It’s true! You see it through to have your own kid go — yeah, he’s very young. But I need to do the same thing for him as I need myself.

Ezra Klein
But at some point, we make it very difficult for adults to ask for those things. You can maybe ask your partner, and that’s it. Particularly, I’ll speak more for men here, because I understand male relationships a little bit better, but you really, as a man, you can’t go to your male friends and ask to be rocked and shushed. [LAUGHTER]

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah, a little bit, the culture has something to do with it.

Ezra Klein
Yeah, and it just strikes me as a shame. To the point you were just making, we spend so many billions of dollars, and so much effort to get the medications we think will help, and to see psychiatrists. And we’ve also cut ourselves off from a lot of just very cheap things, right? We have culturally cut ourselves off from a lot of touch, right? We often live in very atomized ways.

I mean there’s very kind of cheap, natural things that are part of our deep history that we give to our children, or at least in many homes, that, I don’t know, we’ve just decided are a little somehow uncouth, and we suffer for it.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
A very big part of what you’re talking about is our socially stratified system, and our humongous income inequality. I sent my kids to schools where there was a lot of theater, music, dancing, creative writing, sports. They were always moving and creating things. The poorer you are, the less you get any of these things.

Ezra Klein
We’re going to come back, we’re definitely going to come back at the end to the bigger question of inequality. But before we do that, I want to reverse the way we’ve been looking at this. We’ve been talking about the way traumatized people are disconnected from their communities. And I want to talk a little bit about what it means to be in community with somebody who is traumatized.

A lot of the patients you talk about in the book, a lot of the behaviors that traumatized people exhibit, they’re very alienating to those around them. They’re difficult, they can be dangerous. Can you just talk a bit about what trauma is like for those who love someone who is traumatized?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
It is very hard to be with someone who is traumatized, who suddenly shuts down, suddenly blows up. And it takes an enormous toll on relationships. And oftentimes partners get blamed for the other party’s behavior. And so it really finds its way into relationships.

And so, groups of survivors become very important. Groups of incest survivors, groups of people who were molested by Catholic priests, people who struggle with addiction, helping each other say, I know what you’re talking about. I’m not here primarily to condemn you, but to keep you company in your struggle. For a survivor, it’s terribly important.

In a couple’s relationship, that’s harder, because you have a job to do, raising kids, et cetera, et cetera. But these support groups can be very good to give people a sense of being a member of the human race. And once you stop feeling like a member of the human race, your chances for wanting to survive become very slim.

Ezra Klein
How do you advise people to deal with the very difficult question of what you can ask of someone they love? I mean, the tension between recognizing the reality that people’s actions are often largely out of their control. They don’t want to treat us badly, they don’t want to disconnect, they don’t want to pull back, and also that we don’t want to be mistreated, or taken advantage of, or hurt.

And that there is something you can ask of some people, right? Sometimes you can ask somebody to treat you better. And then sometimes you need to recognize that there is healing that has to happen before they’re going to be able to do that. But it’s often hard to know which situation is which. Do you have advice for people who feel like they’re in that situation?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah. I think that’s really — to a large degree that’s what relationships are all about. It’s the continuous negotiation of, what can we be for each other? A relationship is about being there for each other. So my job, if you and I are in a relationship, is indeed to try to create situations in which you can feel safe and be productive.

But your demands may be too much for me. And I need to be able to say, honey, I cannot do it. I really need to sleep in a bedroom by myself if you wake up screaming in nightmares all night, and it must be very hard for you if I cannot sleep in the same bed with you. But we both have needs. And these are very hard to negotiate. And I think you need to have a lot of consciousness, and a lot of awareness to actually be able to sit down and to identify these issues, and to talk about these issues.

But that is the nature of relationships. What can I do, what can I not do, what are the expectations, to what degree can I fulfill these obligations, and to what degree do you need to get the resources for yourself from somebody else? Because I’m depleted, I cannot give you what you’re asking for.

Ezra Klein
So I want to go back then to this question of the broader society that you were talking about a minute ago, with schools and inequality. On one level, it’s clear I think that providing child care, and pre-K, and well funded schools, and universal health care, and better access to mental health services would help make a society that is better at helping people.

But on some level, that also can’t be the whole answer, because a lot of middle and upper class people’s lives are full of trauma, too. So I’m curious what you think are the structures and institutions, or even just social mores, that would help us become healthier, and help people either be traumatized less often or help them more once they are?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
It’s of course, very complex, and nobody has the answers. But creating situations where parents can safely take care of their kids is terribly important. And of course, that is much easier when you have money than if you don’t have money. So almost every other society has universal health care and has support, which we lack.

So for me, this is really a very big issue. Yes, it’s because of the system we live in, the majority of people I treat are people who come from relatively fortunate circumstances. Because if you come from very low education and you don’t have a high school diploma, there’s no way you will find a way of getting to see an experienced mental health professional.

Ezra Klein
What interventions for kids do you think would do the most good? I mean, if you could wave your wand and put some new structures into law that they have elsewhere, or that they don’t have elsewhere, what would the first couple of them be?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Well first of all, child care, that you don’t have to be locked up with the same person all the time. It’s very important for a kid to have the experience of being exposed to more than one adult, and to see that other people have different ways of doing business. So you can actually see, oh my mom gets very upset, as opposed to, oh, that’s the world I live in.

The second piece is to be involved in rhythmical activities with other kids. Moving together with other kids, dancing together with other kids, playing with other kids, exploring the world with other kids, is so at the core of what creates a healthy mind and a healthy brain. That means that there is space, and that people can actually explore things safely. You can actually go out with your friends and try things out, so you don’t live in an environment where there is so much danger outside the door, or inside the door, that you cannot play anymore.

So I would say the most important thing for traumatized kids is to go to places where they can play. And that is, even in some very well known children’s institutions, there are hardly any places to play. Hardly any place to move around. To sing, to play, to dance, to run. So kids are supposed to really move. And move with other kids.

And basically, our systems are made to move in synchrony with the people around us. When you get traumatized, you get out of sync on every most elementary level. What does the military do? They have people move together and march together, to get them back in sync with each other.

Ezra Klein
And it sounds to me like you think the same is actually true for adults, that you need space to play, to move, to be in synchronicity with others, to sing, to dance, to have what gets called collective effervescence.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Absolutely. Of course, you get more frozen as we grow older. But cooking with people, serving meals to people, pouring that wine to other people, still that moving together is a terribly important way of feeling our communality with other human beings.

Ezra Klein
And then I want to return to a question I said we’d tackle here at the end, which is you talked about the ways in which the post- 9/11 period in New York City was actually well handled from the perspective of trauma. One thing that led to us doing this podcast is your book has been back up, all the way up on the bestseller lists.

And I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that has to do with people sensing a lot is wrong in themselves and in society, as we do and, in some cases, don’t recover from the coronavirus. So we’ve just been through a society- wide trauma, we are still going through it. But at some point, there’s going to be the potential maybe for recovery. Are there lessons from New York City after 9/11 for countries when they finally can turn to trying to recover from this pandemic?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
To my mind, the biggest lesson from New York was, for one thing, everybody knew the reality of what had happened. And nobody blamed anybody on the inside. So that immediately puts the issue of secrecy and shame off the map, which is fairly rare when it comes to trauma.

The next thing is that people actually did things. People got together in neighborhood groups, they got together with their family. And there’s a lot of communality in New York. New York temporarily became a very kind city. People really were lovely with each other. They made space for each other. It was almost unrecognizable.

The other thing is that money poured into New York. Something like half of all Americans donated money. So there was no dearth of resources. So many people who are traumatized have no resources. They have no money. We don’t have universal health care. If you don’t have good insurance, it’s very hard to get many of the treatments that I talk about.

So the issue of access and resources is huge. And if we wanted to have good health care systems, we need to have universal health care. We cannot have one health care system for the rich and a completely different health care system for the poor.

Ezra Klein
I think that’s a good place to end. So always, our final question. What are the three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Yeah. Eve Ensler, who now calls herself V, wrote a beautiful book called “The Apology.” Her whole work comes from having been severely molested by her dad. And I think her book, and her other work also, is an extraordinary testimony of courage, of facing up to yourself, and to your experience, and then going on. She’s just marvelous.

The other book that comes to mind is “Love at Goon Park.” It’s a book about Harry Harlow and his laboratory, his discovery of attachment in monkeys. So just a marvelous book about us as human beings, being very much like interactive with other people. And Harry Harlow is a very flawed human being discovering that.

Another book that I think is great, an Australian guy by the name of [Richard] Flanagan, who wrote a book called “The Narrow Road to the [Deep] North,” about war experiences and how war experiences impact on people and get split off. I could just go on, and on, and on. Karl Marlantes’s book about “What It’s Like to Go to War” is an extraordinary description, up there with Tolstoy’s, about the war experience, and his own journey to recovery. Those are just three or four examples.

Ezra Klein
Bessel van der Kolk, your book is “The Body Keeps the Score,” it’s remarkable. Thank you very much.

Bessel Van Der Kolk
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Gelvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

[MUSIC PLAYING] EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So one of the things I do for the show is I try to keep an eye on the best seller lists. And a few months ago, I began to notice something strange. “The Body Keeps the Score,” which is a book about trauma from 2014, was back up near the top of the New York Times list. It’s number one, as I write this, the book’s 147th week on the paperback nonfiction list — 147th. And if you know what this book is, that is wild.

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“The Body Keeps the Score,” it is a searing read about the way trauma disconnects our minds and our bodies. And it’s pretty clearly written with a professional audience in mind. This is a book very largely aimed at other psychiatrists. That so many of us are turning to it, it says something profound about where the national psyche is in this moment of, yeah, trauma.

I’ll be honest of my own history of it here. “The Body Keeps the Score” is one of those books people have told me to read for a long time. But I thought I knew what it was about. I’d heard it discussed so many times, and I’d read it written about. So even though I hadn’t read it, I thought I knew it: trauma lodges in the body, we carry a physical imprint of our psychic wounds, it’s all very hard to heal. Got it.

But I was really wrong about that. The core argument is — I want to use the word “subversive” here. Certainly subversive in how it will leave you thinking about yourself and those around you. It is about traumatic experiences: sexual assault, incest, emotional physical abuse, war and much, much more. They can disconnect our body and our mind. That is when an experience becomes a trauma — when it disconnects us.

And this is a part I didn’t understand from the way the book is talked about. The devastating argument it makes is not that the body keeps the score, it’s that the mind hides the score from us. The mind — it hides and warps these traumatic events and our narratives about them in an effort to protect us. Human beings are social animals. And our minds evolve to manage our social relationships.

So when we face an event that could rupture our relationship with the community or the family, particularly for children of the family that we depend on, the mind often talks us out of it. It obscures the memories or convinces us our victimization was our fault or it covers the event in a shame so thick, we refuse to discuss it. But our body — and that’s an imprecise term here. But the parts of us that are more automatic that manage and respond to threat — our body doesn’t forget that. Our mind can’t talk that part of us into feeling safe again. And it’s this disconnection of mind and body where trauma lives.

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So how do you reconnect them? Bessel van der Kolk is the author of “The Body Keeps the Score.” He was a leading researcher and psychiatrist active in many of the early battles to understand post-traumatic stress syndrome. But more recently, he co-founded and leads a trauma research foundation and has been studying ways to try to heal these deeper parts of our psyches, everything from movement therapies like yoga and dance to E.M.D.R. to internal family systems therapy to MDMA treatment. We talk about all of it in here.

But I do want to offer a disclaimer: the research on some of these novel treatments, it is really promising. But these are often new studies with pretty small sample sizes. So I don’t want anyone to mistake this conversation for direct advice from a psychiatrist who knows your situation and psyche. So if anything in here connects for you, talk to a professional about it. Don’t just drop the treatments you’re using or the medications you’re taking and run to something new.

But with that said, there is so much to learn from in this conversation. I really haven’t stopped thinking about it since we recorded. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com if you want to send me further guest suggestions or recommendations for things we should read or look at. Again, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Bessel van der Kolk, welcome to the show.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Hi, good being here.

EZRA KLEIN: You have this very powerful line in the book from the writer Jessica Stern where she says, quote, “Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative. Mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does — it interrupts the plot.” Tell me a bit about how trauma interrupts the plot.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well, trauma is really a wound that happens to your psyche, to your mind, to your brain. Suddenly you’re confronted with something that you are faced with horror and helplessness. That nothing prepares you for this and you go like, oh, my God. And so something switches off at that point in your mind and your brain. And the nature of trauma is that you get stuck there. So instead of remembering something unpleasant, you keep reliving something very unpleasant.

So the job of overcoming trauma is to make it into a memory where your whole being knows this happened a long time ago, it’s not happening right now. But the nature of traumatic stress is that you keep reacting emotionally and physiologically as if these events are happening right now.

EZRA KLEIN: What is trauma? Is it the event itself or is it your reaction and processing, or I guess lack thereof, of the event?

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: It really is a reaction that you have something horrible that’s going on. And different people have different responses. Although I must say, having done this work as long as I have, I don’t recall ever seeing somebody in my office coming for traumatic stress that I go, oh, this seems like a trivial issue. Like having your child run over by a car, you go like, oh, my God. And usually my response to hearing about people’s trauma is, oh, my God, are you still here?

EZRA KLEIN: I’ll say that, for me, was the hardest part of reading your book was just being faced with something I already know, but being faced with how much pain people are simply carrying around with them every day. It’s one way reading the book made me just look at the world a little bit differently. It’s just this reminder that you have no idea what somebody is carrying.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: That is so true. And of course, we do need to wear our blinders, and we cannot face up to all the bad stuff that’s happening in the world. But to give an example to what you’re saying here: when we first put this diagnosis of P.T.S.D. in a textbook, we said, this is an extraordinary event outside of the usual realm of human experience. That is the official definition. Nobody talked about how common incest is, nobody talks about how common child abuse is, how common domestic violence is. And it’s really quite startling when you get to see how much people actually are coping with.

EZRA KLEIN: At various points in the book, you argue that trauma is the most costly public health problem that we are dealing with. This is before the era of Covid, of course. So let’s keep that to the side. But do you want to talk for a minute about that at scale, what it means that so many people are holding these kinds of experiences and pain?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah, that statement actually came from the Centers for Disease Control, when Vince Felitti at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego did this research more than 20 years ago right now where he asked medical patients — insurance carrying, largely college educated white people — did anybody ever hit you very badly, did anybody molest you, did you witness your parents having physical fights? And the data that came back were just stunning, how much really very scary stuff the majority of people experienced in their lives.

And what their studies there slowly showed is how erosive and devastating these effects are on people’s capacity to recover also. The big issue is that people tend to think about trauma as, oh that event, and having a bad memory about something. That is not really what it is. Once you get traumatized, it changes your brain, it changes how you see the world, and it changes how your body reacts to your environment.

And so it’s not the only thing that goes from your survival system into your mind. It goes also into your body, and the stress hormones continue to erode your system. When you have been traumatized, your chances to die much earlier and to have many diseases go up very dramatically. So much of what we can think about, major social issues in the world we live in, are actually — the social elements, the contextual elements are terribly important.

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EZRA KLEIN: Tell me a bit about the conditions under which an event that could be traumatic becomes a trauma. And in particular, I was very struck by how much of your research suggests that trauma is an event plus a kind of instigated social crisis. There are objectively catastrophic events, like 9/11, that were less likely to cause trauma because they were shared by the community. Where, on the other hand, things like child sexual abuse is very reliably traumatic because it disconnects you from your family. So could you talk a bit about the social structure of trauma?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. So what we tend to leave out of most of our discussions about human functioning is to what degree we are primates. We have brains in order to get along with each other, to be with other people, to connect with other people. That’s really what we are fundamentally all about. And so, much of trauma is about a rupture of the safety of the people who are supposed to protect you and the people who are supposed to come to your help.

So basically, the way that we are wired is that we are wired to not be able to do everything by ourselves, but to be able to look for help and for other people to take over when we can no longer do the job ourselves. And that’s perfectly normal. But if, at that point, the people you can count on most are not there for you, let you down, have been killed, or whatever, then it’s entirely up to you. It’s a much harder thing to deal with terrible situations.

EZRA KLEIN: I just want to tag something you said there for the audience, because we’re going to come back to quite a bit, which is we have brains in order to get along with other people. I think that’s going to be really, really, really important to this conversation. But this gets to something that I found really rich in the book. So “The Body Keeps the Score” has — I mean, as a book, it’s a phenomenon, as a social meme, it’s a phenomenon. So I felt like I knew what it said even though I hadn’t read it until recently.

But then when I read it, what really struck me about it is how much of the book is about not just how the body keeps the score, but how and why the mind hides the score. Can you tell me a bit about that?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah, brilliant. We are created to survive. We’re also created to be loyal and to be part of a group. And sometimes, in order to survive, you need to keep your realities [INAUDIBLE] the people around you. And so when you go through a terrible reality like 9/11 in New York or terrible natural disasters, oftentimes people get very close together because it’s out there, everybody can see it, people help each other. Part of our nature is to be altruistic and to be generous when people are in distress.

But if your feelings conflict with your loyalty — let’s say, if your own mom or dad beat you up and you don’t feel safe with them — you cannot tell other people about it either because you’re supposed to love your mom or dad. And so you need to keep it to yourself. And then it starts festering inside of you. So the reason why you do psychotherapy is mainly to help people to find words for the reality that they have dealt with. And oftentimes, those are realities that are not acceptable for the people around you.

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EZRA KLEIN: You talk about the difference between the parts of the brain that create the autobiographical self and the parts of the brain that create the experiencing self. Can you discuss that a bit?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. So we have these layers of the brain that have different functions. So the deepest layer has to do with what Antonio Damasio calls “the housekeeping of your body”: being able to breathe, go to the bathroom, go to sleep, have an appetite, being able to engage in caregiving and sexual relationships — very elementary. We have that in common with all other mammals basically.

But then we have this meaning making systems that come on top of that, starting with the larger limbic system that has a more complex way of organizing your perceptions about reality. So basically, your limbic system is the part of your brain that forms a map inside of the world outside of you. And so your brain gets programmed by experience to know what to expect and what sort of reactions people will have to certain behaviors. And so early experiences very much shape your perceptions of the world.

So if you are terrified of the people who take care of you, it’s very likely that you will either, or combination of, really be extremely compliant with people in power and hope that they won’t hurt you, or you become chronically angry and oppositional or a combination of those two. But that imprint of, I’m not safe with people who say they care for me, becomes an imprint of how you come to perceive the world. And those are not rational thoughts, and this cannot be abolished by pointing out to people how irrational they are, because that’s the way our brain becomes hardwired to deal with the reality in which it gets formed.

EZRA KLEIN: It was astonishing to me, reading some of the stories in the book. I think all of us have the experience of telling a story about ourself that is not true to how we feel. But you treat patients who, the stories their minds have told or the memories their minds have hidden are really shocking. So why do victims of abuse, particularly child abuse, so often either forget what happened to them or blame themselves for it?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: So the issue there is that we need our parents or caregivers to take care of us. And so the moment we give up on our caregivers as little kids, we’re done for. And so the way the child is wired is to stay as close to the people who are supposed to take care of them as possible. And with that, they will deny the reality of being beaten. Or the imprint is very much like, I’m being beaten or I’m being molested because I’m a bad person. I must deserve it.

So your identity becomes basically, I’m fundamentally a bad and flawed human being. And if I had been a nicer child, people would have loved me and taken care of me. If I’d been a worthwhile child, people would not have done these horrible things to themselves. And actually, when you get into treating these issues, the hardest thing to actually treat in people is this deep sense of being defective, something being wrong with you.

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And what many of my patients also deal with is that I must have made the story up. This is too horrendous for people to do it, I cannot believe that it’s happened to me, I must feel this way because I’m crazy. And oftentimes, that gets reinforced by the environment, or you’re just a difficult child, you’re just making up false memories. But the fact is what happens over time, the reality slowly starts filling out.

EZRA KLEIN: This was a real epiphany for me in reading your book, because you read about cases like this. You read about false memories or you hear about or even know people who blame themselves for horrible things done to them — child abuse or rape or a beating or whatever it might be. And you think, what would happen that brains would be defective that they would do that? That doesn’t make any sense.

But the point of your book, I think, in part is that it does make sense. There’s an evolutionary fitness reason for the brain to do that, which is that it’s a story that allows you to maintain within a family, or maintain within a workplace or maintain within a community. Because if you told the real story, it would rupture your family, it would rupture your community, it would rupture your workplace.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Exactly. These thoughts didn’t come from me, of course, originally. All these thoughts have been thought before. But the great hero here is John Bowlby, attachment researcher, who really showed how children really need to cling to their caregivers and will do anything they can to keep a semblance of connection going so they don’t die or get totally abandoned. And the price they pay for that is very much this very profound sense of self loathing, oftentimes despising yourself, getting into a lot of difficult behaviors because I’m no good anyway. And it’s a deep sense of, I may as well put myself in danger, I may as well take drugs because I’m no good anyway.

EZRA KLEIN: So then you get into these cases where people are telling a story about something — either telling a story that admits something or telling a story that normalizes something — that their body doesn’t believe. And so you have these kind of two systems, like the kind of cerebral system of what somebody is sitting in front of you saying, and then the fact that they collapse into a ball at the touch of another human being or hide in drugs or have all these other coping behaviors. So can you talk about why the system that is rationalizing isn’t able to convince the body? Because you would think maybe that would be just one system all the way through. You got to live the lie. But part of what you’re getting at is you don’t live the lie, you just tell the lie.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah, you live the lie. You really believe that I’m fundamentally defective and that’s why this happens to me. So people really very deeply come to rationalize their very bad feelings. And that actually allows them to continue to survive to some degree. And that’s a different part of the brain.

But of course, your core survival part of the brain picks up the danger signs and keeps continuing to secrete stress hormones, immunological abnormalities, muscle tension, fibromyalgia — a whole bunch of physiological systems where the body continues to behave as if it’s in great danger while the mind says, don’t pay attention to him, he’s lying, he’s a terrible person. So it’s really the conflict between the body feeling very unsafe and the mind not wanting to accept the reality of what has happened to you is at the core of this, yeah.

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EZRA KLEIN: This is a strange idea to wrap your mind around. How is it possible that your body — which on some level is controlled by your mind. I mean, it’s getting electrical signals from the brain. How is it possible that you can have such disagreements within one system?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well, because they are somewhat different systems. The system that helps you to sleep, for example, is a system that most of us have very little control over. And so you may rationally know that it’s important to go to sleep now and life is safe and I have nothing to worry about. But something in the back of your brain, your survival brain, seems to give you messages of, I’m in danger.

Very commonly, when people have had sexual molestation or issues like that early in their lives, they are with somebody, they have a sense of desire, and suddenly their body shuts down. And they become very angry or very frozen. And they say to themselves, there’s something deeply wrong with me because I really like this person that I’m with and I’d really like to have a good time. But my body won’t let me because the primitive survival part of the brain is still stuck back then, when they felt in danger. But the frontal lobe may not register that.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the main ways you say the mind hides the score is through applying shame. You write at one point that for trauma survivors, quote, “Shame becomes the dominant emotion and hiding truth a central preoccupation.” Can you talk a bit about what shame is, what it is as an emotion, and then the role it plays for people after trauma?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah, shame is really a feeling of wanting to hide how you don’t want anybody to see you. Shame comes from having feelings that are fundamentally unacceptable. Like if you’re talking very nicely to me, and I may have a feeling that I’d like to kill this guy, and you think to yourself, what a terrible person am I to want to kill somebody who’s very nice to me. And then you say, I must be crazy, there’s something wrong with me.

As it happens to be, maybe you have a particular accent or a way of talking that may remind me on a very deep level of somebody who beat me up when I was a kid, and I have this intense emotional reaction to you, and I feel like, what’s wrong with you, Bessel, that you have such a terrible reaction to this nice person, and he probably already has picked up that I’m trying to hide something from him because I feel so angry with this person who’s actually being very nice to me. So that’s the confusion and the shame that traumatized people live with.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that struck me about that passage is — and I apologize because I can’t remember where I read this distinction. But I once read that guilt is an individual emotion and shame is a social emotion. Guilt is, I feel bad about something I did, and shame is that I am afraid the community will look bad upon me for something I did. And within this context of trauma often relating to things that happened that would create rupture of the community, it seems interesting and also profoundly sad that shame is such a constant companion to that, because it’s a way of fearing that your community will turn on you potentially if the truth were to be known.

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well, we are communal creatures, and we survive terrible things by community. So the people who are able to get themselves together as, for example, New York did after 9/11 — New York had a spectacularly effective way of dealing with the trauma of 9/11. And once you have the community to go with you, you’re not ashamed of yourself anymore because your neighbor may have the same feelings of terror and fear that you have, and you don’t feel crazy, and you don’t feel like you’re worthy of exclusion.

So one of the things that is driving this whole trauma issue is that you feel cut off from your community, you do things that embarrass you, you blow up at people. Your kids want to play with you, and you get angry with the kid, and you feel bad about being angry with the kid, and you start yelling at this child, and you go like, oh, my god, what’s wrong with me that I’m yelling with the child. And you start trying to control yourself with alcohol or with drugs. And so you have these reactions that you hope people will not see. And the longer they last, the more isolated you became.

So one of the things that I’ve seen, much to my distress, is that when we started this field in our particular window of history, it was a very communal issue. It was women got together around “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” My friend Judy Herman was running incest groups. I was running groups for veterans. And they got a lot of comfort and support from each other, and they shared their very scary thoughts and their angry thoughts. They said, oh, I feel the same way. I’ve had the same experiences. I also made people very angry who I feel close to, et cetera, et cetera.

So people to be with, as the 12 step programs so brilliantly have done, give you a sense of not being alone despite the fact that you feel very damaged and ashamed about yourself.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to put a pin in New York in 9/11 because I want to come back to that and the question of whether or not there are things we can learn as a society, whenever it will be the case that we can begin to recover as a society from Covid and whether or not there are things we can learn in that experience for how to do it well. But I want to ask about another way that we end up hiding what we feel, which is that trauma has a way of numbing people to their feelings, to their emotions, even to very basic physical sensations. And something you talk about, which I didn’t realize, is that when that happens, it becomes hard to construct a coherent sense of a self. Can you talk about how that works?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. When you are involved in your trauma and you are continuously reacting to stuff, you can’t trust yourself. And you don’t really know what’s right because you keep sort of getting into trouble again, you try something and you freeze, and you try something and you explode. And you do something and you feel terrible about yourself. And you don’t know where that comes from. And so you try to make sense out of this turmoil that’s going on in your sensory system. And if you’re lucky, you are talented and you’re a good basketball player, a good guitar player, a good accountant, and you can hide yourself in your particular talent where you can find a safe area for yourself. But when it comes to the complexity of dealing with teenage children or relationships, that may be too much for you and you keep falling apart. And so your identity becomes like, I cannot be with other people, I’m no good. And so that sense of trust in yourself, predicting yourself, knowing who you are, knowing how you react to things becomes very damaged.

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EZRA KLEIN: You have an interestingly complicated relationship to language in the book. You talk about it as both a miracle and a tyranny, and the ability to both put words to things you’ve experienced and also put words to things maybe we haven’t or ways we don’t feel about how we’ve experienced them. And so I wanted to ask it this way, because a lot of us have had experience with therapy have primarily had experience with talk therapy, where you go and you sit in a room and you get asked questions about your parents and you try to answer them. What can that do, and then what can language not do in these cases?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Language, it’s really great when you have kids as you do or grandchildren as I do, how you can see kids develop language over time and you can see how as they develop language, they’re able to communicate about what they like, what they don’t like, and to form common realities with other people. As long as you don’t have language, you really don’t know how to form a sense of community.

So having a language that allows you to define your common reality is terribly important. And of course, traditionally, psychotherapy is very much about developing that language for yourself, which is very important. But understanding why you screwed up doesn’t necessarily stop you from being screwed up. Now I know why I freeze when somebody touches me. Now I know why I get so angry. But the anger and the freeze may still happen.

So you still need to rewire the physiological system. And much of my research has been, how do you get there. And the earlier studies we did was doing yoga. And somehow, yoga helps people develop a more harmonious sense of the internal workings and the internal body sensations. Moving together, dancing together with other people, getting a sense of rhythm, which many people around the world except in the Western world use — drumming together, singing together, making music — helps to reestablish that sense of community and being in sync with the people around you. Later on, sending neurofeedback, playing computer brain interfaces where you can actually play computer games with your own brainwaves and help your brainwaves to become more rational.

And our current research is very much also in psychedelic agents, which turn out to have a very dramatically positive effect on exactly the courses of defectiveness, self-loathing, internal confusion. And our latest data really show that MDMA particularly can really help people to get a much deeper sense of who they are and a deep sense of compassion for themselves.

EZRA KLEIN: We’re going to go through a bunch of these therapies. But one thing I want to ask about them as a group is that one thing lurking around your book, and certainly that I felt reading it and that I felt in my own life as I’ve looked at various modalities for things that I’ve struggled with, is that there’s a hierarchy of status to different treatments. So it’s very accepted at this point, very rational, to take a pill for depression or anxiety. Talk therapy has a very long history. Nobody looks askance at that. That’s something intellectuals do in New York, and they sit in a chair and talk about feelings. And I don’t want to say anything bad about either of those. But then you start looking some of these other things, like E.M.D.R. which we can talk about, or dance therapy or yoga. And it feels soft. You’re like, well, that’s silly, that’s holistic, that’s — and something I think the book is trying to get at is that maybe we have come to overweight certain kinds of approaches to how we feel and underweight others. So before we get into how these therapies work, can you talk about that meta level of coming to respect therapies that maybe don’t have a lot of social status right now?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Very important point you make. It’s a cultural issue. You hear from my accent, I’m northern European, and North America is still very northern European. The world and northern Europe developed two ways of dealing with bad stuff. One of them was to drink. And so taking a pill is a respectable thing in Western culture to do, and normal people ingest stuff to make themselves feel better.

Nobody feels bad about it. Other places in the world may say, that’s weird. Then the other thing that Western people are very good at is talking. We’re not very good in singing together and moving together. You go to China after a disaster and people are doing qigong together, and so that’s interesting, or tai chi.

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And you go to Brazil in [INAUDIBLE] area, and you see people practice capoeira. You go, are they practicing capoeria because it looks good to the tourists, or are they practicing capoeira because it does something to the way they relate to their bodies and their sense of self-control?

So I think to some degree, we are trapped in this post- alcoholic paradigm that the only way to change is through taking pills or by talking. But of course, once you raise kids and you hang around with kindergarten teachers, they don’t do a lot of talking. They’d also do a lot of singing together, and a lot of moving together, and a lot of tossing balls together. And a lot of things that help you get in tune and in rhythm with each other.

And that’s not really the strong point of Western culture. So it all depends on the cultural assumptions you have about what’s helpful to people.

EZRA KLEIN: This part of the book made an interesting connection for me. I had the journalist Anna Sale on the show a couple of months ago for her book about having difficult conversations, and something she says in that book is that we used to have more institutions, and rituals, and conventions, and structures that guided us through the hard conversations, and hard parts of life.

I mean, things like churches and civic organizations. There is a lot of singing in those places, there is a lot of dancing in those places. I mean, you go to a Jewish synagogue, a lot of singing and dancing. And one point she was making is that as some of these institutions have faded in American life, we’ve been left without a template for these conversations.

But reading your book made me think of it on another level, too. I mean, a bunch of the modalities you just talked about, like capoeira or qigong, I don’t want to suggest they don’t have therapeutic roles, but they’re not primarily seen as therapeutic. They’re just a bigger part of those cultures.

And I wonder if you think that one of the issues with trauma in America is that we have lost institutions that were comfortable with ways of being embodied, even if they didn’t frame them in a “the body keeps the score” kind of framework that we used to have. And so they were playing roles that maybe they framed themselves as religious, or civic, or something else, or communal or ritual, but they were also doing things for how we process difficult issues or allowed us to get in touch with our emotions, that they had these side benefits that we didn’t understand and never knew how to measure.

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: That’s, of course, a terribly important point. But at the same time, institutions are dangerous. And sometimes you have to pay a price to keep belonging to the institution. So you may have to keep silent about an elder or a respected person doing bad things to women or to children, or to each other. So yes, there’s comfort in institutions, and yes, there is danger in institutions.

What I’m also impressed by is, in the circle that I live in, which I imagine is fairly rarefied, I see a lot of people exploring things. I see people going on meditation retreats, and singing retreats, and movement stuff, and making music together. So if you’re somewhat privileged in our culture, people oftentimes find ways of reestablishing their sense of connection, their communality.

And again, the issue of privilege and equality is a huge issue. Particularly right now with the pandemic, some people have much better opportunities and have a much easier culture that they fit in that other people do.

EZRA KLEIN: That point about the dark side of institutions is very important, and very well taken. But let’s talk about some of the things that you explore in the book and that people are exploring. And why don’t we start with one that folks may have heard of, but even if they have, even when I had, it’s very alien, which is E.M.D.R. Can you talk a bit about what E.M.D.R. is?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: EMDR is a very simple and weird technique. It is that you ask people to call up the images in their mind about horrible things that have happened to them, and to remember what they felt like in their bodies, to remember what they saw, what they heard, but you don’t talk about it. Because the moment you start talking to people, you change your story according to what you think that person wants to hear.

Talking always becomes the interpersonal process, and talking makes you adjust your reality to what people are able to listen to. So in E.M.D.R., you keep it to yourself, you see these things, and then you ask people to move their eyes from side to side in response to your fingers.

The first time I heard about it, it sounded like crazy. And my patients started to come back saying, I resolved things, I was able to just leave the memory behind. I did the first National Institute of Mental Health- funded research on E.M.D.R. Our adult onset P.T.S.D. people had like, a 78 percent cure rate. So clearly it had major positive effects.

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And so that was my introduction, which I’m very grateful for, of seeing something that’s just on the surface bizarre, but has a very profound effect, that gets us out of this post-alcoholic paradigm of talking or drugs. I said look, this is interesting, this is weird. And so I got very interested in how does it work.

And so two years ago we finally did a study where we looked at what these eye movements cause. And what we saw, it changes the connectivity between different parts of the brain. And so what we saw is that it affected neural networks. And that for me was just so cool, because this really opens up the frontier of where our treatments need to go, is how do we repair these networks where the different parts of the brain are disconnected from each other.

But the result is that when people have this inkling of trauma, they feel it as if it’s still happening now. And what we saw in our neuroimaging study of E.M.D.R. is that the circuits of the brain change, so it allows the mind to go, oh yeah, this has happened to me, but it happened back then, a long time ago. It’s not happening right now. So the E.M.D.R. was my opening that there’s ways of switching neural circuits so your perspective on the issue becomes very different.

EZRA KLEIN: Why would moving your eyes back and forth open that pathway?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: That’s the question we don’t know, except you go back to what Darwin wrote about and Pavlov wrote about it, about conditioned responses of the brain, start to react with how you move your eyes in a certain direction when there’s danger. And there’s maybe some evolutionary circuits involved with moving your eyes in the direction of threat. We don’t know, because research funding would not really allow people to go into asking these questions at this point. I wish we would.

EZRA KLEIN: And one of the other things that was interesting … I’ve not done E.M.D.R. myself, but in people I’ve known who have had a very positive reaction to it, and then in the stories you tell in your book, one of the things about it is that you don’t just tell the story of what happened to you. Oftentimes you begin to alter it.

There’s an imaginative capacity. You’re telling what happened as trauma, and then also people begin rewriting the story, saying things that didn’t happen, and that there’s some healing that seems to happen here and in some of the other modalities that we’ll talk about, from, in an open environment, imagining the way things didn’t play out.

And on some level that’s very strange to me, right? That you can heal yourself not by just understanding what happened, but talking through what didn’t happen. But it seems to be recurrent in these therapies. So can you talk a bit about the role of imagination in healing, and counterfactuals?

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: I was hoping for questions like this, this is great. So the way we deal with unpleasant situations is by imagining how we can do things differently. And that’s really the glory about the brain. It’s like, oh, if you get fires in California, but I can imagine what we can do to prevent the forest fires, to anticipate how you can make a difference.

Trauma destroys that capacity to imagine how things can be different because you get trapped in that traumatic moment. So you cannot imagine anymore that things can be different. So a very big issue in helping people to overcome trauma is to experience the possibility of alternative outcomes.

In my own work, I love to use psychodrama for that. We are involved in theater programs where people actually get to play different roles and see what it feels like in our body to take a new position, to imagine being Lady Macbeth. And so to be able to embody the experience of a powerful queen, you go like, oh, that’s what a body feels like that feels powerful. So a very important part, in my mind, of therapy is to help people to embody new realities.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s a fascinating study you bring up, which relates I think to this very, very famous study where they are still following, actually, but this one class of men from Harvard from decades, and decades, and decades ago. But something the study found is that in the people who were traumatized by their experience in war, their memories never really changed.

They told the same story 40 years later that they told right after it happened. Whereas the people who weren’t traumatized by it, their memories kept changing. The imagination was telling and retelling the story, right? The cliché of the old war stories that never quite happened, or the fishing stories where the fish keeps getting bigger.

So if you could you talk a bit about that? About the way weirdly, a healthy memory is actually a less accurate memory? Because what you need in life is not accurate memories but a story that works for you in the world.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Exactly. My friend who ran the sleep laboratory at Harvard, Bob Stickgold, showed very clearly that, with your dreams, your dreams allow you to retain what’s most relevant and to ignore what’s irrelevant, and you slowly change your story about what happens in order to prepare yourself for the future. It’s a very complex mental phenomenon, and our memories are extremely flexible.

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For example, I go to family reunions with my siblings, and we all tell stories about growing up. And we look at each other and say, you grew up in a different family for me! Have we all created a different story about our past? And that suits us. That’s the story we like to live with.

But the reality may be very different. What we first found out about trauma is that the problem with trauma is you cannot change the story. And the story is the same damn imprint, the same vision, the same body sensation as you had 10, 20, 30 years ago. And so what we need to do when we treat people is to get the normal processes of the brain to work so you can create a new story for yourself, and not get stuck on the specific sensations of back then.

EZRA KLEIN: Speaking of family reunions, can you talk about internal family systems therapy? I had never come along this until the book, but it’s fascinating.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Oh well, internal family systems is not about families. It’s about how we all have families living inside of ourselves. It’s a very important evolution, the past 30 years or so. Jung already talked about the same thing, William James talked about the same thing: that we have a multiplicity of minds. Walt Whitman wrote a poem about it, said that “I contain multitudes.”

You strike me as a very loving, and kind, and intelligent, and attuned person.

EZRA KLEIN: Oh, thank you.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: I hope that’s all there is to you. But only the people know you best know that there is other parts of you that people don’t get to see, and there may be part of us that we may not be aware of sometimes. So that we have different ways of reacting, or engaging, that can be quite different regarding the circumstances.

And what I.F.S. particularly showed us is that when terrible things happen to you, you create ways of being in the world, personalities, that help you to cope. For example, if you get chronically humiliated, you may say to yourself, “Nobody is going to ever humiliate me anymore,” and you become this staff bully who put people down before they can put you down.

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You may go home and be a very sweet and gentle person to your kid, but when you deal with a guy in the office, you may become a bully. That doesn’t mean that all of you is a bully. That means that a part of you is a bully that comes out under certain circumstances. So we never know other people until we live with them for a long period of time, because there may be very hidden parts of themselves that we may have developed back then in order to cope with particular challenges that we face growing up.

EZRA KLEIN: So my understanding of how I.F.S. works in practice is it identifies these almost little personalities in the brain. There are managers, who try to protect you from feeling unsafe, and the firefighters, who respond to moments of crisis, the exiles, who you’re trying to avoid, and that helps people identify these distinct parts of their personalities, and how those parts come out and contribute to different reactions.

And that seems like something that would be helpful even outside the context of therapy. In addition to all the wonderful qualities of mine you listed a minute ago, I do a lot of meditation. And one of the things that years of that is done has make me much more skeptical that there is just one of me in here. When you’re sitting there just watching your mind, the constant question is, well who thought that? Who thought thinking that would be a good idea? I didn’t want to be there.

And the mind has felt to me for a long time like it’s more of a corporation. You know, it has different divisions, and some of them have big budgets, and some small. But family systems seems to get at that too. That one thing that actually causes people frustration and shame is they are told they’re in control or should be in control of their minds.

And then it’s very frustrating, for me as somebody who has struggled a lot with anxiety and obsessive rumination, it’s very frustrating to not be able to control my own mind. Because that feels like I’m failing. And the idea that it’s actually not something I should be able to do, that it’s not just one singular mind, but a lot of different minds or something vying to be heard, there’s some relief in that. And it seems to me some real accuracy in it.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: It’s very helpful in relationships. That you can only survive a relationship if you can really understand how your partner gets very uptight, or angry, or shut off, or something, in response to certain things. And if you start understanding that it is different part. And let’s say if your wife, this probably never happens to you, but perhaps to many other people, someday may say to you, “I hate you!”

And for you to know, oh, she’s now triggered and there was something I did that caused that angry part of her to come out. I know that that angry part is not the most reasonable part of her, so this is not a time for me to start arguing with her that I’m not the most selfish person in the whole world, but you know that that part is out, and you try to help her to know that this too shall pass. And I can see that I do things that really bother you, and I’ll try to work on that.

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And she can say, I can try to negotiate with a very angry, frustrated part. A little therapy might help in helping me to know where it came from, so that I don’t get so out of control angry with you when you don’t do the dishes.

EZRA KLEIN: The single best piece of advice I ever got on marriage is that there is no use in thinking of your partner as a single stable entity that exists separate from you. There’s only your partner in a dynamic with you. There’s only who you also bring out in your partner, that they’ll be somebody totally different with other people. But so the question always, if things are going right or wrong, is, like, which parts of the two of you are being brought out in relationship? Not just, who is this person and do I like them?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: See, and Dick Schwartz extended what you just said in your relationship to yourself. And to really understand that you may have very different reactions at different times, and to really get to appreciate that certain things make me very upset, and to really start making decisions about do I want to give in to that, or do I want to do something about it? Or how to really start getting a perspective on this landscape, and make a discovery inside of yourself.

EZRA KLEIN: An intervention you discuss glancingly in the book, but it sounds from something you said earlier like you’ve been doing more work on, is psychedelic therapy. It’s been a lot more research since you did the book, it sounds like you’re actually behind some of it. So given what we know now, I’m curious how you understand the role of psychedelics potentially in helping people deal with trauma?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: I think psychedelics are a true revolution. And it’s partially a revolution because we don’t know how they work. There’s all these explanations: oh, the serotonin system or the default mode network. But what has happened in the world we live in is that people pay varied attention to what happens in the mind.

And what we see in our MDMA research is that MDMA seems to really trigger a capacity to look at yourself in a more compassionate way, in the same way that MDMA is being used at parties. And when we do our work, very painful, painful, old things tend to come up. But people are able to go there and not get overwhelmed by shame, or overwhelmed by the horror.

And they’re able to go there and say, yeah, this is what happened to me. Oh my God, that was awful. And actually, I’m working on that paper right now, which I think is a very big deal, actually, is what you see is a dramatic increase in self compassion. People say, I now can really see what I went through, and how awful it was, and how I have survived it.

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And what’s fascinating to me is that it gives people a sense of perspective, of who they are, and their sense of self gets very much enhanced. This is who I am, this is what I went through, and this is what I’ve learned from experience. It’s really very dramatic, and I think it’s the sort of thing that may happen with very long term psychotherapy, but I think very profound things can happen in a very short period of time.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m very fascinated by the space, both for personal and professional reasons. And something I was thinking about, in the context of some of the other treatments you bring up, is the why. And I’m thinking here less about MDMA, which as you say has a profound self compassion effect, and more about things like mushrooms and LSD.

But something that came to mind, so Robin Carhart-Harris, who is at UCSF now and is one of the leading researchers on psychedelics, he’s put forward this model which argues that the mechanism by which psychedelics work is that they sort of relax our mind’s confidence in its own internal models, and pattern matching, and stories, which then allows us to kind of experience some of these deeper emotions we have and begin assigning meaning and stories to them, too.

Which sounds actually a lot like E.M.D.R., sounds a lot like, in a way, what internal family systems work is doing. That ability to begin sensing something else and then trying to tell a story about it that your brain will actually believe, and begin to give weight to. And I wonder if you think there’s something to that, that it’s a relaxing of the model that is helpful here?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well, certainly Carhart-Harris has done more work on it than any of the rest of us. And I think his formulation approximates what we see here. I think the big thing in terms of trauma, is that when you’re traumatized you live in a very narrow world. A world of fear, and trying to stay under control, and being afraid to get out of control, or being afraid to get overwhelmed.

So your world becomes more and more constrained. Pierre Janet already wrote it about 150 years ago. How you get narrow minded, and what Janet said back then also, he says, when you get traumatized, the mind has a hard time continuing to grow. The mind gets stuck in its effort to try to control itself, it becomes very hard to open your mind up to new things.

So when you’re traumatized, you oftentimes tend to have the same patterns over and over again. You have a hard time learning from experience. Your mind closes down. I think what psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD do is they open up a new universe inside of yourself that somehow you need to cope with.

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The way you phrased it is a little bit too deliberately cognitive for my mind. The mind does something to become aware — but even aware is too conscious — of that I’m a much smaller piece in the much larger universe, and a universal experience through these substances, which Carhart-Harris and Pollan and those people who also write about, is how you get to see your relative position in the universe.

At the same time as you experience yourself as quite unique and special, you also get to see the rest of the universe as also being unique and special. And universally, regardless of the culture, you always end up with a feeling of, I’m a part of a much larger universe. But I’m an essential part of that part of the universe.

Which is, of course, the opposite of being traumatized. When you’re traumatized, you go, I’m messed up, nobody else is, everybody’s having a life and I don’t, and you feel alienated. And that sense of what all these mind altering substances do, of opening yourself up, being a part of a larger whole, is very significant also.

EZRA KLEIN: So MDMA combined with therapy is now in phase III trials in the F.D.A. for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. You have psilocybin at other levels of the regulatory process. There’s very much a vogue for all this. Do you worry that it has risks we’re not paying attention to?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: I think societies have had a very difficult time legalizing and dealing with the outflow of these massive mind-expanding agents. And I’m very curious to what degree we’re able to stay reasonable about it, to be careful about it, to not have it get out of control. And I’m really delighted with Rick Doblin, who runs the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, M.A.P.S., which forms part of his studies. He is working very hard to keep it very careful. But I’m very worried that things will get out of control, yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: You were very much part of the rise of just pharmaceuticals to treat mental illness. You did one of the early studies on Prozac. And in the book, you have a very complicated relationship with these drugs, which you prescribe and believe they can help people. But you also worry that we overuse them, that we use drugs to ignore signals, or numb signals the body is sending, so that it becomes easier to not do things. How do you think about that space now?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: So I was a very young person. So I worked in the hospital and did a lot of the early studies and did some myself, and there was an enormous promise that chemicals were the answers. And people said, mental illness is a chemical illness, and if we just find the right chemical, we’ll cure it.

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And billions of dollars on the chemical studies really haven’t yielded all that much in terms of understanding or treating mental illness. But the sad thing is that psychiatry as a profession became addicted to drugs. And so the notion that oh, if you just find the right symptom, you’ll find the right drug, still prevails among many professionals.

There are chemicals that can be somewhat helpful. They can help you to sleep better, to be less uptight. But they’re chemicals that really interfere with your natural capacity to deal with these things. And for me, very quickly after I did these early studies with not bad results, they certainly did not promise total happiness, really started to concentrate on what inborn mechanisms we have to deal with our own anxiety, and with our depression.

And so I really discovered the world of the body and tantric traditions, the yoga traditions and breathing traditions, and musical traditions that show that we actually are capable of rearranging our own internal physiological systems. And I wish that in every classroom in America they would teach the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and self regulation, from kindergarten through 12th grade, of what can we do to calm ourselves down, to stay focused? What sort of activities can we engage in to feel in control of ourselves?

And so that we get away from this culture of, if you don’t feel right you take a drug, instead of if you don’t feel right you go for a bicycle ride. If you don’t feel right you go to yoga class. If you don’t feel right, you may need to do some body work to help your body to calm, or you need to go to do some tango dancing, or you need to do something to rearrange your relationship to your internal physiological state.

EZRA KLEIN: Where do you think psychiatry and mental health as a profession is in its evolution? And I mean it in this way, that it all feels very scientific. And there’s a lot of studies and you can read journals. And at the same time, including when reading your book, it’s remarkable how crude the tools we have are. I mean, we have medications that do things that we don’t really understand, but seem to have some help for some people.

We have things like E.M.D.R., which do things we don’t understand, but help some people, or theater therapy, or yoga. We know exercise is good. We don’t always exactly know why. Now we’re exploring psychedelics, which have profound effects and seem to, with the right level of integration, help with trauma. We’re very like, kind of throwing stuff against the wall and finding some things unexpectedly work in ways we don’t fully understand.

So do you think that there are just limits to what we can access in the kind of deep psyche? Or do you think that 100 years from now, or 50 years from now, our treatments today are just going to seem incredibly crude, like we just had not discovered germ theory or something?

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: All of the above, and none, to some degree. I don’t think we are throwing everything against the wall. We’re doing actually the opposite. We’re looking for yet another drug doing the same old stuff that we have done. We are looking at yet another talk therapy that will make people into sensible human beings.

We have, as a discipline, completely ignored our early data, when we first started to image trauma in the brain, that trauma sits on the right side of the brain. And so these right brain phenomena are lasting phenomena. And so the time has come to really start looking at what else can we do, because basically the funding has been very much focused on talking therapies and drug therapies.

So no, we haven’t thrown things against the wall. I’m still waiting for the study of comparing tango dancing with cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m a scientist, it’s an empirical question. But I put my money on tango dancing over C.B.T., by and large, for some people. So I think we need to explore much more.

Is the world open for it? Yes and no. For example, I was able to start a foundation, and rather than become a recipient of funding, I’m able to fund some studies. Now the very first study we are funding is a study of touch and trauma. Everybody who knows anything about trauma, is that some of these people have very varied and oftentimes very anomalous responses to human touch.

People have won Nobel prizes about vision, Nobel prizes about audition. Touch is basically off the wall. The main way that people get comfort in life is through being touched. Once you have been touched inappropriately, touch maybe can defeat this. Let’s study touch.

We are synchronous human beings. The source of pleasure in our lives is to be in sync with each other. The reason why I like talking with you is because, whenever you ask a question, I go, “Boy this guy really gets it.” I feel you’re in sync with me, which gives me a tremendous sense of pleasure. So being in sync with people is critical for our sense of fun, of feeling alive. So how can we increase people’s sense of synchronicity with other human beings?

So I don’t know how it will work itself out, because in the world we live in, everything gets monetized. And so we tend to be able to study very expensive technical treatments more than simple treatments. And so where things will go, God knows. But boy, are we missing the boat on exploring a much larger number of options. Yes, up to now we have.

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EZRA KLEIN: On the point of touch, that there are a couple lines in your book that have really etched themselves in me. And one in particular here where you say that “the things that calm adults are the same things that calm children. Being held, being rocked, and being shushed.” And I don’t know. I just found that very moving.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: It’s true! You see it through to have your own kid go — yeah, he’s very young. But I need to do the same thing for him as I need myself.

EZRA KLEIN: But at some point, we make it very difficult for adults to ask for those things. You can maybe ask your partner, and that’s it. Particularly, I’ll speak more for men here, because I understand male relationships a little bit better, but you really, as a man, you can’t go to your male friends and ask to be rocked and shushed. [LAUGHTER]

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah, a little bit, the culture has something to do with it.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, and it just strikes me as a shame. To the point you were just making, we spend so many billions of dollars, and so much effort to get the medications we think will help, and to see psychiatrists. And we’ve also cut ourselves off from a lot of just very cheap things, right? We have culturally cut ourselves off from a lot of touch, right? We often live in very atomized ways.

I mean there’s very kind of cheap, natural things that are part of our deep history that we give to our children, or at least in many homes, that, I don’t know, we’ve just decided are a little somehow uncouth, and we suffer for it.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: A very big part of what you’re talking about is our socially stratified system, and our humongous income inequality. I sent my kids to schools where there was a lot of theater, music, dancing, creative writing, sports. They were always moving and creating things. The poorer you are, the less you get any of these things.

EZRA KLEIN: We’re going to come back, we’re definitely going to come back at the end to the bigger question of inequality. But before we do that, I want to reverse the way we’ve been looking at this. We’ve been talking about the way traumatized people are disconnected from their communities. And I want to talk a little bit about what it means to be in community with somebody who is traumatized.

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A lot of the patients you talk about in the book, a lot of the behaviors that traumatized people exhibit, they’re very alienating to those around them. They’re difficult, they can be dangerous. Can you just talk a bit about what trauma is like for those who love someone who is traumatized?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: It is very hard to be with someone who is traumatized, who suddenly shuts down, suddenly blows up. And it takes an enormous toll on relationships. And oftentimes partners get blamed for the other party’s behavior. And so it really finds its way into relationships.

And so, groups of survivors become very important. Groups of incest survivors, groups of people who were molested by Catholic priests, people who struggle with addiction, helping each other say, I know what you’re talking about. I’m not here primarily to condemn you, but to keep you company in your struggle. For a survivor, it’s terribly important.

In a couple’s relationship, that’s harder, because you have a job to do, raising kids, et cetera, et cetera. But these support groups can be very good to give people a sense of being a member of the human race. And once you stop feeling like a member of the human race, your chances for wanting to survive become very slim.

EZRA KLEIN: How do you advise people to deal with the very difficult question of what you can ask of someone they love? I mean, the tension between recognizing the reality that people’s actions are often largely out of their control. They don’t want to treat us badly, they don’t want to disconnect, they don’t want to pull back, and also that we don’t want to be mistreated, or taken advantage of, or hurt.

And that there is something you can ask of some people, right? Sometimes you can ask somebody to treat you better. And then sometimes you need to recognize that there is healing that has to happen before they’re going to be able to do that. But it’s often hard to know which situation is which. Do you have advice for people who feel like they’re in that situation?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. I think that’s really — to a large degree that’s what relationships are all about. It’s the continuous negotiation of, what can we be for each other? A relationship is about being there for each other. So my job, if you and I are in a relationship, is indeed to try to create situations in which you can feel safe and be productive.

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But your demands may be too much for me. And I need to be able to say, honey, I cannot do it. I really need to sleep in a bedroom by myself if you wake up screaming in nightmares all night, and it must be very hard for you if I cannot sleep in the same bed with you. But we both have needs. And these are very hard to negotiate. And I think you need to have a lot of consciousness, and a lot of awareness to actually be able to sit down and to identify these issues, and to talk about these issues.

But that is the nature of relationships. What can I do, what can I not do, what are the expectations, to what degree can I fulfill these obligations, and to what degree do you need to get the resources for yourself from somebody else? Because I’m depleted, I cannot give you what you’re asking for.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to go back then to this question of the broader society that you were talking about a minute ago, with schools and inequality. On one level, it’s clear I think that providing child care, and pre-K, and well funded schools, and universal health care, and better access to mental health services would help make a society that is better at helping people.

But on some level, that also can’t be the whole answer, because a lot of middle and upper class people’s lives are full of trauma, too. So I’m curious what you think are the structures and institutions, or even just social mores, that would help us become healthier, and help people either be traumatized less often or help them more once they are?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: It’s of course, very complex, and nobody has the answers. But creating situations where parents can safely take care of their kids is terribly important. And of course, that is much easier when you have money than if you don’t have money. So almost every other society has universal health care and has support, which we lack.

So for me, this is really a very big issue. Yes, it’s because of the system we live in, the majority of people I treat are people who come from relatively fortunate circumstances. Because if you come from very low education and you don’t have a high school diploma, there’s no way you will find a way of getting to see an experienced mental health professional.

EZRA KLEIN: What interventions for kids do you think would do the most good? I mean, if you could wave your wand and put some new structures into law that they have elsewhere, or that they don’t have elsewhere, what would the first couple of them be?

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BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Well first of all, child care, that you don’t have to be locked up with the same person all the time. It’s very important for a kid to have the experience of being exposed to more than one adult, and to see that other people have different ways of doing business. So you can actually see, oh my mom gets very upset, as opposed to, oh, that’s the world I live in.

The second piece is to be involved in rhythmical activities with other kids. Moving together with other kids, dancing together with other kids, playing with other kids, exploring the world with other kids, is so at the core of what creates a healthy mind and a healthy brain. That means that there is space, and that people can actually explore things safely. You can actually go out with your friends and try things out, so you don’t live in an environment where there is so much danger outside the door, or inside the door, that you cannot play anymore.

So I would say the most important thing for traumatized kids is to go to places where they can play. And that is, even in some very well known children’s institutions, there are hardly any places to play. Hardly any place to move around. To sing, to play, to dance, to run. So kids are supposed to really move. And move with other kids.

And basically, our systems are made to move in synchrony with the people around us. When you get traumatized, you get out of sync on every most elementary level. What does the military do? They have people move together and march together, to get them back in sync with each other.

EZRA KLEIN: And it sounds to me like you think the same is actually true for adults, that you need space to play, to move, to be in synchronicity with others, to sing, to dance, to have what gets called collective effervescence.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Absolutely. Of course, you get more frozen as we grow older. But cooking with people, serving meals to people, pouring that wine to other people, still that moving together is a terribly important way of feeling our communality with other human beings.

EZRA KLEIN: And then I want to return to a question I said we’d tackle here at the end, which is you talked about the ways in which the post- 9/11 period in New York City was actually well handled from the perspective of trauma. One thing that led to us doing this podcast is your book has been back up, all the way up on the bestseller lists.

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And I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that has to do with people sensing a lot is wrong in themselves and in society, as we do and, in some cases, don’t recover from the coronavirus. So we’ve just been through a society- wide trauma, we are still going through it. But at some point, there’s going to be the potential maybe for recovery. Are there lessons from New York City after 9/11 for countries when they finally can turn to trying to recover from this pandemic?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: To my mind, the biggest lesson from New York was, for one thing, everybody knew the reality of what had happened. And nobody blamed anybody on the inside. So that immediately puts the issue of secrecy and shame off the map, which is fairly rare when it comes to trauma.

The next thing is that people actually did things. People got together in neighborhood groups, they got together with their family. And there’s a lot of communality in New York. New York temporarily became a very kind city. People really were lovely with each other. They made space for each other. It was almost unrecognizable.

The other thing is that money poured into New York. Something like half of all Americans donated money. So there was no dearth of resources. So many people who are traumatized have no resources. They have no money. We don’t have universal health care. If you don’t have good insurance, it’s very hard to get many of the treatments that I talk about.

So the issue of access and resources is huge. And if we wanted to have good health care systems, we need to have universal health care. We cannot have one health care system for the rich and a completely different health care system for the poor.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a good place to end. So always, our final question. What are the three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. Eve Ensler, who now calls herself V, wrote a beautiful book called “The Apology.” Her whole work comes from having been severely molested by her dad. And I think her book, and her other work also, is an extraordinary testimony of courage, of facing up to yourself, and to your experience, and then going on. She’s just marvelous.

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The other book that comes to mind is “Love at Goon Park.” It’s a book about Harry Harlow and his laboratory, his discovery of attachment in monkeys. So just a marvelous book about us as human beings, being very much like interactive with other people. And Harry Harlow is a very flawed human being discovering that.

Another book that I think is great, an Australian guy by the name of [Richard] Flanagan, who wrote a book called “The Narrow Road to the [Deep] North,” about war experiences and how war experiences impact on people and get split off. I could just go on, and on, and on. Karl Marlantes’s book about “What It’s Like to Go to War” is an extraordinary description, up there with Tolstoy’s, about the war experience, and his own journey to recovery. Those are just three or four examples.

EZRA KLEIN: Bessel van der Kolk, your book is “The Body Keeps the Score,” it’s remarkable. Thank you very much.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Gelvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

Real conversations. Ideas that matter. So many book recommendations.

Listen to “The Ezra Klein Show”: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

Read Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers Online by Xlibris US | Books

Read Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers Online by Xlibris US | Books

Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers

Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers

546 pages
15 hours

Included in your membership!
at no additional cost

Description

The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members
of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived
through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhoodand yet in
most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors
during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent
methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human
guinea experiments some of them participated in.
Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the
most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends
Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the
Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.

Read Traditional Chinese Medicine Made Easy! Online by Aileen Lozada Kim and Clare Baggaley | Books

Read Traditional Chinese Medicine Made Easy! Online by Aileen Lozada Kim and Clare Baggaley | Books




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Traditional Chinese Medicine Made Easy!: A Beginner's Guide to Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine


By Aileen Lozada Kim and Clare Baggaley
31 pages
3 hours

Included in your membership!
at no additional cost

Description


The first acupuncture and herbal medicine guide book exclusively made easy for young readers to understand. Packed with fun facts, colorful illustrations, quizzes, and simple case studies. Traditional Chinese Medicine is usually difficult for beginners to understand, but finally Traditional Chinese Medicine

Children's
All categories
PUBLISHER:
Aileen Lozada Kim
RELEASED:
Jul 10, 2020
ISBN:
9781735057521
FORMAT:
Book

About the author
AKAileen Lozada Kim


Aileen Lozada Kim is a Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioner who is passionate about natural medicine and wellness. She studied at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing DongFang Hospital and Yin Yang Balance Center in Miami, Florida (yinyangbalancecenter.com). Aileen has contributed to medical research and hopes to educate children about the power of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

알라딘: 일본의 종교문화와 비판불교

알라딘: 일본의 종교문화와 비판불교

일본의 종교문화와 비판불교   
길희성,류제동,정경일 (지은이)동연출판사2020-09-17







정가
16,000원
판매가



책소개
‘비판불교의 대승불교사상 비판’과 ‘비판불교의 일본 사회 및 종교 비판’을 다룬 책이다. 종교학자 세 분, 길희성, 류제동, 정경일 선생이 장기간에 걸쳐 연구와 토론을 통해 나온 결실로서, 일본의 불교와 사회문화를 이해하고, 한국과 세계 불교계의 동향을 바라보는 일에도 도움이 될 것이다.


목차


책을 펴내며 _ 5

머리글╻일본 사회, 종교문화 그리고 비판불교 _ 길희성

제1부 _ 비판불교의 대승불교사상 비판 _ 류제동

1장╻대승불교사상 비판 (1)
1. 유가행파 비판
1) 본성주종성(本性住種性)에 관하여
2) 진여소연연종자(眞如所緣緣種子)에 관하여
3) ‘식’(識)에 관하여
2. 여래장(불성)사상 비판
3. 본각사상(本覺思想) 비판
1) 하카마야 노리아키의 본각사상 비판
2) 마츠모토 시로의 본각사상 개념에 대한 비판과 불성현재론(佛性顯在論)
3) ‘본각사상’과 󰡔대승기신론󰡕(大乘起信論)

2장╻대승불교사상 비판 (2)
1. 길장(吉藏)의 공사상 비판
2. 󰡔유마경󰡕 비판
3. 선불교 비판
1) 󰡔육조단경󰡕 비판
2) 󰡔임제록󰡕 비판
3) 도겐(道元) 선사의 12권본 󰡔정법안장󰡕(正法眼藏) 비판

제2부 _ 비판불교의 일본 사회 및 종교 비판 _ 정경일

3장╻비판불교의 일본 사회 비판
1. 비판의 시작: 마치다사건
2. “일본”에 대한 신앙
3. 사회 비판으로서의 종교 비판
4. 현실 긍정과 차별의 (비)불교적 논리: 본각사상과 공간적 연기 이해
5. 비판불교의 사회 비판에 대한 문제제기
1) 여래장/불성, 본각사상과 사회적 평등
2) 사회윤리적 실천의 비판불교적 근거

4장╻비판불교의 일본 종교문화 비판
1. 세속적 일본 사회의 종교혼합주의
2. 신도와 외래 종교
3. 역사적 고찰: 신불습합에서 신불분리까지
4. 비판불교의 종교혼합주의 비판
5. 결론을 대신하여: 비판불교가 더 답해야 할 것

5장╻비판불교에 대한 세계 불교학계의 반응
1. ‘폭풍’이 지나간 자리
2. 비판불교의 소위 ‘보편성’ 문제
3. 비판의 태도에 대한 비판
4. 서양 불교학계의 관심: ‘신앙’
5. 비판불교는 근본주의적 ‘불교신학’인가?
6. 비판불교의 ‘기체론’ 비판과 ‘사회 비판’에 대한 비판
7. 비판불교의 자기비판: 무아(無我)의 길

종합적 비평╻ 비판불교와 한국 종교 _ 길희성
1. 비판불교, 불교 근본주의, 학문의 가치중립성의 문제
2. 붓다의 연기설과 무아설 그리고 사회윤리적 비판의식
3. 기체설과 사회 비판의식

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책속에서



비판불교의 불교 내적 비판 정신은 어디에 기인하는가 하는 의문이 제기된다. 간단히 말해서 그것은 비판불교가 붓다의 근본 사상으로 간주하고 있는 것에 기초하고 있다. 거기에 입각해서 비판불교는 그 후에 전개된, 좀 더 정확히 말해, 인도 대승불교 중기 이후로부터 전개된 유식사상(唯識思想), 특히 여래장(如來藏)사상과 불성(佛性)사상... 더보기
“여래장사상은 불교가 아니다”라는 마츠모토의 주장은 그 자신의 술회에 따르면 세 가지 측면에서 이루어진다. 첫째로 여래장사상이란 무엇이며, 무엇을 여래장사상이라고 보는가, 둘째로 불교란 무엇이며, 무엇을 불교라고 보는가, 셋째로 첫째와 둘째가 동일한 것이 아니라는 점이다. 이 가운데서 불교란 무엇인가라는 문제는 불교학이 탐구하는 ... 더보기
많은 사람들이 무상(無常)을 하나의 곡선이 끊임없이 매순간마다 미묘하게 변화하고 있어서 잠시도 멈춤이 없는 것처럼 이해한다. 다시 말해서 이 곡선은 직선을 포함하지 않는 순수한 곡선이며, ‘끊임없는 변화’(constant change)라는 것이다. 그러나 곡선에서 직선을 완전히 배제하려고 하면 곡선은 최종적으로 하나의 원으로 귀착... 더보기
마츠모토에 따르면 ‘순수한 일본주의’를 가장 대표적으로 보여주는 사람은 미시마 유키오다. 마츠모토는 미시마의 이상적이고 일관적인 일본주의를 다음과 같이 기술한다. “그에게 일본은 절대적 가치였고, 너무나 그러해서 그는 일본이 없는 자기 자신의 존재 내지 천황이 없는 일본의 존재는 상상도 할 수 없었고, 그것의 논리적 결론은 천황이... 더보기
종교적 혼합주의가 사회적 차별과 억압을 초래한다는 비판불교의 주장은 다른 종교 연구자들에 의해서도 지지된다. 예를 들면, 신불습합은 신도와 불교의 역할분담의 형태로 나타나는데, 조셉 스패는 일본의 신도는 피안의 일은 불교에 넘기고 차안의 일에 전념했다고 한다. 여기서 스패가 강조하는 것은 그리스도교와 달리 신도는 세계를 변화시키지... 더보기
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저자 및 역자소개
길희성 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

서울대학교 철학과를 졸업한 후 미국 예일 대학교 신학부에서 석사학위를, 하버드 대학교 대학원에서 박사학위(비교종교학)를 받았다. 서울대학교 철학과 교수, 서강대학교 종교학과 교수를 역임했으며 2011년부터 현재까지 서강대학교 종교학과 명예교수이자 대한민국학술원 회원으로 있다. 현재 강화도 고려산 자락에 ‘심도학사-공부와 명상의 집’을 열어 종교간 울타리를 자유롭게 넘나드는 영성을 추구하는 일에 매진하고 있다. 주요 저서로 『아직도 교회 다니십니까』, 『종교에서 영성으로』, 『종교 10강』, 『일본의 종교문화와 비판불교』, 『인문학의... 더보기


최근작 : <일본의 정토 사상>,<지눌의 선禪 사상>,<마이스터 에크하르트의 영성 사상> … 총 39종 (모두보기)

류제동 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

서강대학교 대학원에서 종교학(불교학 전공)으로 석사학위와 박사학위를 받았다. 현재 성균관대학교 유학동양학과 강사로 있다. 주요 저서로 『하느님과 일심: 윌프레드 캔트웰 스미스의 종교학과 대승기신론의 만남』(2007), 『텅 빈 충만: 공의 하느님』(John Cobb 외 저, 황경훈 류제동 역, 2009), 『보리수 가지치기: 비판불교를 둘러싼 폭풍』(역서, 2015) 등이 있다.


최근작 : <일본의 종교문화와 비판불교>,<종교는 돈을 어떻게 넘어서는가> … 총 2종 (모두보기)

정경일 (지은이)
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유니온신학대학원(Union Theological Seminary)에서 참여불교와 해방신학을 비교 연구한 논문으로 박사학위를 받았다. 현재 새길기독사회문화원 원장으로 활동하고 있다. 한국민중신학회, 연구공동체 ‘평화와 신학’, ‘대구와 카레’ 등에서 활동하고 있다. 공저로 Terrorism, Religion, and Global Peace, 『사회적 영성』, 『고통의 시대, 자비를 생각한다』, 『한국적 작은 교회론』, 『종교 안에서 종교를 넘다』, 『민중신학, 고통의 시대를 읽다』 등이 있고, 역서로는 『신성한 목소리가 부른다』, 『... 더보기


최근작 : <바이러스에 걸린 교회>,<일본의 종교문화와 비판불교>,<아픔 넘어> … 총 10종 (모두보기)


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비판불교가 바라본 일본의 불교와 사회문화

제목으로 제시된 “비판불교”라는 어구는 이 책이 불교를 비판하려는 의도로 집필되었다는 인상을 줄 수 있지만, 그것은 이제 고유명사가 된 일본의 학문적인 조류을 지칭한다. 일본 고마자와대학 불교학 교수인 마츠모토 시로는 1986년에 개최된 국제학술대회에서 “여래장사상은 불교가 아니다”라는 도발적인 논문을 발표함으로써 불교의 근본 사상에 대한 논쟁을 일으키기 시작했고, 수년 뒤 같은 대학의 하카야마 노리아키 교수가 쓴 『비판불교』라는 책 제목이 그대로 이러한 학문적 운동의 이름이 되었다. 세계 학계가 이런 흐름을 주목한 이유는 이 운동이 단지 학문적인 불교 연구에 그치지 않고, 불교사상과 연계된 일본의 토착문화와 사회, 나아가 혼합주의적 종교문화까지 비판하고 나섰기 때문이다. 따라서 이 책은 크게 2부로 나누어 제1부에서는 ‘비판불교의 대승불교사상 비판’을 다루고 제2부에서는 ‘비판불교의 일본 사회 및 종교 비판’을 다룬다. 그리고 머리글과 종합적 비평을 전과 후에 배치해 구성했다. 이 책은 종교학자 세 분, 길희성, 류제동, 정경일 선생이 장기간에 걸쳐 연구와 토론을 통해 나온 결실로서, 일본의 불교와 사회문화를 이해하고, 한국과 세계 불교계의 동향을 바라보는 일에도 도움이 될 것이다. 접기

함석헌의 바가바드기타 주석에 나타나는인용 모음 주석법의 재해석* 나혜숙**

 인도철학제46집(2016.4),75~100쪽

http://krindology.com/db/docs/03.ip46_NHS.pdf

함석헌의 바가바드기타 주석에 나타나는인용 모음 주석법의 재해석*


나혜숙**


Ⅰ들어가는 말. 

Ⅱ 힌두 주석 전통에서 바라본 이 문헌의 연구 가치.

Ⅲ 인용 모음에 대한 기존 해석들. 

Ⅳ 독자의 기타 이해에 초점을 둔 인용 모음. 

Ⅴ 나가는 말.


요약문 [주요어: 함석헌, 바가바드 기타, 주석법, 인용 모음, 해석, 독자]


본 연구는 함석헌(1901-1989)의 바가바드 기타 주석에 나타나는 인용 모음 주석법을 재조명한다. 기존의 해석들과 달리, 본 연구에서는 함석헌이 인용 모음 주석법을 사용하는 이유가 독자의 기타 이해를 돕는 데 있다고 주장하고 다섯 가지 근거를 제시한다.

첫째, 함석헌은 마치 초횡의 노자익처럼 기타에 대한 좋은 주들 의 요점만 모아 한 자리에서 볼 수 있는 편리함을 추구한다. 이러한 의 미에서 함석헌의 기타 주석서를 ‘기타익’이라고 부를 수 있을 것이다. 둘째, 함석헌은 기타 본문에는 없는 해제와 서론을 만들었다. 도움 없 이 기타를 읽기 어려웠던 경험이 있는 그는, 해제와 서론을 만드는 것은 독자가 기타를 읽는 데 도움이 되기 위해서라고 직접 밝혔다. 셋째, 함석헌은 어려운 단어, 구절, 시구에 여러 번역과 주석을 제공한 다. 자신의 인도 철학 지식에 한계가 있으므로 어려운 부분에 대해서는 여러 번역과 주석을 제공해 독자가 읽고 스스로 뜻을 가늠하게 하기 위 해서이다. 넷째, 함석헌은 다른 주석을 인용할 때 논리적인 핵심만 인용 하지 않고 다른 주석가들이 사용하는 인용까지 포함시키는 일이 잦다. 그 이유는 되도록 다양한 인용을 통해 생소한 기타를 이해하기가 수 월하다고 생각했기 때문이라고 짐작할 수 있다.

마지막으로, 함석헌은 여섯 명의 기타 주석가 가운데 라다크리슈난 의 주석을 압도적으로 인용한다. 라다크리슈난은 문헌을 풀이하고, 동서 양의 예시를 풍부하게 들고, 중세 힌두 주석가들도 인용하는 주석가이 므로, 기타의 내용을 조금 더 알기 쉽게 소개하기에 적합했을 것이다. 이 사실들에 근거를 둘 때, 함석헌의 인용 주석법은 선별한 모음이고 독자의 기타 이해를 돕기 위한 의도에서 나온 결과라고 이해할 수 있

다.

 

* 이 논문은 2015년 대한민국 교육부와 한국연구재단의 지원을 받아 수행된 연구임(NRF-2015S1A5B5A07042502).

** 서강대학교 종교연구소 연구원. rapanda1@hanmail.net



Ⅰ. 들어가는 말


바가바드 기타(이하 기타로 약칭)는 고대 힌두 경전 가운 데 한국에도 잘 알려진 경전이다. 한국에 처음 이 경전이 번역된 것은 산스크리트어의 영역서(英譯書)1)를 인도학자 박석일이 번역 한 바가바드 기타로 1978년2) 정음사에서 출간되었다. 박석일의 번역은 중역(重譯)이기는 하지만 힌두교의 대표적 경전군에 속하 는 기타를 국내에 처음 소개했다는 점에서 의미가 있다. 이 번 역서 다음에 출간된 역서는 앞의 경우와 마찬가지로 산스크리트 어의 영역서3)를 함석헌(1901-1989)이 번역하고 주석을 단 바가

 

1) Prabhavananda, Swami & Christopher Isherwood, trans.(1st ed. 1944; rep. ed. 1972).

2) 몇 군데에서 초판으로 소개된 1987년 박석일의 바가바드 기타는 중판(重版)이다.

3) 함석헌은 어떤 영역서(英譯書)를 저본으로 번역했는지 서지 정보를 남기지 않았다. 그러나 그가 주석서 첫머리에 언급한

“에브리맨스(Everyman’s) 문고판의 바가바드기타”(함석헌 1996: 56)를

단서로 하고 여러 번역을 대조한 결과, 그가 저본으로 한 기타는 다음의

영역서에 포함된 한 부분임을 알 수 있었다. Nicol Macnicol, ed.(1938),

HinduScriptures:HymnsfromtheRigveda,FiveUpanishads,the

Bhagavadgita,Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent & Sons

Ltd.이다. 이 책은 이미 영역되어 출판되었던 힌두 경전들을 모아 편집한 책이다. 리그 베다와 우파니샤드는 막스 뮐러(Max Müller)의 번역, 기타는 라이오넬 바넷(Lionel D. Barnett)의 번역이고, 라빈드라나트 타고르(Rabindranath Tagore)가 서문을 썼다. 이 1938년 판본은, 로버트 제너(Robert C. Zaehner)가 새로 번역, 편집하고 서문을 쓴 개정판이 1966년 같은 출판사에서 나오기 전까지 꾸준히 인쇄를 거듭했다(1943,

1948, 1957, 1959, 1963. 1965). 이 1938년 판본에 실린 바넷의 기타

번역(책 제목은 Bhagavad-Gita:orTheLord’sSong)은 1905년 첫 출간된 이후 여러 번 증쇄했기 때문에 어떤 판본인지 확실하지 않다.

1906년부터 1982년까지 에브리맨스 문고판의 출판 역사를 편찬한

바드 기타이다. 함석헌의 역주서는 스무 권의 함석헌전집 중 한 권으로 한길사에서 1985년에 출간되었다. 이후 기타에 대한 많은 번역서, 해설서, 논문이 출판되었다.

기타에 대해 국내에서 두 번째로 발간된 역서이자 최초의 주 석서이기도 한 함석헌의 기타 주석에는 눈에 띄게 두드러지는 점이 있다. 그것은 이 문헌이 기타에 대한 다른 주석, 힌두교 외 의 종교 경전, 문학 작품의 인용을 모아놓은 방법으로 일관되게 구성되어 있는 것이다. 논자(論者)가 논점을 근거를 들어 전개하 는 쓰기 방식이 익숙한 현대에, ‘주석가가 왜 자신의 주석을 주 (主)로 하지 않고 인용 모음을 주로 하는가?’, ‘이러한 주석법을 어 떻게 이해하면 좋은가?’와 같은 질문이 나오는 것은 자연스럽다. 그러나 함석헌의 주석서에는 이 주석법에 관한 직접적인 언급이 일체 없다. 그래서 본 논문에서는 먼저 과거에 이 질문을 던지고 대답한 학자들의 언급을 분석한 후, 함석헌의 주석서를 주의 깊게 읽어 이 질문에 새로운 측면에서 대답해 보려고 한다. 그리고 함 석헌의 인용 모음 주석법이 기존의 이해들과 달리 ‘독자의 기타 이해’와 관련된 활동이라고 주장할 것이다. 함석헌의 주석서 판본 이 세 종류4)이기 때문에, 기타와 그 주석을 인용할 때 독자의 편의상 쪽 표기대신 기타의 장과 절로 표기한다. 선행 연구에 들어가기에 앞서 함석헌의 기타 주석서의 연구 가치를 논한다.

 

시모어(Seymour)는 1905년 판본인 듯하다고 추정한다(Seymour 2011:

146).

4) 위에서 언급한 함석헌전집 13권(한길사 1985), 이거룡의 해제를 넣은 ‘한길그레이트북스’ 18권(한길사 1996), 이거룡의 해제를 빼고 다시 편집한 함석헌저작집 28권(한길사 2009).

Ⅱ. 힌두 주석 전통에서 바라본 이 문헌의 연구 가치

함석헌의 기타 주석서는 함석헌 연구자나 기타 연구자에게 잘 알려진 문헌이기는 하지만 이 텍스트를 대상으로 한 세밀한 연구는 이 문헌이 출간된 후 현재까지 30년이 넘는 동안 거의 전 무하다. 박홍규는 “함석헌의 바가바드 기타에 대한 연구는 없 다” )고 바르게 지적했다. 2013년에 출판된 박홍규의 논문함석 헌과 간디의 종교관 비교: 바가바드기타에 대한 해석을 중심으 로는 중요한 서지 정보가 불분명한 데에 따른 오류가 있기는 하 지만, ) 함석헌의 기타 주석서를 연구의 주요한 한 축으로 삼았 고 텍스트 연구에 기반을 두었기 때문에 이 문헌을 가장 비중 있 고 세밀하게 다룬 연구다.

이렇게 이 문헌을 대상으로 한 연구물 수는 턱없이 적지만, 이 문헌은 활발하게 연구할 가치가 있다. 연구하는 방향에 따라 그 가치를 다양하게 논할 수 있겠지만, 본 논문에서는 힌두 주석 전 통에서 바라보는 이 문헌의 가치를 살펴보고자 한다. 함석헌은  기타를 주석서 형태로 출간했는데 그 자체가 주목할 만하다. 왜 냐하면 주석서는 힌두 지적(知的) 전통이 전수되는 형태를 가장 특징적으로 보여주기 때문이다. 힌두교 내 교파 간 분쟁은 물리적 이라기보다 주로 지적 논쟁이고, 일반적으로 이 논쟁은 교파의 권 위 있는 근본 경전에 대한 주석과 해석 과정에서 나타난다. 즉, 주 석가는 자신이 속한 교파의 근본 경전을 주석하면서 교리의 입장 에 맞추어 경전을 해석할 수 있음을 입증해내고, 그 해석에 동의 하지 않는 다른 교파에 속한 논쟁자들의 의견을 포함시키고 논박 한다. 그리고 때때로 어떤 주석에 복(複) 주석이 쓰이고, 그 복 주 석에 또 복 주석이 쓰이는 방식으로 주석 전통이 이어졌다. 그리 고 이렇게 오랜 시간에 걸쳐 복 주석들이 붙은 주석은 경전에 준 하는 큰 권위를 얻게 되는 경우도 생겼다. 이렇게 힌두교의 교파 간 철학적, 종교적, 신학적 교류는 전통적으로 주석이라는 형태로

행해졌다.7)

함석헌이 노자와 장자의 경전에도 주석했기 때문에 왜 특별히 힌두 경전 기타에 주석을 한 것이 특별한 일일까 생각할 수 있 다. 그러나 힌두 지적(知的) 전통에서 지식이 전수되고 교류된 주 된 방식이 ‘주석’이라는 것은 인도 문헌에 관심 있는 연구자가 아 닌 이상에는 그다지 알려지지 않았고, 함석헌의 주석서에 대한 기 존 해석과 평가에서 한 번도 언급되지 않았기 때문에 주의를 환 기할 필요가 있다. 물론 그는 주석에서 논쟁자를 포함시키고 논박 하는 인도의 전통적인 주석 방법을 사용하지도 않았고, 그가 힌두 종교와 철학의 면면(綿綿)한 주석 전통에 대해 알고 있었는지도 알 수 없기 때문에, 그가 번역서가 아니라 주석서를 남긴 사실에 과대하게 의미를 부여하는 것은 바람직하지 않다. 그러나 그 사실 을 과소평가할 필요도 없다.

 

7) 김호성(2004: 195)은 다음과 같이 힌두 지적(知的) 전통의 특징을 잘 정리해 말해 주었다. “선행하는 원전에 대한 주석/해석으로서 그 철학사가

전개되어 왔다는 점은 인도철학의 한 특징이다. 근현대에 이르러

해석학(Hermeneutics)이 서양의 신학이나 철학의 영역에서 발전되어 왔음은 주지하는 바이다. 그러나, 자기학문의 방법론을 해석학으로서 의식하는 것에는 다소 뒤졌다고 하더라도, 그 哲學史 전체가 해석학적 특징을 躍如하게 보이고 있는 것으로 정통의(vedic) 인도종교철학에 앞서는 것은 없는 것으로 생각된다.”

비록 함석헌은 힌두 사상을 잘 모른다고 겸손해했지만 문헌을 읽어보면 실제로는 많은 인도 주석과 번역을 읽었음을 알 수 있 다. 그가 힌두 주석 전통을 ‘이론적으로’ 몰랐을 수는 있어도, 기 타의 주석 전통이 인도에서 어떻게 이루어졌는지를 여러 인도 주석을 읽으면서 ‘실제로’ 맛보았다. 그리고 스스로 의식하지도 의 도하지도 않았겠지만 힌두 주석의 그리고 기타 주석의 전통적 흐름 안에 위치하게 되었다. 국내에 기타에 대한 한글 번역서, 해설서, 학술 논문은 적극적으로 출판된 데에 비해, 한국인이 쓴 기타 전체에 대한 주석서는 지금까지도 함석헌의 주석서뿐이다. 그래서 함석헌의 주석서에 담긴 주석 내용은 일단 차치하고라도, 힌두 경전 자체가 생소하던 1980년대 국내에 힌두 경전이 주석서 라는 형태로 출간되었다는 사실을 고려하면, 함석헌의 주석서는 국내 힌두 종교와 철학 연구사에서 독특하고, 과감하고, 의미 있 는 시도라고 할 수 있다. 이상으로 이 문헌의 가치를 주석서라는 형식상의 특징을 가지고 논했다. 이제 이 주석서의 여러 주석법 가운데, 가장 두드러진다고 판단되고 학자들도 가장 주목했던 인 용 모음식 주석법에 관해 기존의 해석들을 각각 살펴본다.


Ⅲ. 인용 모음에 대한 기존 해석들


함석헌의 인용 모음에 관한 학자들의 언급은 함석헌에 관한 글 과 기타에 관한 글에서 찾아볼 수 있다. 그들의 의견을 네 가지 로 분류할 수 있다. 첫째, 장광설 및 온갖 것의 수집으로 본 해석, 둘째, 인용을 나열이라고 성격 지운 후 회통과 종교다원주의로 본 해석, 셋째, 자신이 하고 싶은 말을 인용으로 대체한다는 해석, 넷 째, 인용을 비교 행위로 본 해석으로 나눌 수 있다.

1. 장광설, 온갖 것 수집 심재룡은 기타를 다양한 해탈의 길이 담긴 경전이 아니라 카 스트 제도를 옹호하는 “일관된 절대주의 철학의 산물” )로 해석한 다. 그래서 기타를 해석하는 다른 방식들을 비판하면서 “어떤 이들은 이 <노래>에서 석가, 공자, 노자, 예수 등 인류의 온갖 성 인의 말씀을 다 발견하노라고 장광설을 벌이는가 하면” )이라고 말한다. 심재룡이 직접 언급하지는 않았지만 이 구절의 “어떤 이 들”에 함석헌이 속한다는 것을 쉽게 짐작할 수 있다. 이와 비슷한 맥락에서, 류황태는 “[기타에 대해] 자신의 관점을 보이는 번역 서도 거의 없다. 함석헌의 경우가 조금 다르지만 자신의 관점이 명확하지 않다. 세상 온갖 것을 다 수집해 놓은 것 같다.”10)고 말 한다. 본 논문에서는 함석헌이 인용을 모으는 행위를 자신의 지식 을 장황하게 늘어놓거나 아무 것이나 수집하는 행위로 해석하지 않고, 독자가 기타를 이해하는 데 도움을 주기 위한 행위라고 주장할 것이다.

2. 나열, 회통과 종교다원주의

이거룡은 인용 모음 주석법에 관해 처음 주목하고 가장 분량 있는 글을 남겼다. 그는 함석헌의 인용이 “겉으로 보기에 아무런 체계도 없이 그저 이런저런 주석가들의 생각을 나열해놓은 듯하 고”, ) “백과사전식의 나열처럼 보이는 것이 오히려 당연한지도 모른다” )고 말한다. 그는 무분별해 보이는 나열식 주석법이 부정 적으로 여겨질 수 있음을 잘 알고 다음과 같이 말한다.

… 선생의 나열식 인용은 결코 싸구려 절충주의가 아니다. 오히려 이것이야말로 참다운 의미의 회통(會通)이 아닐까 싶다. 좀 단순하고 투박하게 보일지는 모르지만, 여러 종교 경전들을 나란히 인용하는 것 만으로도 의미가 크다. 그것만으로도 각 종교가 서로 배척하지 않고 등을 기대고 있는 듯하여 실로 보기가 좋은 것이다.13) 이후 김영호도 이거룡과 같은 입장에 선다.

꼭 종교학 이론을 세우지 않더라도 여러 종교 경전들을 나열식으로 인용하는 것만으로 그는 종교간의 갈등이 보이게 안 보이게 첨예한 오늘의 풍토에 경종을 주고 종교 다원주의의 길을 제시하고 있다. … 그것을 학자들은 절충주의(syncretism)라고 하기도 하지만, 단순한 절 충이 아니고 높은 자리에서 감싸안는 ‘회통’(會通)이라고 하는 것이 더 어울리는 말일 것이다.14)

이렇게 이거룡, 김영호는 함석헌의 인용 모음을 ‘나열’이라고 보 고 나서 회통과 종교다원주의의 긍정적 측면으로 해석한다. 함석 헌의 인용에서 종교다원주의와 회통을 제시(김영호)까지는 아니 더라도 발견(이거룡)할 수 있는 것은 사실이다. 하지만 본 논문에 서는 함석헌의 인용 모음 주석법이 무분별한 나열의 성격보다는 선별한 모음의 성격에 가깝고, 회통과 종교다원주의보다는 우선 독자의 기타 이해에 더 관련된 활동이라고 주장할 것이다.

3. 인용을 빌려 자신의 말을 한다.

이거룡은 함석헌이 자신이 하고 싶은 말을 인용을 통해 한다고

해석한다. 그는 다음과 같이 말한다.

어떻게 보면 선생의 생각이 담긴 부분이라고는 극히 일부에 지나지 않는 듯하지만, 기실 따지고 보면 다른 사람들의 주석을 끌어다 쓰는 가운데 스스로가 하고 싶은 말, 해야 할 말을 다하는 주석을 내고 있

 

13) 이거룡(1996) p. 51.

14) 김영호(2001) pp. 238-239.

다.15)

‘이러저러한 경전들이 이러저러하게 말하고 있다’는 것을 보여주는 중에, 기실 자기의 생각을 담아낸다.16)

류황태는 함석헌이 “자신의 맘에 드는, 자신의 판단에 적당한 인용 비교를 해 놓았다.”17)고 말한다. 박홍규도 류황태와 같은 입 장으로 다음과 같이 말한다.

반면 함석헌의 바가바드기타 해석서에는 간디를 비롯한 여러 사 람의 해석이 함석헌 자신의 해석과 함께 포함되어 있다. 자신의 해석 과 달리 타인의 해석을 인용한 것은 어떤 의도인지 명확하지 않다. 그 해석에 찬성한다는 것인지, 아니면 해석의 하나로 제시한다는 것인지 설명이 없기 때문이다. 그러나 여러 해석 중 한두 가지를 인용하고 있 으므로 자신의 의견과 같다고 본 것으로 보아도 무방할 것 같다.18)

인용이란 함석헌이 하고 싶은 말을 표현하는 도구이거나(이거 룡), 그가 마음에 드는 부분이나(류황태) 자신의 의견과 같은 부분 을 인용했다(박홍규)는 해석이다. 주를 선별하는 행위, 선별한 주 안에서도 인용할 부분을 고르는 행위에는 선별하고 고르는 자의 시각이 분명히 반영되어 있다. 그러나 본 논문에서는 그가 ‘자신 의 말을 대신 전하는 주’ 혹은 ‘자신의 의견과 같은 주’를 선별해 인용했다기보다는, ‘독자가 기타를 잘 이해하는 데에 적합하다 고 판단한 주’를 인용한다고 제안할 것이다. 다시 말해서, 초점이 함석헌 자신보다는 독자에게 있다고 제안할 것이다. 주석서에서 함석헌은 직접 주석하는 일도 많기 때문에, 자신이 하고 싶은 말 을 굳이 인용을 통해 할 필요가 없었기 때문이다.

 

15) 이거룡(1996) p. 49.

16) 이거룡(1996) p. 51.

17) 류황태(2009) pp. 65-66.

18) 박홍규(2013) p. 89.

4. 인용을 비교한다. 기타의 구절과 인용을 비교한다.

함석헌의 인용 주석법에 대해 류황태는 “대부분 관련이 없는, 초점에 맞지 않는 인용 비교를 늘어놓는다” )고 말한다. 그리고 박홍규는 “그의 바가바드기타 해석은 … 그 각 구절을 다른 종 교나 사상과 비교하는 것이었다. 이를 비교종교학의 입장이라고 할 수 있을지 모른다.” )고 말한다. 류황태는 함석헌이 “인용 비 교”를 한다고 평가했는데, 함석헌은 번역끼리는 비교했지만, 자신 이 인용한 주석, 경전, 문학 작품끼리 비교하거나, 평가하거나, 해 석하는 일을 일체 하지 않는다. 함석헌이 주를 선별해 모으는 데 에 관심이 있었고 모아 놓은 인용들끼리 비교하지는 않았기 때문 에 류황태가 말한 “인용 비교”는 성립되기 힘들다. 그리고 본 논 문에서는, 함석헌의 인용법이 박홍규가 말한 대로 기타의 구절 과 다른 사상들을 비교하는 데에 목적이 있다기보다, 전체적으로 볼 때 오히려 기타의 구절을 독자가 이해하기 쉽게 돕기 위해 여러 인용을 모아놓은 것이라고 주장할 것이다. 왜냐하면 비교 행 위란 모음 행위보다 한 단계 발전된 분석 행위인데, 함석헌이 기 타의 구절과 다른 종교나 사상을 ‘비교한다’고 평가할 만한 근거 가 약하기 때문이다.


Ⅳ. 독자의 기타 이해에 초점을 둔 인용 모음


기존의 해석들과 달리, 본 논문에서는 인용 모음 주석법이 독자 의 기타 이해를 초점으로 둔다고 주장하기 위해 다섯 가지 근 거를 제시할 것이다. 첫째, 함석헌은 좋은 주들에서 뽑은 요점을 한데 모은다. 둘째, 해제와 서론을 만든다. 셋째, 어려운 단어, 구 절, 문장에 여러 번역을 소개한다. 넷째, 제3의 인용을 포함시킨 다. 다섯째, 동서양의 예시들과 중세 힌두 주석가들을 인용한 라 다크리슈나의 주석을 가장 많이 인용한다. 이들을 차례로 살펴본

다.

1. 좋은 주를 한데 모아 편리하다.

함석헌은 기타 주석서에서는 인용 모음에 대해 논한 적이 없 지만, 다른 주석을 모아 놓는 주석법의 장점은 편리함이라고 다른 곳에서 언급한 적이 있다. 노자의 도덕경에 대한 많은 주석서 중 초횡(焦竑)의 노자익(老子翼)에 관련해 그는 다음과 같이 말 한다.

노자에 대해서 고래로 주석이 많아요. 옛날 사람은 요새와는 또 달 라서는 노자익(老子翼)이라는 걸 제일 편리하다 하지요. 왜 그런고 하니 각 사람의 주(註)를 다 보려면, 전문적으로 연구하는 사람은 그 렇겠지만, 그럴 새가 있어요? 그런데 초횡(焦竑)이라는 사람이, 상당히 재주도 있고 깊이 생각하는 사람인데, 모든 걸 골라서, 자기 말도 이따 금 나오긴 나오지만, 자기만이 아니고 남들의 좋은 주를 모아서 냈어

요.

이 책의 특색은 본문이 있을 뿐만 아니라, 본문을 한 사람이 해석하 는 것이 아니고 개중에 그래도 누가 누가 했던 주로 좋은 걸로 몇 개 골라서 그 요점 되는 거를 같이 실었어요. 이 사람 저 사람의 해석을 볼 수가 있어 편리한 거야. 이름도 노자익이라 하는데 왜 익(翼)이 라 그랬는고 하니, 새에게 나래가 있으면 잘 날 수 있는 모양으로 이 런 주가 있으면 좋다는 거지요. ‘덕(德)을 우익한다’ ‘호랑이에 나래 붙 은 사람’이라 그러잖아요? 노자를 잘 활용할 수 있도록 좋은 주를 붙 였다 그런 의미로 노자익이라 그래요.21)

함석헌이 노자에 대한 특정 주석에 관해 쓴 위 인용글에서 그

 

21) 함석헌(2009a) p. 56.

가 주석 활동에서 중시한 세 가지를 알 수 있다. 첫째, 여러 해석 을 한데 볼 수 있는 편리함을 중시한 점, 둘째, 많은 주석 가운데 좋은 주석을 골라 싣는 점, 셋째, 선별한 주석 중에서도 요점을 싣 는 점이다. 그리고 이 세 가지는 기타 주석에 그대로 적용된다. 함석헌도 여러 사람의 해석을 실었고, 주를 선별했고, 선별한 주 를 다 인용한 것이 아니라 요점이라고 생각한 점을 실었다. 그러 므로 그가 초횡의 주석법을 기타에 도입했다고 볼 수 있고, 그 런 의미에서 함석헌의 기타 주석서를 ‘기타익(翼)’이라고 부를 수 있을 것이다. 그러므로 노자익에 관한 함석헌의 생각을 고려 하고, 또 그가 노자익에 관해 서술한 주석법과 기타의 주석법 이 같은 점을 고려하면, 함석헌의 인용은 기존의 연구에서 쓰인 ‘나열’로 이해하기보다는 ‘모음’으로 이해하는 것이 함석헌의 주석 의도를 더 잘 살린다고 할 수 있다. 그리고 함석헌이 이 방법을 사용하는 목적은 ‘자신이’ 편리하게 기타를 읽기 위함도 있겠지 만, ‘독자가’ 기타에 관한 여러 주석을 한데 모아 편리하게 읽기 위함이라고 이해할 수 있다.

2. 해제와 서론을 만든다.

함석헌은 해제와 서론을 만들어 싣는다. 그는 말로만 전해 듣던 기타를 부산 헌책방에서 우연히 발견해 놀라고 기뻤다고 말한 직후, “주도 설명도 하나 없으니 옳게 이해했을 리가 없습니다. 그 래도 읽고 또 읽으니 좋았습니다.”라고 말한다. 함석헌이 저본으 로 삼은 힌두 경전들(Hindu Scriptures) )의 한 부분으로 실린 바넷(Barnett)의 기타 영역에는 해설과 주가 있기는 하지만 아 주 적었다. ) 함석헌은 자신이 이 경전을 설명이 충분하지 않은 번역으로 읽을 때 막막했던 경험을 바탕으로, 다른 기타 영역서 에 포함된 서론과 부록을 선택해 해제용(解題用)으로 번역해 싣는 다. 그는 왜 해제와 서론이 필요한지를, 그리고 왜 자신의 말로 쓰 지 않고 다른 글을 번역해 싣는지를 다음과 같이 밝힌다.

내가 경험해 봤으니 설명 없이는 알기 어려울 줄을 압니다. 해제나 서론이 필요합니다. 그러나 [해제의 경우] 서툰 내가 하는 것보다는 잘한 이의 것을 빌리는 것이 옳을 듯해 스와미 프라바바난다(Swami

Prabhavananda)와 크리스토퍼 이셔우드(Christopher Isherwood)의 공 동 번역에 실린기타와 마하바라타기타의 우주론두 장을 우선 실어서 앞으로 읽어가는 데 도움이 되게 할까 합니다.24)

함석헌이 해제용으로 번역해 실은기타와 마하바라타에는  기타와 기타가 속한 마하바라타의 주요 주제인 다르마 (dharma)가 소개되어 있다. 또기타의 우주론에는 기타의 핵 심 철학인, 상키야(sāṅkhya) 철학의 순수 정신인 푸루샤(puruṣa) 와 근본 물질인 프라크리티(prakṛti)의 이원론이 소개되어 있고, 근본물질에서 23개의 물질이 전개되는 원리가 도표와 함께 실려 있다. 둘 다 기타에 생소한 한국 독자에게 입문용으로 소개하기 에 적당한 자료이다. 또한 원래 기타 본문에는 서론이 없지만 함석헌은 거의 모든 장(열여덟 장 중 열다섯 장)에 인용으로 이루 어진 서론을 넣는다. 이렇게 해제와 서론을 주석에 넣는 것은, 그 가 “설명 없이는 알기 어려울 줄을 압니다. 해제나 서론이 필요합 니다”, “앞으로 읽어가는 데 도움이 되게 할까 합니다”라고 말한 대로, 독자가 기타를 이해하는 데에 도움을 주려는 목적 외에는 따로 이유를 찾을 수 없다.

3. 어려운 단어, 구절, 문장에 여러 번역을 소개한다.

함석헌은 기타 본문의 단어, 구절, 시구 전체가 어려울 때 여 러 번역을 제공한다. 두 가지 예를 들어본다. 우선, 기타 2.66을

 

24) 함석헌(1996) p. 56. 묶음표는 필자의 삽입.

함석헌은 “마음의 통일 없는 사람에게 이성 없고, 마음의 통일 없 는 사람에게 영감도 없다. 영감이 없는 사람에게는 평화가 없고 평화가 없는 사람에게 어디서 즐거움이 있겠느냐?”로 번역한다. 이 구절의 단어를 주석하면서 그는 “영감”의 산스크리트어 bhavana(원래는 bhāvanā)를 소개한 후, 이 단어에 대한 총 일곱 가지 번역을 소개한다. 산스크리트어 bhāvanā는 직역하면 형용사로서 ‘존재하게 하는’, ‘일으키는’, 명사로서 ‘생각’, ‘상상’, ‘명상’이라는 뜻으로 이 시구에서는 번역이 까다롭다. 그래서 함석헌은 자신의 번역인 ‘영감’으로 뜻을 결정하면서도, 일곱 번역, 즉 ‘헌신’(간디), ‘집중력’(라다크리슈난), ‘정려(靜慮)’(다카쿠스, 즉 세계성전전집 ), ‘올바른 상태’(데이비스), ‘반성’(힐), ‘지식 추구의 유지’(텔랑), ‘신령 감응’(바넷, 즉 에브리맨스 문고판)을 소개한다.

또 난해하다고 판단한 기타 8.4 )에 대해서는 다섯 명(라다크 리슈난, 다카쿠스, 간디, 스와미 프라부파다, 틸라크)의 번역을 모 두 문장 채로 소개한다. 함석헌이 주석을 길게 인용하는 일은 흔 하지만, 번역가들의 기타 시구 번역을 통째로 인용하는 경우는 드물기 때문에 이 시구가 그에게 상당히 난해했음을 알 수 있다. 또한 본문에 인도 철학에서 중요한 개념 ‘푸루샤’가 들어가자 다 음과 같이 말한다.

… 그중 가장 문제 되는 것이 둘째 구절에 있는 푸루샤라는 말이다. 그것은 사람, 사람 몸, 인류, 개인, 인격, 혼, 초월적 영, 원시 남성 등 등으로 번역되는 말이다. 인도 철학을 모르는 나로서는 도저히 확신을 가지고 그중 어느 것을 골라낼 수가 없다. 위에 인용한 여러분들의 번 역을 참조해 독자가 스스로 짐작하기 바란다.(기타 8.4에 대한 함석 헌의 주석 중) 함석헌이 이 시구와 특정 개념을 번역하는 어려움을 밝히고, 그

래서 여러 번역을 제공하고, 독자가 직접 살펴보기를 권하는 모습 을 볼 수 있다. 함석헌이 ‘푸루샤’ 개념을 이해하는 데 겪은 어려 움은 다른 곳에서도 보인다.

숨은 푸루샤를 말하는 것인데, 물질(prakriti)에 대립시켜서 생명의 씨, 혹은 정신, 혹은 얼, 혹은 인격, 혹은 말씀(로고스)이라 부를 수 있 는 것이므로 여기서 숨이라 해봤다. 어떤 번역에는 원인(原人)이라 하 기도 했다.

수천 년에 걸쳐 발전해 온 힌두교의 복잡한 교리, 철학, 신화, 우주 론의 뜻을 우리로서는 명확히 이해하기 어려운 일이다. 읽는 데 다소 도움이 될까 하여 바가바드기타 있는 그대로의 한 절을 인용하여 그것이 얼마나 많은 이름으로 불리는가를 보이기로 한다.(기타 8.22 에 대한 함석헌의 주석)

이렇게 말하고 나서 함석헌은 바가바드기타 있는 그대로라는 기타 주석서에 나열된 푸루샤의 별칭을 다음과 같이 인용한다.

“푸루쇼타마(Purushottama), 트리비크라마(Trivikrama), 케샤바 (Keshvava), 마다바(Madhava), 아니룻다(Aniruddha), 흐리시케샤 (Hrishikesha), 상카르사나(Sankarsana), 프리쥼나(Pradyumna), 슈리다라(Sridhara), 바수데바(Vasudeva), 다모다라(Damodhara), 자나르다나(Janardana), 나라야나(Narayana), 바마나(Vamana), 파

드마나바(Padmanabha) 등등이다.”

푸루샤는 리그 베다부터 상키야 철학과 베단타 철학을 거쳐 힌두 사상에서 풍요롭고 깊이 있게 발전한 철학 개념이므로, 함석 헌이 주석가로서 겪었을 학문적 어려움이 이해가 간다. 그런데 그 의 주석에서 보이는 훌륭한 점은 자신이 잘 모른다는 사실, 번역 하기 어렵다는 사실을 숨기거나, 언급을 회피하거나 최소화하지 않는다는 점이다. 대신 그는 자신이 확신 있게 뜻을 선택하기 어 려움을 정직하고 겸손하게 밝히고, 여러 번역과 주석을 인용해 독 자가 이들을 참고한 후 직접 뜻을 가늠하기를 권한다. 이것은 그 의 인용 모음이 독자의 기타 이해에 관련되어 있다는 것을 말 해 준다. “읽는 데 다소 도움이 될까 하여 바가바드기타 있는 그 대로의 한 절을 인용”한다고 그가 한 말에서도, 그의 주석 인용 이 독자에게 도움을 주려는 목적으로 이루어짐을 알 수 있다.

함석헌은 그가 인용한 주석들의 해석적 시각끼리 혹은 인용한 주석끼리 평가하거나 비교하는 일은 한 번도 없다. 그러나 본문의 단어, 구절, 문장 번역을 비교하고 평가하는 일은 낯설지 않다. 이 사실은 그가 주석가들의 해석과 인용을 비교하는 일보다는 기타 의 본문을 이해하는 일에 더 무게를 둔다는 주장에 힘을 실어 준다.

4. 제3의 인용을 포함시킨다.

함석헌은 주석, 경전, 문학 작품을 직접 인용할 뿐만 아니라, 그 가 인용하는 주석가가 인용하는 제3의 인용도 자주 포함시킨다. 여기에서는 두 가지 예를 든다. 함석헌은 기타 4.23을 주석하면 서 데사이 )의 주석을 인용한다. 우선 기타 4.23은 다음과 같다.

집착을 떠나 해탈하여, 그 마음은 지혜 위에 굳게 서고, 그 행동, 희 생을 위하는 사람의 행위(業)는 온전히 소멸되어버리느니라.(기타 4.

23)

함석헌은 이 본문에 대한 데사이의 주석을 다음과 같이 인용한

다.

[4장] 19절에서 23절까지는 자유로운 행위의 모든 조건을 묶어서 설명하는 말이다. 3장 9절에서는 희생을 위한 행위는 얽어맴이 없다고 했는데 이 절에서는 희생은 카르마, 곧 업까지도 소멸시킨다고 한다. 업이란 이제 앞으로 열매를 맺을 행위다. 희생은 그와 같이 얽어맴을 예방도 하고 고칠 수도 있는 두 가지 일을 할 수 있다. 구자라트의 신 비가 나라신하 메다(Narasinha Metha)는 무지한 사람을, “굴러가는 차 밑을 걸어가면서 자기가 그 차를 끌고 가거니 하고 믿는 개와 같 다”고 말하였다. 판디트 살타발레카르(Saltavalekar)는 지혜있는 사람 을 설명하기 위해 이런 아름다운 비유를 했다. “차를 타고 앉아 있는 사람이 차가 움직이는 대로 움직이지만, 정말 움직이는 것은 차뿐이 다. 그와 마찬가지로 어진 사람은 지극히 높으신 이를 찾아 제 몸이라 는 차를 타고 나가는데, 그 몸은 움직이나 자신은 가만히 앉아 있다.”

(기타4.23에 대한 데사이의 주석)

함석헌이 데사이의 주석을 인용할 때, 데사이가 인용한 두 사람 나라신하 메다와 살타발레카르의 인용은 굳이 들어가지 않아도 되었다. 그런데 함석헌은 데사이의 주석적 요점에 더해 데사이가 인용한 부분, 즉 함석헌에게는 제3의 인용까지 포함시킨 것이다. 그가 그렇게 한 이유는 물론 그가 이 비유가 마음에 들어서 그럴 수도 있을 것이다. 그러나 필자는 그가 독자가 기타 본문을 더 잘 이해하는 데에 관심을 두었기 때문이라고 생각한다. 이 생각을 뒷받침하기 위한 예를 하나 더 들어본다. 함석헌의 주석서에서 가 장 긴 주석인 기타 6.10에 대한 주석은 그 대부분이 라다크리슈 난의 주석으로 이루어져 있다. 우선 기타 6.10은 다음과 같다.

요가를 닦는 사람은 은밀한 곳에 홀로 남아 있어, 몸과 마음을 억제 하고, 모든 욕망과 가진 것을 버리고, 늘 정신 모으기를 힘써야 하느니

라.(기타 6.10)

이 시구에 대해 라다크리슈난은 우선 요가에 대해 파탄잘리의 요가 수트라를 언급하면서 외부로 향하는 마음을 명상의 대상 으로 집중시켜야 한다는 점을 설명한다. 이때 구약성서의잠언 을 인용한다. 또 “은밀한 곳”이라는 구절을 주석하면서 마태복 음6장 6절을 인용하고, 오리겐이 은둔자들에 관해 기록한 글을 인용한다. 또한 “몸과 마음을 억제”하는 구절을 주석할 때에는 중 세 힌두 주석가 샹카라를 인용하고, 자기를 억제해 마음이 정결해 져야 하나님과 깊이 교통할 수 있다고 해석하면서 워즈워드, 릴케 를 인용한다. 또 외계로 향한 마음을 거두어 자신의 혼으로 한데 모음을 설명하면서 플라톤의 메논을 인용한다.

함석헌은 라다크리슈난의 주석적 요점, 즉 외부로 향하는 마음 을 명상의 대상에 집중해야 한다는 요점만 인용해도 되었을 텐데, 긴 분량인데도 라다크리슈난이 언급하고 인용하는 다양한 경전, 종교가, 문학가, 철학자를 모두 실었다. 우연히 주석 인용이 이러 한 스타일을 띄게 되었다고 말하기에는 제3의 주석이 포함되는 모습이 일관적이고 사례가 많다. 이것은 함석헌이 인용을 잘라내 기보다는 주석서에 되도록 포함시키고 싶어 한다는 것을 말해준

다.

그렇다면 함석헌은 왜 제3의 인용을 되도록 많이 포함시키고 싶어 했을까? 종교다원주의로 해석하고자 하는 독자는 이 부분을 그렇게 해석할 수 있을 것이다. 즉, 함석헌이 기타의 시구에 나 타난 사상을 보편적인 것으로 보고, 같은 사상이 다른 종교, 사상, 문학에서 어떻게 나타나는지를 보여준다고 생각할 수 있을 것이 다. 그러나 필자는 함석헌이 제3의 인용을 포함하는 이유는 국내 에 생소한 힌두 경전 기타 본문을 다양한 배경을 가진 독자가 수월하게 이해하는 데에 도움을 주려는 작업이라고도 이해한다. 다시 말해서, 독자가 다양한 종교적, 문화적 사고의 개념 틀에 빗 대어 기타 본문을 이해할 수 있도록 돕기 위해, 논리적이고 딱 딱한 요점만 싣지 않고 의도적으로 제3의 인용까지 모두 포함시 킨 것이라고 해석한다.

이거룡은 함석헌의 주석법에 대해 기술하면서 다양한 언어로 표현될 때 의미가 명확해지는 점을 잘 지적했다. 그는 “어느 한 종교의 사상은 그 종교 자체의 언어로 해석되기보다는 다른 종교 의 언어로 풀어 밝혀질 때 더욱 선명하게 제모습을 드러내”27)는 것이라고 말한다. 회통의 입장에서 함석헌의 주석 모음을 해석하 는 이거룡이 이 문장에 특별한 강조점을 두었다고 생각하지는 않 지만, 이 문장은 함석헌이 다른 주석을 인용하는 주석법의 목적을 핵심적으로 보여준다고 생각한다. 다시 말해서, 함석헌은 기타 의 언어를 다른 종교들의 언어, 다른 문화들의 언어로 풀어 밝힌 부분까지 포함시킴으로써 독자가 기타의 언어를 더 잘 이해하 도록 돕고자 했다. 함석헌 자신에게도 생소했을 힌두 경전 내용을 이해하기 위해 그 스스로 연구하여 주석을 달고, 주석가들의 주석 도 인용하고, 해당 시구의 요점을 그 자신도 다른 종교와 문화에 빗대어 생각해 보고, 다른 주석가들이 인용한 부분도 빼지 않고 의도적으로 인용에 포함시켰다고 볼 수 있다.

5. 라다크리슈난 주석을 압도적으로 인용한다.

마지막으로, 함석헌은 압도적으로 라다크리슈난의 주석을 사용 한다. 라다크리슈난(1888-1975)은 대학의 철학 교수, 부총장, 외교 대사를 거쳐 인도 대통령(1962-1967)을 지낸 인물로서 학계와 정 계에서 모두 활동했지만, 인도의 고대 고전(기타, 우파니샤드, 법구경)을 주석한 주석가기도 했다. 함석헌은 기타를 주석하 면서 총 여섯 명의 인도인 주석가(인용 빈도가 높은 순서대로, 라 다크리슈난, 간디, 마헤시, 데사이, 틸락, 스와미 프라부파다)를 인 용하는데, 함석헌이 간디를 존경했기 때문에 간디의 주석에 크게 의지할 것 같지만 그렇지 않다. 그는 라다크리슈난의 주석을 간디 의 주석보다 세 배 가량 많이 사용하고, 기타 본문의 모든 장에 빠짐없이 사용한다. 그 이유를 다음과 같이 추정할 수 있다.

첫째, 라다크리슈난의 주에는 산스크리트어가 로마자로 들어가 있고, 각 시구마다 주석이 길지 않고, 단어와 짧은 구절에 대한 주 석이 많다. 또한 간디, 마헤시, 틸락의 주석은 짧은 구절의 주석보 다는 자신의 해설이 주(主)이고 각자의 관점을 담은 사상이 포함

 

27) 이거룡(1996) p. 51.

되는 데에 반해, 라다크리슈난의 주석은 관점을 담았다기보다는 단어, 구절을 중심으로 문헌 풀이에 조금 더 가깝다고 할 수 있다.

둘째, 라다크리슈난은 샹카라(Śaṅkara, 8세기), 라마누자 (Rāmānuja, 11세기), 마드바(Madhva, 13세기), 베단타 데시카 (Vedānta Deśika, 13세기), 마두수다나 사라스바티(Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, 16세기)와 같은 중요한 힌두 중세 기타 주석가들을 자주 소개한다. 산스크리트어를 모르는 함석헌이 주석서들을 직접 찾아보기 힘들었을 것이므로, 중세 힌두 주석가들의 작품을 풍부 하게 담은 라다크리슈난의 주석에서 도움을 받았을 것이다. 이 점 은 그가 라다크리슈난의 주석을 인용할 때 자주 이 중세 주석가 들의 인용까지 포함시키는 점으로 알 수 있다.

셋째, 라다크리슈난은 인도 철학과 종교의 가치가 서양 철학과 종교에 뒤떨어지지 않으며 동양과 서양의 사상에 교류점이 많았 다는 것을 보이고자 했으므로, 서양의 종교나 문학을 인용하여 인 도 사상과 비교해 언급하거나 인용하는 곳들이 많다. 예들 들어, 기타 11.5에서부터는 크리슈나가 아르주나의 간청을 받은 후 자 신을 신의 모습으로 현현하여 보여준다. 라다크리슈난은 이 종교 체험을 예수의 변모, 사울의 다마스커스 도상의 환상, 콘스탄틴의 십자가, 잔다르크의 환상에 빗대고, 성 힐데가르드의 작품을 인용 한다. 동서양을 이분(二分)하는 틀로 이해한 함석헌에게, 동양 사 상과 서양 사상을 비교하는 라다크리슈난의 주석 경향은 잘 맞았 을 것이다.

이렇게 다른 주석가들보다 문헌 풀이에 충실하고, 힌두교 안에 서 기타의 주석들을 소개하고, 기타와 힌두교 밖의 사상들을 비교하는 라다크리슈난의 주석을 가장 많이 사용하는 점으로 미 루어, 함석헌이 독자의 기타 본문 이해에 역점을 두었다고 이해 할 수 있다.


Ⅴ. 나가는 말


본 논문에서는 함석헌의 기타 주석에 두드러진 주석법이 인 용 모음이라고 보았다. 그리고 이 주석법에 대해 기존에 행해진 해석을 네 가지로 정리하였다. 첫째, 장광설과 온갖 것의 수집이 라고 본 해석, 둘째, 나열이라고 성격 지운 후 회통과 종교다원주 의라고 본 해석, 셋째, 자신의 말을 대신 하기 위한 수단으로 인용 을 사용한다는 해석, 넷째, 인용 간에 비교하거나 기타 구절과 인용을 비교한다는 해석이었다. 이 기존의 해석들과 달리, 본 논 문에서는 함석헌의 인용 모음 주석법은 독자의 기타 이해를 도 우려는 행위와 관련 있다고 주장하고, 그 근거로 다섯 가지를 제 시하였다.

첫째, 비록 함석헌이 기타 주석서에서 말한 것은 아니지만 초 횡의 노자익을 들어 설명한 부분을 참고하여, 함석헌은 기타 를 읽는 이가 좋은 주의 요점만 모아 한 자리에서 볼 수 있는 편 리함을 추구했다고 주장했다. 그러한 의미에서 기타 주석서를 함석헌의 ‘기타익’이라고 부를 수 있다고 보았다. 같은 맥락에서, 함석헌의 인용을 ‘나열’이라기보다는 ‘모음’으로 이해하는 것이 함 석헌의 주석 의도를 살린 더 적절한 이해라고 주장하였다. 둘째, 함석헌은 기타 본문에는 없는 해제와 서론을 만들었다. 자신이 해제와 서론 없이 기타를 읽기 어려웠던 경험에 바탕을 두었고, 그래서 해제와 서론을 만드는 것은 독자가 기타를 읽는 데에 도움이 되기 위해서라고 직접 밝혔다. 셋째, 함석헌은 힌두 종교 와 철학을 논하는 데에 한계가 있음을 정직하고 겸손하게 드러내 고, 어려운 단어, 구절, 시구에 여러 번역과 주석을 제공한다. 자신 의 지식에 한계가 있으므로 여러 번역과 주석을 통해 독자가 읽 고 스스로 가늠하게 하기 위해서이다. 넷째, 함석헌은 다른 주석 을 인용할 때 논리적이고 딱딱한 핵심만 인용하지 않고 다른 주 석에 담긴 제3의 인용까지 인용에 포함시키는 일이 잦다. 그 이유 는 제3의 인용을 통해 생소한 기타를 이해하기가 수월하다고 생각했기 때문이라고 짐작할 수 있다. 마지막으로, 함석헌은 여섯 명의 기타 주석가 중 라다크리슈난의 주석을 압도적으로 인용 한다. 라다크리슈난은 문헌 풀이에 주목하고, 자신의 해석도 하면 서 동서양의 예시를 풍부하게 들고, 중세 힌두 주석가들도 인용하 는 주석가이므로, 함석헌이 생소한 힌두 경전의 내용을 조금 더 알기 쉽게 독자에게 소개하기에 적합했을 것이다. 이 다섯 가지에 근거를 두고 전체적으로 볼 때, 함석헌의 인용 모음 주석법은 기 존 해석들과 달리, 독자가 한국인에게 생소한 기타를 이해하는 것을 돕기 위한 행위라고 해석할 수 있다.

그리고 무엇보다 함석헌이 독자의 기타 이해를 돕고자 한 이 유는, 그가 기타가 “진리의 말씀” )이라고 생각했고 그래서 다 른 사람에게 “권하고” 싶어 한 것과 관련 있다. “진리”가 무엇을 뜻하는지는 밝히지 않아 확실하지 않지만, 그가 “전도” )라는 비 유적 표현을 사용할 만큼 기타 독서에서 큰 감화를 받았고 기 타를 다른 이에게 전하고자 했던 마음은 확실하다. 즉, 그는 독 자가 기타를 지식으로만 이해하는 데 머물지 않고 그 안에 담 긴 진리를 깊이 있게 이해해 삶에서 잘 활용할 수 있기를 바랐다. 이 바람은, 자신이 주석 없이 읽을 때 겪은 어려웠던 경험을 살려, 독자가 기타를 더 잘 이해하게끔 도와주는 행위로 표출되었다. 그리고 기꺼이 고백한 힌두 사상에 대한 지식의 한계 안에서, 최 선으로 선택한 주석법이 바로 ‘인용 모음’이라는 주석법으로 나타 났다고 이해할 수 있다.


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Abstract

Reinterpretation of the Commentarial Method of Collecting Quotations: in Ham Seok-heon’s Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā

Haesook Ra

Sogang University

This study aims at shedding new light on Ham Seok-heon’s commentarial method of collecting quotations in his commentary on the BhagavadGītā (henceforth Gītā). Although he leaves his own comments, Ham Seok-heon (1901-1989, henceforth Ham) mainly uses a particular kind of commentarial method; that is, he quotes passages from both other commentators’ commentaries and other religious texts as well as works of literature. Previously, several scholars interpreted this kind of commentarial method as a disorderly enumeration of quotations or as based on religious pluralism, and so on. This study, however, argues that it is rather a selected collection of quotations, by which he wants to help the readers of the commented text Gītā understand better. I suggest five reasons for this argument.

First, mentioning Jiao Hong(焦竑)’s commentarial method in the 老子翼, Ham writes that Jiao Hong collected at one place selected good comments from different commentaries. Considering this record, it can be assumed that Ham also desired the readers of the Gītāto read at one place the selected good comments. Second, He makes a preface, which is a translation of two chapters from a dif-

 

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ferent book, to the Gītāand the introductions to almost every chapter of It. Having an experience of reading it almost without any commentarial aid, Ham writes himself that he makes the preface and introductions for the sake of helping the readers understand the Gītā better. Third, he provides the difficult words, phrases, and sentences of the Gītā with various translations and comments. As he reveals that he is not conversant with Indian philosophy, the various translations and comments are for the readers themselves to decide the meaning of those difficult parts. Fourth, he quotes not only the logical and central ideas but also rich citations that other commentators provide. It can be conjectured that Ham wanted to include numerous citations, so that they facilitate the readers’ understanding of the Gītā. Finally, Ham depends most on Radhakrishnan’s comments, which are characterized as annotating the Gītā text, giving abundant citations from both the Eastern and the Western traditions, and quoting the medieval Indian commentators such as Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva. Based on these five observations, this study intends to show that Ham’s commentarial method of collecting quotations was devised in order to help the readers of the Gītā acquire a better understanding of It.

Keywords : Ham Seok-heon, BhagavadGītā, commentarial method, a selected collection of quotations, interpretation, readers.

투고 일자 : 2016년 3월 28일 심사 기간 : 2016년 4월 11일 ~ 4월 28일 게재 확정일 : 2016년 4월 29일