But I have never felt that I was an expert in either tradition, nor have I been motivated to formulate, let alone trademark, a hybrid between the two. I reacted with horror at the advent of “mindful psychotherapy” and have always been careful neither to cloak myself in spiritual garb nor to dismiss the accumulated wisdom of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Mindfulness as a substitute for traditional psychotherapy strikes me as shortsighted, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and blending the two traditions, just as they are getting to know each other, has always seemed premature. Most such attempts have cobbled together superficial elements of each to the detriment of both.

With the recent popularity of mindfulness and the proliferation of apps and blogs and podcasts about it, people like Fred tend to look to it as a kind of mental gymnastics, good for one’s health and beneficial if practiced on a regular basis. This is not necessarily mistaken, but it can make meditation feel like just another thing one is doing wrong. While some of my patients have been able to prioritize the regular sitting practice of mindfulness, many others, in the midst of busy work and family life, cannot.

What I liked about this conversation was talking about mindfulness as doing nothing. So many people get into trouble with it because of their desire to always be in control. The line between helpful discipline and rigidifying control is not always so clear, and when there is a tendency toward perfectionistic striving, meditation can be recruited into serving that master. I didn’t want Fred to fall into that trap. His superego did not need a boost from meditation.

The division between meditation and real life is artificial. Doing each thing with full attention turns everything into a meditation.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.