Owlseyes ’s Reviews > Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy > Status Update

Buddhist methods, in contrast to therapy’s focus on personal relational and identity themes, are designed to alleviate suffering and increase compassion in terms of broader universal themes. In all of its methods, Buddhism focusses attention on craving, aversion, and ignorance as experienced particularly through creating, sustaining, and defending the illusion of a separate, stable, independent self.

Aspects of interdependence in Zen and Jung

In one example of how this interdependence can be traced in psychotherapy, Kopf (1998) compares Jung’s account of the transferential phenomena of therapy with the account of katto (vines) from Zen Master Dogen’s analysis of the master-disciple relationship in the chapter of Katto Shobogenzo.

[in client/therapist relationship] One person transfers a whole context or story, or a particular feeling state, to another and believes that it originates with the other. Countertransference is simply the reaction of the second person to the transference of the first, especially in the feeling states and images of the second person.

Not only the complexes of the unconscious, but also the ego complex of conscious awareness can throw us off balance through defensive emotional patterning

Dukkha


The First Noble Truth taught by the Buddha is often translated into English as ‘Life is suffering.’


Dukkha refers literally to a state of being off-center or out of balance, like a wheel riding off its axle or a bone riding out of its socket.

If you explain suffering only in organic terms, then you exclude the possibility that you can change your life through changing your mind.

Buddhism teaches that our suffering arises from the illusion that the individual self is enduring and needs to be protected

Unique among religions, Buddhism has developed systematic methods for investigating the roots of suffering and other psychological responses in ways that are valid and reliable. The methods of Buddhism are objective and empirical and do not contradict the metaphysics of science

A great deal of harm has already occurred as a result of embracing biological determinism as a fundamental explanation of human suffering.

The spiritual problem of the end of the century

Carl Jung more than once said that science is the ‘spiritual adventure of our age’...

Science did not transcend metaphysics, however. It created its own metaphysics with widespread cultural consequences.