The Existential Buddhist | dharma without dogma..

William James might have been the primary psychologist to take an curiosity in Buddhism, however he definitely was not the final. In Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), psychotherapist and non secular research scholar Ira Helderman explores the historical past and present standing of the continued relationship between the American psychotherapeutic neighborhood and Buddhist traditions—no less than the Buddhist traditions as transmitted by Asian modernizers and as practiced inside predominantly European-descent Buddhist “convert” communities. His method is predicated each on a participant-observer ethnological evaluation (he attends skilled psychological conferences dedicated to Buddhist themes and interviews presenters and attendees) and on textual analyses of the writings of main figures, residing and historic, who’ve performed key roles within the unfolding relationship between Buddhism and Western psychology.

His isn’t an easy story both of the secularization, subversion, and cultural appropriation of Buddhist custom by therapists, or of the stealth transmission of Buddhist concepts into American tradition. As Helderman factors out, “psychotherapy” and “Buddhism” are socially constructed classes and, due to this fact, are usually not entities that may interact in dialogue. There are solely particular person clinicians making pragmatic choices about the way to deal with particular person purchasers whereas negotiating the boundaries set by organizations and companies that police their career and responding to the influences of a number of impinging historic and cultural forces {and professional} imperatives. These clinicians typically occupy a number of and considerably conflicting roles as scientists, healers, and non secular practitioners. They want to barter a wide range of socially constructed classes that essentially inform their choices, together with the definitional classes of faith, secularity, spirituality, science, medication, and remedy, and what the connection between these classes must be. They additionally want to think about the important goals of each remedy and Buddhist apply—whether or not they’re consonant or disparate—and their relationship to extra broadly construed conceptions of “wellness” and “the good life.”

Helderman defines six main approaches clinicians take with regard to Buddhism: therapizing, filtering, translating, personalizing, adopting, and integrating. In the chapters that observe the introductory chapters, Helderman examines every of those approaches and the work of psychotherapists who typify every method. At the identical time, he’s clear that these approaches are usually not pure sorts and that the clinicians he reads and talks to typically undertake a number of and, at instances, conflicting approaches, generally emphasizing completely different approaches relying on the viewers they’re addressing. Therapizing means explicating Buddhism within the language of psychological discourse, as when Franz Alexander explicates the objective of Buddhist apply as a narcissistic rechanneling of libidinal energies away from the exterior world and onto the self. Filtering entails choosing and selecting Buddhist concepts in keeping with how consonant they’re with fashionable Western science. Therapizers and filterers each view psychology and science as the ultimate arbiters of reality. Translating entails restating Buddhist practices in biomedical phrases, as when meditation is described as “attentional training practice” or “the relaxation response.” Personalizing entails a personal private dedication to Buddhism, whereas conserving it in a separate silo from one’s medical apply. Adopting means reformulating psychotherapy in Buddhist phrases. Adopters see Buddhism as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Finally, integrating entails discovering methods Buddhist and psychotherapeutic concepts can mutually assimilate and accommodate to one another, the place neither is seen as being essentially privileged over the opposite. As Helderman critiques these approaches, he explores the work of such clinicians and theorists as Carl Jung, Franz Alexander, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jeffrey Rubin, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Barry Magid, Steve Hayes, Mark Epstein, Marsha Linehan, Paul Cooper, Harvey Aronson, Paul Fulton, Jack Engler, Jack Kornfeld, Joseph Loizzo, Pilar Jennings, Jan Surrey, Jeremy Safran, Christopher Germer, Gay Watson, Karen Kissel Wegela, Ken Wilber, and others.

Many of the clinicians described are sad with the traditional boundaries of what constitutes faith and what constitutes secularity. They typically attempt to redefine the phrases or blur their boundaries, however their affect is inescapable. Helderman explains that is the case due to the pervasive affect of coaching and certification authorities, third-party payors, hospital accreditation organizations, first modification issues, and malpractice case legislation; the lengthy cultural historical past of how concepts are transmitted to us; clinicians’ self-identifications with their very own therapeutic lineages and the internalization of their norms; and non secular students’ critiques, which, for clinicians, typically assist outline the authenticity of their understandings of Buddhist teachings. Helderman argues that the boundaries clinicians redraw between what’s non secular, secular, religious, medical, and psychotherapeutic are inherently unstable and riddled with inside inconsistencies, and thus topic to fixed critique and revision.

Helderman views clinicians’ relationship with Buddhism towards the bigger background of what Eugene Taylor has known as psychology’s “shadow culture” (Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America [1999]). While American psychology is usually trifurcated into the three twentieth-century mainstreams of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology, Taylor described a “fourth stream” of other therapeutic strategies from Swedenborgianism, homeopathy, mesmerism, Christian Science, and New Thought, right down to in the present day’s mindfulness. Taylor described how this fourth stream periodically emerges, is repressed, after which makes an inevitable return as a result of the division between scientific/medical and non secular/religious elements of therapeutic is at all times unstable. Are Buddhist-oriented psychologists mixing science and faith? Or if psychotherapy is an alternative to the non secular dimension of life in a secularized age, are therapists actually mixing two various kinds of religious traditions? Psychotherapists have at all times occupied a sort of liminal area between science, artwork, medication, and spirituality, and Buddhism—or no less than Western Buddhist modernism—might be seen as the most recent import into this area.

Helderman is primarily a non secular research scholar, and he makes good use of each non secular research broadly thought-about and fashionable Buddhist scholarship particularly. One theme he revisits a variety of instances is the diploma to which fashionable Western psychotherapists’ utilization and understanding of Buddhism might be in comparison with the method of sinicization and the way in which the medieval Chinese understood and made sense of Buddhism. This is, after all, a declare that Buddhist-oriented psychologists make themselves in an effort to assist legit their work. Is Buddhism, just like the fabled Ship of Theseus, one thing that undergoes fixed transformation but stays, in some way, the identical ship, or sooner or later is it not Buddhism? Are karma, reincarnation, merit-making, and celestial bodhisattvas essential elements of any Buddhism, or can a Buddhism without them nonetheless be a Buddhism? Who will get to determine whether or not one thing remains to be a type of Buddhism, or whether or not it is crypto-Buddhism or just New Age nonsense? These are questions Helderman raises, presenting arguments on either side, however leaves basically unresolved. Helderman emphasizes that these questions are usually not mere idle questions. There is one thing necessary at stake right here. At the guts of those disputes is a clinician fighting how finest to assist a severely disturbed affected person who has not been helped by the standard and customary therapeutic measures—a therapist who, within the midst of uncertainty and controversy, should decide about whether or not and the way to make use of one thing he discovered at a convention, in a zendo, or from a e-book that he thinks may be useful however isn’t certain might be universally applauded. Helderman thinks we must have some actual sympathy for this clinician, however he additionally thinks that in an effort to do their work nicely, clinicians have to formulate and make clear their very own thought-about solutions as to what’s well being and well-being, what sort of endeavor remedy is, and to what diploma faith can and must be included on this combine.

Helderman has written a e-book that’s admirable by way of its comprehensiveness, depth, and nuance. The clinicians included on this research are a great illustration of thought leaders—psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic/transpersonal—within the subject. His historic protection of seminal figures, similar to Jung, Alexander, Maslow, and Fromm, is superb. He makes good use of the work of up to date Buddhist students, similar to Stephen Bokenkamp, José Cabezón, Francisca Cho, Rupert Gethin, Jay Garfield, Luis Gomez, Janet Gyatso, Donald Lopez Jr., David McMahan, John McRae, Ann Gleig, Robert Campany, and Robert Sharf, amongst many others, in addition to students of up to date faith and spirituality. Helderman’s e-book is probably the most correct, full, and in-depth exploration of how Western psychotherapists therapize, filter, translate, personalize, undertake, and combine Buddhism into their theories, lives, and practices but written, and is prone to stay a basic for years to come back. It has implications not just for how clinicians construe their apply but additionally in understanding the most important vector for both (relying on one’s viewpoint) the transmission of Buddhism into American tradition or its secularization and diminishment.