Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings

The book opens by situating the modern encounter between Buddhism and Western psychology within the history of dialogue among Zen, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology, and transpersonal psychology. The chapters then discuss Buddhist psychology, the integration of psychoanalysis and Buddhism, Buddhist attitudes toward practice and identity, the relation between self and awakening, Nāgārjuna’s thought, mirroring in psychotherapy, psychotherapy as Buddhist practice, and the intellectual history of Buddhism’s influence on Western psychology. The volume emphasizes a “middle-way” approach in which Buddhism and psychology are not collapsed into one another, but placed in constructive dialogue.