Psychotherapy, East and West
Before he became a counterculture hero, Alan Watts was known as an incisive scholar of Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy. In this 1961 classic, Watts demonstrates his deep understanding of both Western psychotherapy and the Eastern spiritual philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. He examined the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that questioned the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreakingsynthesis, Watts asserted that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self. When psychotherapy merely helps us adjust to social norms, Watts argued, it falls short of true liberation, while Eastern philosophy seeks our natural relation to the cosmos.
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What Hacker News says
- You should check out Watt's Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), it's a good read.
Here's a half-baked thought: I always held the notion psychedelics help us, at least personally, come to the realization of "be in the world, but not of the world." It relates to what Watt's mentions in that book, in this case the therapist is in place of the psychedelic:
(1) "The psychotherapist … tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world."
(2) "Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning — hatred being a form of bondage to its object."
(3) "Psychotherapist... are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality."
(4) "When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication."
I was talking to a friend about this earlier this year and one argument that stood out was my friend saying it can't be as simple as that, the whole spectrum of mental illness, which was conflicting with what I initially thought.
- Alan Watts - The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - The Wisdom of Insecurity - Psychotherapy East & West
Herman Hesse - Siddhartha - The Journey to the East
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Seneca - Letters to Lucilius
Daniel Quinn - Ishmael
