Carrello
Zen and psychotherapy share similar traits and concerns, including an emphasis on insight, attentiveness, and transformative experience. Although they are distinct paths which have traditionally viewed one another with suspicion, they nevertheless challenge and enrich one another. Each is a journey and a process of inquiry. Each recognizes the tendency toward self-deception and values truth and awareness.
In this intimate and unique book, Zen master and psychoanalyst Joseph Bobrow illuminates the dynamic interplay of emotional and spiritual development through the prisms of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy, and demonstrates how these traditions can help us engage our lives, transform suffering, and live with contentment and freedom.
He elegantly interweaves personal narratives of professional, emotional, and spiritual development with themes such as mindfulness, self-knowledge, and transformation. In tracing his development as both a therapist and a Zen practitioner, he highlights the interplay of the two traditions in his own life and work to show how those involved with one tradition can learn from the other. Clinical vignettes drawn from the author's psychotherapeutic practice underscore how trauma, attachment, emotional communication, and emotional regulation can be more fully engaged and plumbed by the integrated streams of Zen and psychotherapy.
This integration, as Bobraw artfully illustrates, can help us to better grasp our conscious and unconscious experiences and more fully develop the fundamental capacities of the self as we understand its "noself" nature. Zen and psychotherapy is a nuanced and compelling meditation on two distinctive paths toward self-understanding, and how, in concert, both provide a comprehensive, interactive model of a fully functioning human life.