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PSYCHOTHERAPY AND BUDDHISM: TOWARD AN INTEGRATION. By Jeffrey B. Rubin. New York: Plenum Press, 1996, xi + 207 pp.
This important book by Jeffrey B. Rubin is one of a series of writings over the last ten years representing a small group of psychoanalysts in the Freudian tradition1 who, like Rubin, practice some form of Buddhist meditation (Coltart, 1992, 1996; Cooper, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, in press; Eigen, 1998a, 1998b; Finn, 1992; Milner, 1973; Roland, 1988,1996,1999; Suler, 1993). They join an earlier group of neo-Freudian psychoanalysts (Fromm, Suzuki, & DeMartino, 1960; Homey, 1987; Kelman, 1960) who traveled down this same road but in a more conceptual than experiential way. The present book might be more accurately titled Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in that it is with psychoanalysis, not psychotherapy in general, that Rubin is basically concerned. Like the others, Rubin departs from the Freudian tendency to perceive spiritual experiences and practices as either a regression to an egoless merger experience with the mother of infancy or as a form of psychopathology. He offers an overview of the Freudian literature on this topic.
What then does Rubin have to offer that is markedly different from the writings of others on Buddhism and psychotherapy? He suggests that Americans who become involved in Buddhism must effect a very different kind of integration between their meditative practices, their everyday selves, and their social functioning than Asians have displayed through the centuries. Moreover, Americans usually learn from Asian Buddhist teachers, although the hierarchical relationships embedded in each culture can be dissonant with each other. In historical perspective, it is only very recently that Buddhist meditative practices have been introduced into Western societies.
In dealing with this issue, Rubin is singularly iconoclastic. He goes for the jugular regarding both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, though extolling what each has to offer the other. He starts with the question familiar to those involved in both psychoanalytic work and Buddhist meditation: How does one reconcile the endeavors of psychoanalysis and other forms of Western psychotherapy to strengthen the self with Buddhism's approach to the self as ever changing and as having no inherent existence, as well as with Buddhism's approach to the nonself and to emptiness?2 Rubin argues that both have important but limited views of...