Buddhism & Psychotherapy in Conversation: A Healing Partnership

For more than half a century, there’s been a growing interest in the relevance of Buddhist psychology and meditation to psychodynamic treatment. Carl Jung, along with Karen Horney, Nina Coltart, and many other clinicians across psychoanalytic orientations, have made efforts to explore how a traditional therapeutic approach to healing might be enhanced by a Buddhist understanding of suffering and its end. This course will examine how these contrasting traditions understand the roots of personal and collective suffering and how their complementary, though divergent, methods offer increased opportunities for healing when used in tandem.

For clinicians, this course will provide an exploration of how the treatment of common psychological struggles, including depression and anxiety, as well as more complex forms of trauma, may be supported by Buddhist insights and methods for both patients and therapists. For meditators, this course will offer ways to more fully understand and address the psychological content that can arise in one’s spiritual practice through a psychodynamic approach to inner life and its development. With periods of meditation practice, readings, and classroom discussion, together we will examine the foundational concepts addressed in both Buddhist and psychotherapeutic teachings, including the nature of self, identity, loss, and efforts at healing.