**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Book #Psychotherapy #Wisdom  >[!info]- Details > **Title**:: Psychotherapy East & West > **Subtitle**:: >**Authors**:: [[Alan Watts]] >**Publisher**:: New World Library >**Date_published**:: 2017-01-15 >**Pages**:: 210 >**ISBN**:: 1608684571 9781608684571 >**Bibliography**:: Alan Watts. *Psychotherapy East & West*. New World Library, 2017-01-15. > [!example] Explore > --- 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 groundbreaking synthesis, 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. --- # Core Ideas 1. Western Psychotherapy has a lot in common with Eastern wisdom traditions. They're both concerned with transformation of consciousness and the liberation of the individual from social condition (when the Psychotherapy is true, see: [[True psychotherapy removes the blocks to truth]]). 2. Maya is not primarily about escaping a physical or metaphysical reality, but more about seeing through illusions (maya) created and imposed by society, including language and logic. Social constructs shape our entire experience in the world and is often a source of suffering. 3. The ego, as in the feeling of a separate and permanent self, is a social fiction. Self-consciousness arises through social interaction (we know this to be true because [[Our sense of self unfolds intersubjectively, not separately]]). Watts says this is the primary source of all of our problems, and liberations involves seeing through the ego (no destroying it). 4. The concept of the "countergame" in liberating the individual, which is a strategy used by both gurus and psychotherapists to challenge someone's false ego assumptions. Instead of directly confronting these beliefs, which are created and driven by the ego, gurus and psychotherapists instead engage in and play along with them until the person discovers their false nature themselves. 5. There's no separation between the organism and the environment, rather these are mutually dependent and act upon each other. 6. For Western science or thought to be truly liberating, it needs its own yoga—a practical discipline for realising theoretical understanding as a felt insight, one that goes beyond intellectual comprehension. This is already happening in the West (see: [[Hakomi Method]] and [[Aletheia Coaching]]). 7. Death is integral and essential to life, and the fear of death is a key source of anxiety. We can't have being without nonbeing, so through the realisation of nonbeing as a complement to being we can move beyond the anxiety of death through this realisation and acceptance. 8. Western culture has a fear of life, and therefore life force energy (which he uses the term Eros). This causes [[Lab/01 Incubator/Sleeping/Repression]] and leads to the inability to be liberated, be more integrated and enjoy life as play. 9. At the core, life is play. Those who approach it with rigid seriousness, [[Survival Attunement distorts our entire way of being|survival]] and a constant striving for a future goal miss its fundamental nature. Liberation involves engaging with life in a more spontaneous and playful way.