Look but Don’t Touch

This chapter introduces psychotherapists’ therapizing religion approaches to Buddhist traditions. In these approaches, therapists analyze religious traditions using not only psychological methodologies (as in the discipline of psychology of religion), but psychotherapeutic theories founded on ideas about health and illness. They thus “therapize” religion. It explicates the work of Franz Alexander and Carl Jung in detail as two early representatives of these approaches - though the two arrived at very different conclusions about the pathological or positive content of Buddhist practice. It further explains that clinicians continue to therapize Buddhist traditions today, often to assess the healthfulness of Buddhist elements before “translating” or “integrating” them into their psychotherapies. This reveals the instability that lies within the relational configurations therapists imagine between the religious and the not-religious when they therapize Buddhist traditions. In their repositioning of psychotherapy within classifications like religion and science, even the early treatments of Jung and Alexander ultimately subvert the hard borderlines they mean to reinforce.

Geography, China's Path and State-Society Relations: Redressing Western Misinterpretations

The complexity of China's state-society relations is often underestimated, or completely neglected, by Western commentators, journalists, politicians and, at times, academics. There especially seems to be a lack of theoretical ideas and systematic analysis in geographical studies. The overall outcome of said underestimation is the proliferation of misinterpretations on the meaning-sense of evolving relational configurations between power, people and places in China. Hence the Western ability (institutions and common people) to understand and judge, as objectively as possible, ongoing socio-economic and political trends in China, its hybrid experimental path and general development trajectory, is concretely invalidated. Starting from this standpoint and drawing from different sources, this paper first suggests that the changing characteristics of the current Chinese multi-scalar politico-socio-economic processes cannot be simply reduced to “capitalism.” Secondly, to get a better understanding of China in a comparative perspective — by analyzing the country's direction of development and governance — I summarize some instructive traits of state-society relations, arguing that the nature and significance of these differ, when they are not quite the reverse, from the prevailing (mis) interpretations by Western agents. I specifically refer to the need to (re)interpret two points from a comparative standpoint: a) the state's popular legitimacy and socio-economic dynamism, and b) the variegated modes of conflict resolution and financial governance.

Working With Couples Between Past and Present: Some Clinical Implications

A clinical case of a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy is presented in order to highlight the difficulties and the sense of suffering present in ‘old-style marriages’ that have tried to take up the challenge of modernity. In fact, as the holding structure of the strength of blood ties and institutionally formalised bonds carries less weight, a greater fragility in the capacity for partners to have a relationship seems to emerge. The authors enquire how, in the modern couple, intrapsychic aspects might interact with the social pressures that face new relational configurations.