With Rigor

In the adopting religion approaches to Buddhist traditions explicated in this chapter, clinicians actively and openly take up Buddhist teachings, practices, and identities. Instead of treating Buddhist traditions as resources for clinical work, therapists taking adopting religion approaches sometimes frame psychotherapies as resources to aid Buddhist communities. The chapter briefly surveys the impact this has on Buddhist communities in the United States, a number of which have been established by psychotherapists. Such approaches can appear to upend a hierarchy between the religious and not-religious as clinicians characterize therapy as merely a tool to, for example, clear psychological obstacles from meditation practice. This reversal can be traced back to humanistic and transpersonal therapists of the 1960s-1970s like Abraham Maslow who, critiquing secularity and “the medical model,” remade therapeutic goals to include the activation of “human potential.” While contemporary therapists who take adopting religion approaches could be defined as fully practicing religion (some describe their psychotherapies as new hybrid Buddhist schools), this arrangement of religious/not-religious also remains unstable: the specific Buddhist traditions they adopt can themselves be characterized as secularized forms, already bereft of features coded as more “conventionally” or “self-evidently” religious (merit-making practices, propitiation of deities, etc.).

Black Boxes and Trojan Horses

This chapter introduces psychotherapists’ translating religion approaches to Buddhist traditions focusing on the therapeutic use of mindfulness practices as a popular case example. In these approaches, Buddhist elements are “translated” into biomedical treatment interventions admissible to secular-designated psychotherapy. Influenced by a number of institutional and affiliative factors, cognitive behavioral psychotherapists were predisposed to seek to maintain scientific legitimacy while incorporating Buddhist practices. Taking a closer look at the historical origins of contemporary therapeutic mindfulness practices and the currently-untold stories of the development of some of the most prominent mindfulness methodologies (Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, etc.), the chapter interrogates the prevailing narrative that “mindfulness was extracted from Buddhism” and completely remade into a secular biomedical item. The chapter elucidates the ongoing contestation among clinicians - spurred by encounters with multiple, overlapping institutional authorities (not only biomedical or Buddhist, but academic as well) - over whether to define their “translations” as Buddhist or psychotherapeutic, religious or not-religious.

Introduction

The Introduction begins by laying out the methodological and theoretical foundations of the book. It explains that, currently, religious studies research on this topic has been limited, only conducted on select aspects such as mindfulness practices. Methodologically, ethnographic observation and interviews add significant texture to historical and discourse analysis and reveals the full diversity of ways therapists have related to Buddhist traditions. Further, at a theoretical level, previous studies often present binary interpretations of psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions as either cases of secularization or religious transmission. These totalizing interpretations do not take account of research on the social construction of classifications of the religious and not-religious (the secular, science, medicine, etc.). The Introduction then outlines six major sets of approaches that clinicians have taken to Buddhist traditions: clinicians (1) therapize, (2) filter, (3) translate, (4) personalize, (5) adopt, and (6) integrate those aspects of Buddhist traditions that they view to be religious. These categories, though highly artificial, are a useful method for mapping therapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions because they illustrate how they arise out of the relational configurations clinicians believe they make between the religious and the not-religious. And yet, these configurations always prove unstable.

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.

Research Tested, Science Approved

This chapter describes clinicians’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions. Contemporary psychotherapists often express a prodigious enthusiasm about neuroscientific research purporting to prove the healing potential of Buddhist practices. Here scientific experimentation is seen as filtering away the taint of the religious or as leaving only a religious essence that is compatible with science – a “filtered religion” akin to filtered coffee. The seeds of filtering religion approaches lie in the work of early psychologists of religion like William James and James Bisset Pratt who also sought to filter Buddhist teachings through the high-technology psychologies of their own day in a search for new therapeutic religious forms (epitomized by “mind-cure” and James’ “religion of healthy-mindedness”). Today, experimental research design is applied to Buddhist meditation and Christian petitionary prayer practices alike in order to validate their so-called secular biomedical use. The chapter thus concludes that therapists’ filtering religion approaches to Buddhist traditions destabilize religion/secular binaries even as they submit the religious to the scientific or biomedical.

Keeping Meditation Religious and Psychotherapy Secular

This chapter examines psychotherapists personalizing religion approaches to Buddhist teachings and practices. Here clinicians can be dramatically influenced by Buddhist teachings, but, intent on maintaining a clear differentiation between Buddhist and psychotherapeutic practice, are loath to “mix” the two. Deep believing Buddhist clinicians betray no sign of Buddhist influence in actual therapy sessions eschewing embodied practices or explicit discussion of Buddhist concepts. They instead hold their Buddhist identities silently internal within “the person of the therapist,” thus “personalized.” The work of one of the most famous therapists to investigate Buddhist traditions, Erich Fromm, is detailed. Fromm’s innovative reconstructions of the terms “religion” and “secular” remain highly influential today. The chapter then describes contemporary therapists who keep their therapy offices clear of visible signs of Buddhist practice during their work day while, in the evenings, publicly speak on “Zen psychoanalysis” or even lead Buddhist communities. These therapists view their work to be fundamentally Buddhist in nature and their patients will sometimes seek them out precisely for their Buddhist association. Personalizing religion approaches thus blur boundaries between the religious and not-religious based on distinctions between the private and the public, the personal and the professional.

Coming to Terms with Our Terms

This chapter surveys psychotherapists’ common understandings for the primary terms the volume tracks: psychotherapy, religion, secular, science, medicine, Buddhism, spirituality, and terms for the ultimate aim of life such as enlightenment. Psychotherapists’ “conventional definitions” for these concepts are established as drawn from both textual analysis and data from interviews and ethnographic observation. The chapter then explains how therapists inherited these conventional definitions through brief histories of how European communities came to invent a modern concept of religion that is based on a Protestant prototype of inner belief or came to discover a Buddhism defined as atheistic (despite the evidence of Buddhist communities throughout history who propitiate deities). The chapter thus clarifies the socially constructed nature of these core concepts, concepts to which psychotherapists then contribute to in an ongoing revision and reconstruction.

Conclusion

By the Conclusion, the diversity that exists among psychotherapists’ approaches to Buddhist traditions is clear. However, Prescribing the Dharma also informs larger questions in religious studies by observing that this diversity is generated out of therapists’ shifting definitions of what is religious and not-religious. Examining common operative understandings of categories like religion, science, and medicine yields a number of conclusions not only about the interpretive utility of these categories, but their function in the lives of communities in the United States. The Conclusion delineates six central findings that can be derived from Prescribing the Dharma’s research. It is then divided into six sections each of which expands upon those findings and their application to the field.

Over the Borderline

This chapter surveys clinicians’ integrating religion approaches to Buddhist traditions. Here psychotherapists seek to incorporate Buddhist and psychotherapeutic elements in such a way that both remain recognizable. Some believe that common elements or shared ultimate aims make Buddhist and psychotherapeutic “compatible.” Others design methods to overcome what they otherwise portray as fundamental incommensurables (e.g., dissonances between Buddhist and therapeutic conceptions of the self). At times, therapists explain their integrative efforts to be what they call “hybrids” consistent with those of previous locations of Buddhist transmission (e.g., medieval China). The chapter considers whether scholarly concepts such as hybridity or religious repertories used to describe historical religious mixing could be useful in describing these contemporary activities. Or, alternatively, whether the combinativeness here is unique and without historical precedent: the bricolage of the religious and the not-religious, scientific or biomedical. To some therapists, integrating Buddhist and psychotherapeutic frames necessitates asking questions of definition (whether Buddhist traditions are properly classified as religious; psychotherapy as not-religious, etc.). Some take up cultural rhetoric surrounding the term “spirituality” in this context to argue that their activities are neither religious or not-religious.