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Paul Cooper is a practicing psychoanalyst who has published several psychoanalytic books and articles, a Zen Buddhist scholar and practitioner, a poet who writes haiku and waka, and who composes for and plays shakuhachi, traditional Japanese flute. He is uniquely positioned to write with extensive theoretical and experiential knowledge of both disciplines, with an exquisite sensibility and depth of understanding. With his specialized background in both psychoanalysis and Zen
Buddhism, he creates a pathway for the reader to appreciate both the uniqueness of each discipline and their resonance and affinity with each other.
Cooper's introduction and 10 chapters address various aspects of the “wisdom teachings” inherent both in psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, the misconceptions that arise regarding both disciplines, and the ways in which they address the profound questions of what it means to be human, to be conscious, to encounter the physical world, to contemplate a fundamental ground of being, and to search for freedom from the constrictions of perceptions, preconceptions, unconscious processes and attachment to suffering and its causes.
An overview of the 10 chapters allows us to follow the unfolding of Cooper's vision. I will address in some detail the opening chapters, in order to create perspective, and then briefly summarize where Cooper subsequently leads us. Chapter 1, “Riding the Elusive Ox of Zen: Problems of Definition”, provides the conceptual framework for the book, beginning on the first page, the first sentence, with a very Zen-like and psychoanalytic-like question of definition: “What Zen and what psychoanalysis are we talking about?” Essentially he is beginning with a paradox, that both Zen and psychoanalysis are experiential, hence internal, and offers a framework to understand these internal experiences as a coherent, theoretical body of knowledge and research that by its very existence is external. He describes the challenge of trying to keep a ba