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If you've been a practicing analyst in recent years, chances are you've had a patient seeking a therapist conversant in Buddhist teachings and meditation. Whether patients have sought you out due to familiarity with your work as a clinician friendly to the spiritual terrain, or you've grown interested in the clinical relevance of Buddhist psychology through your patients, you will find in Paul Cooper's trenchant and nuanced book Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action, a wellspring of analytic and spiritual insight.
Having read much of the literature on the ever-growing conversation between Buddhist psychology and psychodynamic treatment, I came to Cooper's book with little anticipation of new or revelatory perspectives. But immediately Cooper offers a simultaneously unique and inclusive approach to these contrasting traditions. As a seasoned psychoanalyst with ecumenical analytic orientations and a Zen priest in the Japanese Soto tradition, Cooper writes with a palpable and humble authority. Most nourishing, is his focus on the Zen notion of gūjin or total exertion. Building on the revered 13th century Japanese Buddhist teacher Eihei Dogen's work, Cooper offers a way into this teaching as an overarching method for psycho-spiritual healing.
Gūjin—the ability to enter into or realize the full nature of one's experience—is a resonant concept in the analytic tradition. And yet, it brings an enlivening optimism and expansiveness to an analytic perspective that for many might be shrouded in the entrenched defenses against awareness that most patients are working through. We are all, regardless of our analytic approach, familiar with the painstaking process of helping our patients (and ourselves) lift the protective veils of defense against reality. One might even suggest this is the heart of analytic work: cultivating the patience necessary to enter into a slow and labyrinthine process that allows our patients to safely access fuller and more complex truths. Given the pace and