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On the cover of the book is an empty chair and an empty psychoanalytic couch. Who's not there? How can there be a psychotherapy without the self? Opening the book reveals the development over the past 20 years of Epstein's thinking about these matters. In this republication of scholarly papers too long languishing in dusty journals, he reflects,
“In my experience, therapy and meditation, psychological development and spiritual realization, seem to be intertwined. One can facilitate the other, or retard the other, or subtly infuse or contaminate the other” (p. 16). What he forcefully contributes to through these papers (and his other books) is an ongoing integration of psychodynamic psychotherapy and the mindfulness of the Buddha. Where psychoanalysis a hundred years ago was digging for some certain truth as to Who I Am, here we find today a different model, one of multiplicity of self, a model of opening and possibility, where “I” is recognized as a passing though useful thought, where the experience of becoming more fully human realizes “thoughts without a thinker.” Epstein's (1995) breakthrough book of the same title established for Buddhism a permanent place at the contemporary psychoanalytic table (where the conversation is not always decorous). These essays reveal the seeds of that book and others, and in themselves, through recurrent themes and considerations, amplify the interrelatedness of psychological and spiritual growth.
The first essays, grouped under “Buddha,” represent Epstein's early attempts to apply what he had learned from his psychiatric residency to the Buddhist studies and meditative experience he had begun as an undergraduate. He starts with narcissism, that pathological investment in self which typifies our culture. Countering the argument that one must have a cohesive self (via ego development) in order to lose a self (via subsequent spiritual growth), he sees meditation “as a vehicle for freeing an individual from his own narcissism, a lib