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Alan Watts, the well-known interpreter of Zen Buddhism, has written a book (Psychotherapy East and West) which has an important bearing on the relation of contemporary Western man to the unconscious. In a beautifully worded exposition, he attempts to prove that the ego is unreal and unnecessary, being merely a part of man's illusion of belonging to a unified social field. He concludes that “disturbed individuals are, as it were, points in the social field where contradictions in the field break out” (p. 46). The ego is “hypnotized” by certain social institutions and the way of liberation, as practised in the East by Buddhism, Vedanta, or Taoism, is designed to release the individual from his hypnosis. The ego, then, being unnecessary to preserve the illusion of maya, ceases to exist. Whoever suffers from this state of hypnosis seeks help from the guru who must above all convince him “that he, the guru, has mastered the imaginary problem, that his ego is not disturbed by pain or death or worldly passions” (p. 57). His method is to trick the sufferer into giving up his illusions. “Buddhism emphasizes the unreality of the ego, whereas Vedanta emphasizes the unity of the field. Thus, in describing liberation, the former seems to be saying simply that the egocentric viewpoint evaporates, and the latter that we discover our true self to be the Self of the universe …” but “it comes to the same thing in practical experience” (p. 59).
In this preliminary study, Watts has presented an original picture of the purpose of Eastern philosophy which should evoke lively controversy among religious historians of both the East and the West. He calls our attention to the social facts behind the philosophy, unlike so many Western students of the Ancient East, who have shown us only the metaphysical results of achieving liberation from an equally metaphysical (or at least methodological) cosmology, as if there were no social or psychological conditions to motivate the need for such libera