Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an Integration. By Jeffrey B. Rubin. New York:  Plenum Press, 1996,  xi + 207 pp.

This important book by Jeffrey B. Rubin is one of a series of writings over the last ten years representing a small group of psychoanalysts in the Freudian tradition1 who, like Rubin, practice some form of Buddhist meditation (Coltart, 1992, 1996; Cooper, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, in press; Eigen, 1998a, 1998b; Finn, 1992; Milner, 1973; Roland, 1988, 1996, 1999; Suler, 1993). They join an earlier group of neo-Freudian psychoanalysts (Fromm, Suzuki, & DeMartino, 1960; Horney, 1987; Kelman, 1960) who traveled down this same road but in a more conceptual than experiential way. The present book might be more accurately titled Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in that it is with psychoanalysis, not psychotherapy in general, that Rubin is basically concerned. Like the others, Rubin departs from the Freudian tendency to perceive spiritual experiences and practices as either a regression to an egoless merger experience with the mother of infancy or as a form of psychopathology. He offers an overview of the Freudian literature on this topic.

What then does Rubin have to offer that is markedly different from the writings of others on Buddhism and psychotherapy? He suggests