Psychological interpretations of Buddhism are more comprehensive than one might initially think. This “dialogue,” or at least attempts at such, has been a subset of the broader psychology and religion movement since the latter's inception in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the history of this specific dialogical enterprise has incorporated multiple models and engaged multiple types of Buddhism. To name but a few, even a cursory survey of the past century reveals that theories classified as Jungian, humanistic/transpersonal, empirical/experimental, neurocognitive, existential, behavioral and what can be called “general psychotherapeutic” have all engaged what they consider to be the psychological import of Buddhism (e.g., Boss, 1965; Molino, 1998a; Nauriyal et al., 2006). The relation between these latter studies and psychoanalytic ones is complex as nonpsychoanalytic studies (notably evident in Jungian and transpersonal studies) often employ psychoanalytic concepts in eclectic ways.1
Given this complexity, some initial comment concerning parameters is in order. First, we shall confine ourselves to specifically psychoanalytic studies of Buddhism.
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Parsons, W.B. (2009). Psychoanalysis Meets Buddhism. In: Belzen, J.A. (eds) Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2540-1_8
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