Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis

Ordinary Mind offers a groundbreaking synthesis that begins to move us from a psychology of illness into a psychology of wellness. In an engaging, accessible, and often witty style, psychiatrist and Zen teacher Barry Magid helps us to understand challenging Zen ideas - openess, emptiness, no-self and enlightenment - and explores how they make sense within Western pysychotherapy. On the analysts’s couch and the meditator’s cushion, we are fundamentally practicing awareness of the moment-by-moment unfolding of our thoughts and feelings. Many seek to combine a variety of practices within their own lives but feel a certain unease about how exactly these different practices relate to each other. Is meditation merely an escape from psychological problems? Does a psychological approach to meditation reduce spirituality to self-help ? How does the use of Prozac fit with spiritual practice? Is the relationship between meditation student and teacher analogous to that between patient and pyschotherapist? And most importantly: How can we best learn from these two systems of thought that address the problems of the huamn mind and of human suffering? In answering these questions Magid gives an account of Zen practice and the search for meaning informed by the psychoanalytic theories of self psychology and intersubjectivity.