Toward a Psychology of Awakening by John Welwood

Author:John Welwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

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Psychotherapy as a Practice of Love

Genuine psychotherapeutic eros must be a selflessness and reverence before the patient’s existence and uniqueness.

—MEDARD BOSS

FREUD ONCE ADMITTED in a letter to Jung that “psychoanalysis is essentially a cure through love.” Yet while many psychotherapists might privately agree that love has some kind of role in the healing process, the word love is curiously absent from most of the therapeutic literature. The same is true for the word heart. Not only is this term missing from the psychological literature, but the tone of the literature itself also lacks heart.

My interest in the place of heart in psychotherapy developed out of my experience with meditation. Although Western thought often defines mind in terms of reason and heart in terms of feeling, in Buddhism heart and mind can both be referred to by the same term (chitta in Sanskrit). Indeed, when Tibetan Buddhists refer to mind, they often point to their chest. Mind in this sense is not thinking mind but rather big mind—a direct knowing of reality that is basically open and friendly toward what is. Centuries of meditators have found this openness to be the central feature of human consciousness.

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