Thoughts without a thinker

Author: Mark Epstein

In an extremely personal and enlightening synthesis, Epstein draws on his experience as a therapist and patient to integrate Western psychotherapy with the Buddha's teachings on suffering, illusion, wisdom and non-attachment. According to Epstein, Buddhist meditation practices can help people reclaim repressed memories, process painful emotions, and give new direction to destructive energies. If, as Bion argues, the only way not to pollute the psychoanalytic interpretation is to place oneself in front of the patient "without memory and without desires", not allowing thoughts to be colored by the preconceptions, emotions, desires of a thinker, then the Buddhist doctrine of not self is full of suggestions for the analyst.