The continuity of being

Author: M.Epstein

Psychoanalysis was, although not only, fundamentally a clinical response to mental distress. And even today its substantial nature has remained linked to the request for the alleviation of psychic suffering. What is less recognized, but no less true, is that precisely the need for an answer to a profound and widespread spiritual unease has given rise to that flourishing transformation of Western spirituality which initially relied on religious forms imported from the East, and among them above all that complex of traditions that the West has called 'Buddhism'. The common humus on which the demand for psychoanalysis and that of spirituality has grown is a widespread state of suffering inherent in the life of modern man. Mark Epstein belongs to that new generation of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who have experienced firsthand this double need for personal research as a global experience of their own being, and have integrated it into a concrete vision of reality and an original practice of both psychotherapy. both of spirituality. Not a theory, but a Buddhist psychotherapist who recognizes that a concept like that of 'continuity of being', introduced into psychoanalysis by Winnicott, has a central meaning in a Buddhist perspective, for the simple fact that for him it is not just a concept , but a real lived experience.