Man is burdened with an ego that is in constant conflict with society and nature, in perpetual flight from loneliness and death. Despite its diverse methods, the single aim of psychotherapy is to free man from his endless self-battle.
Alan Watts’s arresting, provocative study shows how Eastern philosophers long ago faced—and solved—the problem of man’s existence in a seemingly hostile universe. Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism are examined and related to the theories of Freud, Jung, Sullivan, and May. The inscrutable wisdom of Zen masters is made clear by Alan Watts as he explains how the modern “fiction” of the ego has clouded the sights of psychotherapy and blocked Western man from his true place in nature.
The source of modern man’s conflict, according to Watts, is the society that traps the ego in a “doublebind” of contradictory demands. This is the Hindu-Buddhist maya, or social illusion, which one must appre
