ABSTRACT
The focus of transcendence of the ego, satori or samadhi as it is referred to in the terminology of zen, has been the subject of some reflection and misapprehension at the dawn of Western psychotherapy, most notably in Freud’s assessment of the infantile narcissistic impulse or oceanic experience. Similarly, in the realm of psychotherapy, the attempt to overcome emotional pain by reader clients is often heightened by the very methods used in their healing, namely the reinforcement of notion of self which, whether reader choose to view it in its positive or negative manifestations, in some very real sense may lack existence, and, in either case, ultimately function as the source of reader pain. Buddhism has in particular enjoyed recent celebration of its methods in psychotherapeutic community through the current fascination with mindfulness and meditation practice. One supposes that identifying and exposing underlying mechanisms of brain function which go into readers experience of the self would settle matter definitively.
