ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 summarizes some of the ideas of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Thich Hnat Hanh and the theoretical psychologists Philip Cushman and Ronald Miller that an Enlightenment program of science, progress, and individualism, by itself, leads modern culture and the field of psychology to downplay the suffering, pain, and threats of meaninglessness and death that afflict nearly everyone’s life to some degree. These maladies are acknowledged mostly only as things to be eliminated or overcome by technology, social progress, or some kind of therapy. In fact, many are ineliminable and their denial easily becomes in itself a source of suffering.
