Image: iStock by Getty Images Thanks for reading Glen’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Freud and the psychoanalytic form of therapy that he pioneered have taken a beating in recent decades. Critics have highlighted Freud's Victorian-era prejudices toward women and his dismissal of homosexuality as inherently deviant. Some of Freud's claims were culturally shocking and resistant to empirical validation, like the perennially controversial Oedipus complex, an allegedly unconscious drama in which little boys yearned to have sex with their mothers and then became so horrified about being castrated for harboring this desire that they developed an implicit but exacting sense of self-censorship. And the five-days-a-week and multi-year commitment that orthodox psychoanalytic therapy required was simply impractical and unaffordable for all but an elite few. Shorter and more evidence-based forms of therapy, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, have largely filled in the hole that the limitations and flaws in psychoanalysis left open.
Thank you Glen for doing the hard work of comparing the world of Buddhist meditation and the approaches to self-understanding that we grew up with through Western therapy, especially psychoanalytic therapy, all through the lens of your own experiences in both realms. Your writing is always meticulous, detailed, and clear.
Thank you Glen for doing the hard work of comparing the world of Buddhist meditation and the approaches to self-understanding that we grew up with through Western therapy, especially psychoanalytic therapy, all through the lens of your own experiences in both realms. Your writing is always meticulous, detailed, and clear.