This weekend's Sunday New York Times Magazine featured a piece by Chip Brown titled Enlightenment Therapy where Brown discusses the coming together of psychoanalysis and Zen Buddism. It's a long piece, and I looked at it several times. I read for a while, but it was long and I can't say it held my attention well. I went back several times. I'm missing something here: Why is this a featured article? What's said that's worth taking pages to say? What am I missing here? Someone want to enlighten me?
I don't know that Zen and psychoanalysis have much in common, except that they both can ameliorate distress, and both are at once trendy and fringe, depending on context and the times. Both are chameleonlike with fuzzy borders, which makes them inherently suspect (not always a bad thing).
ReplyDeleteMust have been a slow day at the Times.
I don't think it was the subject matter, but the way it was written and pieced together... very Oprah-ish if you ask me
ReplyDeleteHo boy. Don't get me started. You're not missing a thing. It's a New York thing, and it's pointless intellectual mental mast., and I'm sorry I missed it, but usually pieces like these get published to sell newspapers to intellectuals or intellectual wanna be's.
ReplyDeletefad.
ReplyDeleteHere is a recent article on a promising new mode of treatment though.
ReplyDeleteDepression and anxiety are the most common mental disorders in America, affecting more than 60 million patients every year. Pharmacological interventions dominate the medical management of these disorders and may include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (Prozac), norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (Strattera), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (Emsam), benzodiazepines (Valium), azaspirodecanediones (BuSpar), and any number of similarly efficacious drugs or drug combinations prescribed in accordance with strict FDA guidelines, or not, based on the treating physician's better judgment.....Read on.