Buddhist Romanticism

“meaning” has no meaning in a strictly materialistic system. “Meaning”
makes sense only in a system that allows for the teleology of purposes and
aims. Thus the focus on symbolism was, for him, the central means for reenchanting
the world so that life itself could regain meaning and
authenticity.
In proclaiming this modernized version of the Romantic view of
spiritual illness and the spiritual cure, Jung saw himself as advancing
beyond both Christianity and Buddhism. Buddhism, in his eyes, ranked
with Christianity as one of the two greatest traditional “systems of healing
for psychic illness.” And he expressed high regard for the symbolic world
of the Buddhists, especially in the Tibetan tradition, and for Buddhist
systems of mental training as possible means for inducing mind states
receptive to the unconscious. In this way he accorded much more respect to
Buddhism than had Freud, who regarded all quests for religious experience
as reversions to an infantile state. Thus, wherever Jung’s influence spread—
both among trained Jungian analysts and among therapists of a more
eclectic humanistic bent—he opened the door for Buddhism to enter into
the world of Western psychotherapy.
Nevertheless, the door was open only on certain conditions. Jung
criticized Westerners who wanted to adopt Buddhism as their religion,
comparing them to Western paupers trying to dress up in Oriental robes. In
his eyes, Buddhist symbolism and practices were to be adopted strictly in
line with his view of how to best foster the becoming of the soul. The result
was that his Romantic organic view of the universe prevented him from
imagining the possibility that the Dhamma might be right in seeing even
the healthiest form of becoming as a disease, and that it might offer a
spiritual cure—suitable for all times and places—that transcended
becoming entirely.
Maslow
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was one of the pioneers of humanistic
psychology in America. Writing at a time when Freud and the behaviorists
dominated the psychotherapeutic field, Maslow championed what he called
a Third Force in psychotherapy, devoted to the principle that a therapist
should not be content simply with curing his or her patients’ blatant
neuroses and psychoses, but should also work toward their full
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