The Tao of Self Psychology: Was Heinz Kohut a Taoist Sage?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹This comment by Chang Po-Hsing is from Relections on Things at Hand (Hsi, 1175), an anthology of Neo-Confucian texts compiled by Chu Hsi with the help of Lu Tsu Ch'ien in 1175, and according to the translator of the 1967 edition, Wing-tsit Chan, the text used for this translation was originally “published in Chu Hsi's own time” (p. xi)—placing its date of publication between 1175 and 1200.

Farrell Silverberg, PhD, NCPsyA, is a clinical psychologist, a certified psychoanalyst, and was the first Western student of Taopsychotherapy master Rhee Dong Shik in Seoul, Korea. Silverberg has lectured internationally and has published in journals in the United States and in Asia. He began integrating psychoanalysis and Eastern thought 30 years ago, and his papers on the combined technique include Therapeutic Resonance (1988), Working With Resistance (1990), and Resonance and Exchange in Contemplative Psychotherapy (2008), Silverberg is a Supervising and Training psychoanalyst at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. A video presentation about his concept of resonance can be found online at: www.consciousnessprecedesmind.org/dr-silverberg-channel/dr-silverberg.html

²This question asked by Confucius and recorded by his disciples in the Analects circa 500 BC, follows a description of a situation in which doing things with proper form, li alone, failed to keep harmony (Shun, 1993). The particular translation of Book III, verse 3, that I used here is Chong's (1999) modification of the translation by D. C. Lau (1979, p. 67) wherein Chong (p. 309) leaves the original Chinese words jen and li untranslated to replace Lau's more limiting translation of jen and li as “benevolent” and “rites.”