The Psychologisation of Eastern Spiritual Traditions

This essential book critically examines the various ways in which Eastern spiritual traditions have been typically stripped of their spiritual roots, content and context, to be more readily assimilated into secular Western frames of Psychology.

Beginning with the colonial histories of Empire, the author draws from the 1960s Counterculture and the subsequent romanticising and idealising of the East. Cohen explores how Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist traditions have been gradually transformed into forms of Psychology, Psychotherapy and Self-Help, undergoing processes of ''modernisation'' and secularisation until their respective cosmologies had been successfully reinterpreted and reimagined. An important component of this psychologisation is the accompanying commodification of Eastern spiritual practices, including the mass-marketing of mindfulness and meditation as part of the burgeoning well-being industry. Also presenting emerging voices of resistance from within Eastern spiritua