Weber, Michel, "Western Psychotherapies and Eastern Worldveiws in the Light of Whithehead's Anthropology." Whitehead Religion Psychology. 28-35.[Conference paper presented at The 5th International Whitehead Conference], Seoul, South Korea, May 28. 2004.

Abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to contextualize the contemporary state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a Whiteheadian spirit. We will explore afresh a cross-elucidatory path that was born with the field of history or religion: what can we learn from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? Since such a dialogues has so far occurred either independently of Whitehead’s categories or at a time when postmodern scientism could still look as a viable – if not promising—path, new thoughts are welcome to throw some Whiteheadian light on the current status of psychotherapies and thereby to encounter the price the West is paying for the short-termed successes of its scientific-technical materialism. 

The three correlated “actors” that we wish to plunge in a Whiteheadian atmosphere are: pathology (and the suffering individual), psychotherapy (and the therapist) and society. Psychotherapy answers (or tries to answer) the feeling of discomfort or ill-being—pathology – that occurs in an individual within a given society. Accordingly, we argue in four steps proposing heuristic distinctions that do not pretend to exhaust the conceptual possibilities at stake. First, the question of the nature of psychopathology is raised in the broadest possible way; second, two types of psychotherapy are discussed; third, Western and Eastern cultural contexts are contrasted; forth, Whitehead’s Hygeological Pancreativism is introduced.