Psychotherapy East and West

What is the common ground between Western psychiatry and Eastern philosophy, and what has each to learn from the other? Alan Watts found a common principle that, intentionally or otherwise, seems to be used wherever therapy is trying to overcome man’s false sense of himself as an isolated ego — an ego that traps him in a perpetual flight from death and loneliness. In varying ways and degrees, both Eastern philosophy and Western psychotherapy engage the individual in experiments that vividly reveal the fallacy of this conception and give him a new feeling of identity.