Essentially, then, Buddhism, like the Western traditions in psychotherapy that followed many centuries later, is in its psychological form a depth psychology, describing the full range of the human emotional experience. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others. In a brilliantly delineated section of the book on Buddha's psychology of the mind, Epstein writes, Emotional experience remains a problematic area for most people. We are all made uncomfortable by the intensity of our feelings, and we develop various ways of defending against this intensity.
Buddhist emptiness is the key that unlocks the problem of the emotions.
Emptiness is the understanding that the concrete appearances to which we are accustomed do not exist in the way we imagine. This is an understanding psychologically that has vast implications philosophically for the field of psychotherapy. The ability to hold an emotion in the transitional space of bare attention is . . . Psychotherapy is a way to explore and even to resolve them by going into the doubt, rather than away from it, by purposefully disrupting the existing structures, rather than by indulging them. It is for each of us to accept the uncertainties that we humans try to ignore.