Increasing use of Buddhist Practices in PsychotherapyAmerican Scientist Volume 92, Number 1 January-February 2004Psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Bantam Books, 2003), talks with senior editor Michael Szpir of the American Scientist Magazine (Online) about the increasing use of Buddhist practices in psychotherapy and the benefits of teaching "emotional intelligence" to children in school and adults in organizations.Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman achieved widespread recognition in 1995 with the publication of his book Emotional Intelligence, which popularized research by psychologists showing that success in life and work is based on much more than IQ. In his latest book, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, Goleman chronicles a five-day meeting of the minds among Buddhist scholars, cognitive scientists and the Dalai Lama that took place in March 2000 in Dharamsala, India.Perhaps no other religion or spiritual practice has explored the structure of the mind so carefully as Buddhism. With a precision that approaches the rigor of the best scientific taxonomies, Buddhists have dissected and redissected the mind, generating a catalogue of "mental afflictions" (figuratively citing as many as 84,000) that lead to inner transformation as afflictions are overcome. The top fivehatred, desire, confusion, pride and jealousyare comparable, though certainly not identical, to the destructive mental states identified in the West. The thoroughness of the Buddhist approach to understanding the mind, and the apparent peace of mind enjoyed by Buddhist monks, has attracted Western scientists hoping to shed further light on the neurobiology of emotions and new pathways to mental health. This union has been manifested most successfully in a series of "Mind and Life" conferences between scientists and the Dalai Lama that date back to 1987. Goleman's recent book is a day-by-day narrated transcription of this conference.Senior editor Michael Szpir interviewed Goleman late last year to hear his thoughts about the recent convergence of the brain sciences and Eastern spirituality.How did you become interested in the relation between Buddhist and Western approaches to understanding the mind? Do you consider yourself a Buddhist?Back in the early 1970s, when I was completing my doctorate in psychology at Harvard, I had a predoctoral traveling fellowship (from the Ford Foundation) and then a postdoc (from the Social Science Research Council), which gave me the opportunity to spend a total of two years in Asia, particularly India, Sri Lanka and Dharamsala (a "little Tibet" in the Himalayan foothills). While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind. I was surprised to find fully articulated systems of psychologygenerally little knownat the heart of these religions; the most fully articulated was "Abhidharma," a Buddhist system of thought. This system describes how the mind works, and how that process gives rise to ordinary states of suffering, and remediesespecially meditation. I, of course, had never heard of this psychology in my study of psychology in the West, even though it has been in full and continuous operation for more than 1,500 years. (The hubris of Western psychology holds that the discipline began in Europe and America in