Course Description

This course offers an immersion into the literary, philosophical, and contemplative streams of Zen, with a particular focus on the paradoxical discipline of Great Doubt and the experience of nonduality. A major theme will be Zen as illustrative of apophatic perspectives in psychotherapy. Through selected readings of Zen and pre-Zen writings—especially koans, haiku, and anecdotal encounters with Zen masters—participants will explore how language is used not to explain but to awaken, to fracture habitual patterns of thought, and to reveal the immediacy of being, while also exploring the parallels and implications for psychotherapeutic practice. Course emphasis will include amplification of Zen insights through a Western psychological lens, with attention to how Zen’s paradoxes mirror the psychoanalytic encounter with the unconscious and the unspoken.

Learning Objectives

Explain the apophatic orientation shared by Zen and negative theology—where knowing proceeds through unknowing—and apply this perspective to psychotherapeutic work as a disciplined tolerance of absence, silence, and the limits of interpretation, rather than as a technique for development of insight.
Analyze Zen literary forms (especially koans) as methods of psychological deconstruction, identifying parallels with psychoanalytic processes such as negative capability, reverie, and tolerance of the unformulated.
Differentiate Zen-inspired nonconceptual awareness from dissociation, avoidance, or defensive withdrawal, enhancing clinicians’ capacity to work responsibly with contemplative language and experience in clinical settings.
Apply insights from Zen practice to psychotherapeutic stance and technique—particularly presence, listening, and restraint—supporting a clinical posture that can hold ambiguity, silence, and not-knowing without premature interpretation.

The Aion Institute is approved by the California Psychological Association to provide continuing professional education for psychologists. The Aion Institute (AIO279) maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

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AION 407 Zen and the Art of Psychotherapy