If you've ever wondered why western psychology has so many schools and theories without a well-formed center, and how that lack can be remedied in a stroke, you will want to read this extraordinary and deeply engaging book. Although the new discipline of transpersonal psychology is attempting to to import the "spiritual" aspects of existence into human psychology, one gets the feeling that such efforts are often a kind of "add on" that doesn't quite reach the core. In the numerous well-written chapters of the masterful anthology "The Druid of Harley Street: The Spiritual Psychology of E. Graham Howe", we quickly see how a near contemporary of Freud, Jung and Adler has already provided us with a much smoother and more depthful way of "riding" the living spirit into western psychology--a better road once not taken but now being slowly rebuilt.
Although he was once the United Kingdom's most famous psychiatrist, Howe's introduction of Eastern philosophy into psychotherapy in the early and middle twentieth century is not discussed in the history of western psychology. In editor William Stranger's lucid introduction, however, we see how Howe picks up where William James' own Gifford lectures left off. With the wobble of western psychology now belatedly looking for the "mind" in the brain, Stranger shows us that Howe had already established a profound foundation for a truly East-West psychology based upon Consciousness long before the efforts to find this took off in earnest back in the sixties. Many associate that latter moment with R.D. Laing, who was an iconic figure of that period. But it turns out that Laing, like the Zen popularizer Alan Watts, was mentored by Howe, whose influence on both becomes obvious when we read this book. In his foreword to Howe's popular book "Cure or Heal", the famous Scottish psychiatrist called him "a master psychologist" and went on to say, "What we have here is not a synthesis of different schools, but an original expression in the modern idiom of that which all schools seek to express in more or less rigid and desiccated ways. But the expression here is supple and fresh."
That's it precisely. As Laing says in the same essay, Howe's writings are not ABOUT Zen; they ARE Zen. Howe's genius was to write a psychology that is so lucid and humanly true that it can be fully absorbed by the layman, but so penetrating and profound that it will provide important clinical insights to psychotherapists of all persuasions (as some of the foremost ones of our time testify on on the book's jacket). I highly recommend this book for its profoundly humane, spiritually, enlightening and yet down to earth recasting of western psychology in its rightful and necessary spiritual context. Sometimes the older road is the better one. "The Druid of Harley Street" is that older, better road.
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