Buddhism and psychology

The first mass marketing of Buddhism and other Eastern religions came by way of the Theosophical Society which became what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky called "spiritual psychology" which we would call today, parapsychology.  

Despite the mass marketing in the West by the Theosophical Society, the real contents of the Buddha's teachings were still pretty much confined to academia and its theology libraries. It is only when Buddhism began to be looked at as an ancient form of Eastern psychology, dropping Blavatsky's "spiritual" that Buddhism started to take root in the soil of the West.  

I think credit goes to Carl Gustav Jung whose enormous prestige and popularity helped position Buddhism in such a way that it could enter mainstream Western psychology offering new remedies, such as meditation, to cure the nihilistic West of its decadence.  With Jung, here begins, we could say, the official psychologization of Buddhism.  But there is one problem.

Psychology is not without materialistic roots and maybe too much psychopathology.  In addition, with both empirical and rational foundations, it naturally tends to exclude, for example, mysticism and ontology. Still it admits humanistic psychology alongside of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.

It is with the general influence of humanistic psychology that Buddhism is remodeled into a kind of Buddhist psychology.  Looking at the shape of Buddhism today, mysticism and ontology are kept far away. Buddhism has gone from being a path to the transcendent, i.e., nirvana, to one of becoming a humanistic path in which man is his own end—not in Nietzsche's words as something to be surpassed which chimes more with Buddhism.

 

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[Methexis]

"One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped." - Paul Tillich