Four Noble Truths and The Medical Model
Broadly speaking, differences between traditional Buddhism and contemporary institutionalized Western psychology can be conceived in terms used in the following table.
| Buddhism (Four Noble Truths) | Western psychology | |
| problem | suffering (dukkha) | significant distress, disability, pain, loss of freedom, suicidality |
| etiology | craving (tanha), ignorance (avijja) | conditioning, genetics, biology, childhood development, socialization |
| goal | Enlightenment (bodhi), Nirvana | normal or higher functioning, lack of initial symptoms |
| treatment | Noble Eightfold Path | counseling, therapy, medication, systems advocacy |
Read more about this topic: Buddhism And Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words noble, truths, medical and/or model:
“Nothing in medieval dress distinguished the child from the adult. In the seventeenth century, however, the child, or at least the child of quality, whether noble or middle-class, ceased to be dressed like the grown-up. This is the essential point: henceforth he had an outfit reserved for his age group, which set him apart from the adults. These can be seen from the first glance at any of the numerous child portraits painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)