Question

The idea of stuff expresses no more than the experience of coming to a limit at which our senses or our instruments are not fine enough to make out the pattern. Something of the same kind happens when the scientist investigates any unit or pattern so distinct to the naked eye that it has been considered a separate entity. He finds that the more carefully he observes and describes it, the more he is also describing the environment in which it moves and other patterns to which it seems inseparably related. As Teilhard de Chardin has so well expressed it, the isolation of individual, atomic patterns “is merely an intellectual dodge.”

Although the ancient cultures of Asia never attained the rigorously exact physical knowledge of the modern West, they grasped in principle many things which are only now occurring to us. Hinduism and Buddhism are impossible to classify as religions, philosophies, sciences, or even mythologies, or again as amalgamations of all four, because departmentalization is foreign to them even in so basic a form as the separation of the spiritual and the material.... Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring non-violent revolution, or “loyal opposition,” to the culture with which it is involved. This gives these ways of liberation something in common with psychotherapy beyond the interest in changing states of consciousness. For the task of the psychotherapist is to bring about a reconciliation between individual feeling and social norms without, however, sacrificing the integrity of the individual. He tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone in the world (of social convention) but not of the world.

What does the passage suggest about the theme of the book from which it is excerpted?

• A. The book attempts to understand psychotherapy in the context of different and changing systems of thought.
• B. The book argues that psychotherapy unites elements of an exact science with elements of eastern philosophy.
• C. The book describes the origins of psychotherapy around the world.
• D. The book compares psychotherapy in the West and in the East.

Answer 1

The correct option is A The book attempts to understand psychotherapy in the context of different and changing systems of thought.

Option (A) is the correct answer. Check the video for the approach.