Hubert Benoit (psychotherapist)

Hubert Benoit (1904 to 1992) was a twentieth-century French psychotherapist whose work foreshadowed later developments in integral psychology and integral spirituality. He developed a pioneering form of psychotherapy that combined a psychoanalytic perspective with insights from Eastern spiritual disciplines, in particular Ch'an and Zen Buddhism. He stressed the part played by the spiritual ignorance of Western culture in the emergence and persistence of much underlying distress, used psychoanalytic concepts to explain the defences against that unease, and emphasised an analytic preparatory phase while warning against overemphasis on specific causal precursors of symptoms. He drew parallels between Zen training and the experience of psychoanalysis and gave a psychological account of satori.