I was a raised in a family of my dad was a artist who was a Buddhist. He became a Buddhist in 1971 when he hit

bottom as an alcoholic and he got sober and he utterly refused to do the 12 steps in a Judea Christian manner.

So he got really into,

at the encouragement of his sponsor, he got very into Buddhism at the time, which meant my

household suddenly went from a chaotic, insane environment, and suddenly one where there was Zafus and

meditation tapes.

And my mom was, as much as Buddhism was important to my dad for his sobriety and his

mental health. My mom was an avid Freudian. She started analysis I think in the 1940s or 50s when she was in her

20s and she was the book cases so were lined with books by

Freud and Buddhism and I never occurred to me as a team that the Buddha and the psychologist that my mother loved to read had any different agenda whatsoever.

To me, the goal of both quite clearly is a teenager reading through these books and listening to my parents

talk about their loves was to end human suffering through awareness to co true happiness and peace through non-material

ends through spiritual endeavor to allow people to gain insight into the behaviors and thoughts and that which causes them suffering.

So I've always read both through the exact same prism,

the exact same perspective.

And over the years, I have still marveled at how many overlapping insights the Buddha had 2,500 years ago that parallels some of the wonderful insights that contemporary psychology has brought to us.

I guess I would be known as a secular Buddhist in that I read and I teach from a very therapeutic,

psychoanalytic, psychological perspective, and I'm unapologetic about that.

There are plenty of other wonderful, wonderful teachers

who teach it from metaphysical and other traditions.

And in New York, there's, they're all around, so you have your choice.

One of the things that fascinates me, after Freud, Freud viewed the I as this kind of primordial, beastial, sexual aggressive urges that were constantly trying to go through into conscious life and the ego its role was to somehow keep the

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