If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

This book is so full of 1970s buzzwords — ‘groovy', ‘cosmic', saying ‘pilgrimage' when you mean just living your life — that it reads like a heavily timestamped artifact of the past, even though the message is basically timeless: an adult should be no man's disciple. This book should really be recommended to the Coelho fanbase — they'd recognise their favourite ‘spiritual' language and the gist is something they should probably hear.

One thing that I found seriously disturbing though was Kopp's naivety about his patients at the sex offender facility. I wonder, was his thinking common in the 70s? Did people really believe that you could psychoanalyse pedophilia and sexual violence away? That as soon as a pedo realises that he's only looking for his absent father's love or for his ice-queen mother's hugs or something, he'll be cured and ready to go and pursue healthy relationships with consenting adults? It's not hard to see why convicts whose chances of parole depend entirely on a shrink giving them an all-clear would play this game, but why would he?