[1][2] His special interest and contribution lay in developing a pioneering form of psychotherapy which integrated a psychoanalytic perspective with insights derived from Eastern spiritual disciplines, in particular from Ch'an and Zen Buddhism.
He used concepts derived from psychoanalysis to explain the defences against this fundamental unease, and emphasised the importance of an analytic, preparatory phase, while warning against what he regarded as the psychoanalytic overemphasis on specific causal precursors of symptomatology.
The ultimate viewpoint, that of reality, is clearly inexpressible; and the teacher would harm the pupil if he let him forget that the whole problem is precisely one of leaping the gap which separates verbal truth from real knowledge.
After an interval of 25 years, Benoit summarised his views in De La Réalisation Intérieure (1979), to which he added a fourth section in 1984.
Pierson[12] precedes his account of Benoit's approach with the following comment: "...although his The Supreme Doctrine was widely read and appreciated in many countries, problems with the translation of his later, more comprehensive and conclusive work, Let Go!, must have cost him most of his English-speaking readers."
Benoit was brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by Aldous Huxley, a leading exponent of the Perennial Philosophy in the middle decades of the 20th century.
According to Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in his foreword to the 1995 re-issue of Terence Gray's translation, 'The Supreme Doctrine had a considerable impact on Western students of Zen in the two decades following its publication and was widely cited by such writers as Christmas Humphreys, Alan Watts, and Heinrich Dumoulin'.
While Huxley promoted The Supreme Doctrine for its discussion of Zen Buddhism from a Western psychological perspective, others highlighted concepts of particular interest.
Benoit considered this to be a near-universal, fundamental component of human personality, likening it to an '"inner lawsuit" which is continually being enacted in our subconscious mind.
Hart, author of Modern Eclectic Psychotherapy (1983), presented Benoit's work as a contribution to the philosophy of science that humanistic and transpersonal psychologists were attempting to develop.
A few pages later, Wilber wrote(p. 108): 'Once again, Hubert Benoit has a brilliantly precise statement on the nature of the Atman-project in general, and substitute objects in particular: "Man only seeks to deify himself in the temporal sphere because he is ignorant of his real divine essence (Atman).
Man is born the son of God, participating totally in the nature of the Supreme Principle of the Universe; but he is forgetful of his origin, illusorily convinced that he is only this limited and mortal body which his senses perceive.