The psychology of Buddhism, on the other hand, rejects the notion of an inner self and proposes a radically different view, where thoughts exist without a thinker, deeds without a doer, and feelings without a feeler.
It seems a lot of western commentary on what Buddhism claims is specified always in contrast to this Cartesian framework, but without any awareness that it is only around 300 years old, and so such commentary cannot be entirely instructive as to what Buddhism actually has to say. Unless you just like talking about unicorns. (Such is our indoctrination that the only alternative to Materialism, or its brother in arms, Idealism, is the position enforced by Descartes in his attempt to unleash the 'Scientific' world view into 'Gods creation', one which Science and the western neo-buddhists have been trying to free themselves from ever since.)
It pays to keep things in historical context, and I am reminded of this lovely story by Graeber:
This particular maze of mirrors is so complex and dazzling that
it’s extraordinarily difficult to discern the starting point—that is,
what, precisely, is being reflected back and forth. Here
anthropology can be helpful, as anthropologists have the unique
advantage of being able to observe how human beings who have
not previously been part of these conversations react when Frst
exposed to Axial Age concepts. Every now and then too, we are
presented with moments of exceptional clarity: ones that reveal the
essence of our own thought to be almost exactly the opposite of
what we thought it to be.
Maurice Leenhardt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many
long years teaching the Gospel in New Caledonia, experienced such
a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of his students, an aged
sculptor named Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced
to spiritual ideas:
Once, waiting to assess the mental progress of the Canaques I
had taught for many years, I risked the following suggestion:
“In short, we introduced the notion of the spirit to your way of
thinking?”
He objected, “Spirit? Bah! You didn’t bring us the spirit. We
already knew the spirit existed. We have always acted in
accord with the spirit. What you’ve brought us is the body.”
The notion that humans had souls appeared to Boesoou to be
self-evident. The notion that there was such a thing as the body,
apart from the soul, a mere material collection of nerves and tissues
—
let alone that the body is the prison of the soul; that the
mortification of the body could be a means to the glorification or
liberation of the soul—all this, it turns out, struck him as utterly
new and exotic.
David Graeber - Debt, The First 5000 Years