The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism

In his Fragments of a Journal , playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote: According to Freud, the three obstacles that prevent us from being are anxiety, pity and aversion. This is the threefold chain that binds us. But our chain is fourfold or even fivefold: hatred or aggressiveness are equal hindrances to freedom. Desire is the most serious obstacle to our deliverance. Freudianism can thus, to some extent, be reconciled with Buddhism… Ionesco goes on to suggest that the ultimate implications of psychoanalysis are not far removed from those of Buddhism. In this book, Anthony Molino teases out those implications in a collection of writings on the complex relationship between the two disciplines. Comprised of both a historical overview of the classic writings in the dialogue (with works by Alexander, Fromm, Suzuki, Hisamatsu and Jung), and a far-reaching panorama on the state-of-the-dialogue today (with contributions by Adam Phillips, Mark Epstein, Masao Abe, the late Nina Coltart, and, in conversation, psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall and His Holiness the Dalai Lama), The Couch and the Tree is intended as a watershed in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural exploration.