About the Book
A comprehensive collection of essays exploring the interstices of Eastern and Western modes of thinking about the self, Crossroads in Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Mindfulness: The Word and the Breath documents just some of the challenges, conflicts, pitfalls, and “wow” moments that inhere in today’s historical and cultural intersections of theory, practice, and experience. As this collection demonstrates, the crossroads between Buddhist and psychoanalytic approaches to mindfulness are rich beyond belief in integrative potential. The surprising and fertile connections from which this book originates, and the future ones which every reader in turn will spur, will invigorate and intensify this specific form of contemporary commerce at the crossroads of East and West. Analytically-oriented psychotherapists, themselves of different “climates” and cultures, break out of the seclusion of the consulting room to think, translate, meditate on, and mediate their experiences—generated via the maternal order—in such a way as to make those experiences thinkable via the necessary filters of the paternal order of language. In this light the “word and the breath” of the book’s subtitle are addressed as the privileged “instruments” of psychoanalysis and meditation, respectively.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
Jeff Shore
Introduction
Anthony Molino
Part 1: Elusive Bridges
1: The Correlation between Psychotherapy and Buddhism and How Buddhist Psychology Can be Applied to Life
Thich Nhat Hanh
2: With Buddha in Mind: Mindfulness-based Psychotherapy in Practice
Nigel Wellings
3: The Bliss Body and the Unconscious
Joseph Bobrow
Part 2: Being in Practice
4: The Role of “No-Self” in Creativity: Expanding our Sense of Interdependent Engagement
Polly Young-Eisendrath
5: What the Emotions Ask of Us: Psychoanalysis and Dharma Psychology
Gherardo Amadei
6: Psychoanalysis, Transgenerational Psychotherapy, and Karma
Michela Morgana
Part 3: Psychoanalysis and Meditation
7: Metamorphoses of Consciousness: Answers in the Light of Awareness
Alessandro Giannandrea, Antonino Raffone and Katie Ferrell
8: Meditation Practice: From Cushion to Inconceivable Ordinary Life
Dorothy Yang
9: The Relief of Being
Pilar Jennings
Part 4: Parallel Convergences
10: “Amae” and Western Buddhism
Roberto Carnevali
11: Unexpected Guests: Buddhism, Psychosynthesis & Psychoanalysis
Graziano Graziani
12: Mandalas of the Mind: Exploring the Role of Mandalas in Jung’s Thought And His Relation with Buddhism
Katriona Munthe and Anthony Molino
Afterthoughts
Reflections on Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
Adam Phillips
Appendix
Psychoanalysis and Buddhism as Cultural Institutions
Jeremy Safran
About the Contributors
About the Author :
Anthony Molino, PhD, isa practicing psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and literary translator. His works include The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, Freely Associated: Encounters in Psychoanalysis with C. Bollas, N. Coltart, M. Eigen, J. McDougall, and A. Phillips and In Freud’s Tracks: Conversations from the Journal of European Psychoanalysis.
Roberto Carnevali is a psychotherapist who works both privately and in institutional psychiatry. Director of the Italian magazine Pratica Psicoterapeutica, he is the author of several books and a frequent contributor to some of Italy’s foremost professional journals.
Alessandro Giannandrea, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation instructor. His ongoing research interests focus on the connections between psychotherapy, mindfulness, Buddhism, and the philosophy of mind. The author of several articles on these topics, he collaborates with the University of California, San Diego Center for Mindfulness and Rome’s Sapienza University.
Review :
[T]he authors are to be commended for tackling a seminal and difficult topic.
Anthony Molino, a practicing psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and literary translator, has given us a marvelous collection of essays. . . .Crossroads implies a place of exciting commerce, interesting interactions, synergies and discoveries. . . .Deceptively simple in its language, it rewards rereading, rather like repeated meditations or consecutive analytic sessions, even if there are familiar sights along each circular path, we find the spiral deepening as we go.
This book has so many riches—riches of Buddhism, riches of psychoanalysis, of Buddhism as therapy and therapy as meditative quest, each affected by the other, becoming part of each other. The writings of this book take us to living places and provide much guidance about the ins and outs of experience.
After The Couch and the Tree Anthony Molino has done it again, putting together a rich collection of highly diverse essays on a critical topic of our era. This book is, indeed, a ‘crossroads’ and the subtitle could as easily read ‘the word and the breadth’ as it does ‘the word and the breath.’ Western thought about the Eastern mind has been and will be a centuries’ long project that will engage the future imaginations of people around the world and, looking back, it would not be surprising to find this book among those that endure the test of time.
Crossroads in Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Mindfulness impresses readers with the ongoing development of a Buddhist psychoanalysis, or of a psychoanalytic Buddhism, distinct from any previous form of either psychoanalysis or Asian Buddhism. Most contributors to this volume are longstanding practitioners of both and explore engaging new perspectives at the crossroads of the two disciplines even as they eschew any facile syncretism. The book is also noteworthy for the window it offers into the history of the relationship between Italian psychoanalysis and Buddhism, a subject hardly addressed to date in English.
