In These Pages …

How can we embrace the moment of a diver in the air? More precisely from the Zen point of view, how can we be the moment of a diver in the air? In its immediacy this haiku brings us to a moment in which we sense life's beauty, preciousness, and transience. Hitting the water is the next moment, erasing the one that came before. Awakening to the way life is, to the unfolding of the moment, and to the ways we suffer when inevitably we move in our minds from the immediacy of the moment is at the heart of Buddhist teaching. This special issue examines how these teachings can inform the practice of psychoanalysis.

It is not the first time the Journal has explored this subject. Half a century ago, when Karen Horney met the Japanese Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, who was one of several Zen masters and scholars who had come to the United States to offer their way of seeing life, she deepened an ongoing interest in how Zen Buddhism resonated with her own theories about human nature, suffering, and well-being. In the 1950s, she was one of several psychoanalysts, poets, and artists who found a kinship with Zen teachings. This Journal, founded by Horney, reflected that interest. Articles were published about Zen and how Zen conceptions were synergistic with analytic points of view. But over the next four decades, psychoanalysis moved in other directions. It is only in the last few years that psychoanalysts have seemed to rediscover the possibilities that Buddhism offers to enrich the field. In the pages of this issue, we reach back to pick up the threads of that earlier dialogue, bringing it forward to link Buddhism to psychoanalysis, including the newly insinuated postmodern perspective with its concerns about the deconstructing of self, the multiplicity of selves, and the interdependence of self and other.

Bringing the two traditions together in a depthful way is no easy task. Not only are we