The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: Anthony Molino. London: Constable. 1999. Pp. 361.

This book is that thing which James Strachey said did not exist: a cake made of nothing but currants. It is an anthology of writings on Buddhism and psychoanalysis, mostly by psychoanalysts of different schools, but sometimes by Buddhist teachers. There are thirty pieces in all, including three interviews, between Jung and the Zen teacher Hisamatsu, between Joyce McDougall and the Dalai Lama and between Anthony Molino and Nina Coltart. If I say it is composed entirely of currants, I mean to imply that the shrewd reader will enjoy it, but will probably choose to consume it more slowly than the driven reviewer.

Molino has put together a fascinating variety of texts. He begins with a historical section, stretching back to the 1920s and the exuberant writing of Joe Tom Sun (also known as the Chicago psychoanalyst, Joseph Thompson), and a splendid period-piece by Franz Alexander, ‘Buddhistic training as an artificial catatonia’. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud had suggested that one function of religions was to promote ‘the restoration of limitless narcissism’ (1930, S.E. 21, p. 72). Alexander goes beyond Freud, to see Buddhist practice as the systematic pursuit of psychotic states of mind. The early levels of meditation are an ‘experimentally induced melancholia’, with all libido converted into sadistic frenzy against the self; catatonia soon follows, and the state of Enlightenment, in which the Buddha remembers his previous lives in many different life-forms, is the ‘unrolling’ of embryological development, ‘which is nothing other than a short repetition of all forms of life in the geological rise and fall of many worlds since the first birth’ (p. 20).

Alexander's text reads as if by someone who has never met a practising Buddhist. The other psychoanalytic contributions are all subsequent to the Second World War, when Japanese Buddhism, particularly Zen, entered American culture