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Many years ago, a friend put me onto Thoughts without a Thinker by Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and the author of several books about Buddhism and psychoanalysis.1 I was a philosopher by profession who had once taught Buddhism in a course on philosophy and who also was beginning clinical training at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute for Training and Research in New York City. I found Epstein's book provocative and illuminating.
I was thus delighted when the Book Review Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly invited me to review Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. Most of the eight contributors to this collection of essays are analysts as well as experienced Buddhist practitioners: Nina Savelle-Rocklin, Delia Kostner, Nina Coltart, Andrew Olendzki, Mark Epstein, Axel Hoffer, Sara L. Weber, and Gerald Fogel. Hoffer, who edited the volume, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The book met my expectations. The essays are outstanding, and even psychoanalytic readers who are not, or not yet, into Buddhism will find the dialogue useful. As Coltart writes in this volume: “Of course there are differences [between Buddhism and psychoanalysis] … but there are many more extensive and subtle ways in which they flow in and out of each other, and are mutually reinforcing and clarifying” (p. 54).
Among the many similarities: (1) both psychoanalysis and Buddhism emphasize unity of mind and body; (2) both are theories of how to alleviate suffering; (3) both are practices aimed at alleviating suffering—practices that can take may years before they begin to be transformative