Crossroads in Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Mindfulness: The Word and the Breath - Hardcover

[T]he authors are to be commended for tackling a seminal and difficult topic. * PsycCRITIQUES * 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. * Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association * 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. -- Michael Eigen, PhD, author of "Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis" 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. -- Christopher Bollas, PhD, author of "China on the Mind" 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. -- Shoji Muramoto, PhD, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

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.