The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism

In his Fragments of a Journal, playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote: According to Freud, the three obstacles that prevent us from being are anxiety, pity and aversion. This is the threefold chain that binds us. But our chain is fourfold or even fivefold: hatred or aggressiveness are equal hindrances to freedom. Desire is the most serious obstacle to our deliverance. Freudianism can thus, to some extent, be reconciled with Buddhism... Ionesco goes on to suggest that the ultimate implications of psychoanalysis are not far removed from those of Buddhism. In this book Anthony Molino teases out those implications in a collection of writings on the complex relationship between the two disciplines.