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.

The privileged link of psychoanalysis to spoken language does not necessarily facilitate communication among analysts and psychotherapists of different mother tongues. The Journal of European Psychoanalysis published since 1995 has long sought to overcome these linguistic barriers. Traditionally, it has introduced English readers to important European authors, as well as to authors of Latin American countries whose paradigms are close to European "styles." Freed of the editorial and political constraints that often govern the official organs of schools and institutions, the Journal of European Psychoanalysis has, for many years, regularly featured conversations with some of the most prominent and brilliant figures in contemporary psychoanalysis: highlighting debates and trends within psychoanalysis and related fields while remaining ever-sensitive to the practical, ethical, and theoretical implications of clinical practice. In Freud's Tracks collects some of the most engaging and provocative of these conversations, thus tracing a recent history of psychoanalysis in Europe while also evidencing the discipline's vital and vibrant connections with the fields of politics and social policy, science and philosophy, cultural studies and the social sciences."

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. Comprised of both a historical overview of the classic writings in the "dialogue" (with works by Alexander, Fromm, Suzuki, Hisamatsu and Jung), and a far-reaching panorama on the state-of-the-dialogue today (with contributions by Adam Phillips, Mark Epstein, Masao Abe, the late Nina Coltart, and, in conversation, psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall and His Holiness the Dalai Lama), "The Couch and the Tree" is intended as a watershed in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural exploration.