ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis enriches Buddhism with its provision of a collaborative relationship designed to validate the client's experiences and provide opportunities for new forms of relatedness and self-transformation. Bringing psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, Buddhism, and meditation together may seem like a shotgun wedding. Psychoanalysis is a psychotherapeutic tradition that arose in Europe in the late nineteenth century to address psychopathology and mental illness. Both psychoanalysis and Buddhism are concerned with alleviating suffering and illuminating human identity. Meditative psychoanalysis has three dimensions and evolved in stages over several decades: listening, understanding, and liberated intimacy. One of the seminal insights of psychoanalysis is that human development—and the psychotherapeutic relationship—always and inevitably occur in the context of formative human relationships. The therapeutic relationship and the liberating intimacy it provides at its best occurs in a special and unusual relationship—one characterized by empathy and profound emotional attunement, self-reflectiveness and freedom and creativity.
