ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis offers Buddhism a multidimensional road map of the ailing mind's concerns, the mind's defensive thoughts and feelings, its relational contexts and recurring patterns. Buddhist meditation offers psychoanalysis a profound way to train optimal attention and deep phenomenological observation—broader, perhaps, than the phenomena considered by psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud advocated listening to patients with "evenly-suspended attention". Attention observes the passing flow of what the patient says, stresses, and omits. The kind of attention Bion advocated allows therapist and patient to know in an experiential way the patient's warded-off chaos and pain. Donald W. Winnicott spoke similarly of an attention to transitional space—a space where time, logic, right and wrong, the connection to mother, father, to actual things happening in one's life, to usual judgment, all are suspended. There is a freedom from self-consciousness and consequence, a freedom from identification and duality.
