Axel Hoffer’s book, Freud and the Buddha: the Couch and the Cushion, aims to explore what two traditions dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering, psychoanalysis and Buddhism, can learn from each other. Both traditions are concerned with the contents of the mind and come from careful observations by individuals of the inner workings of the mind. For psychoanalysis, the goal is an understanding of the unconscious which runs our lives and of which we are unaware. For Bud