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Landmarks of Psychoanalysis

The Couch

Freud’s analytic couch is one of the most famous pieces of furniture in the world, both feared and revered as a powerful metonymic image of the psychoanalytic process. For visitors to the Freud Museum, it is an object of fascination. Everyone longs to lie on it.

It is, of course, cordoned off for security reasons but a few people, as seemingly diverse as Barry Humphries and Helena Bonham-Carter, have been briefly allowed to recline on it.

Freud was given the couch early in his career, in 1891, by a grateful patient, Mme. Benavisti. At that time Freud was moving from the use of hypnosis to that of the fundamental psychoanalytic technique of “free association” and found that patients were more easily able to do this when lying on the couch.

Freud sat at the head of the couch, out of sight of the patient. This avoided face-to-face contact and helped maintain some emotional distance between patient and analyst (thus minimising the risk of the patient making advances to the doctor under the influence of transference-love). Another good reason for the position of the chair may be found in Freud’s comment to Hans Sachs that, “I cannot let myself be stared at for eight hours daily.”

Seeing the couch for the first time, one is struck by its homeliness. It is a typical domestic divan of its time, nothing special; a scroll-ended couch upholstered in plain beige cloth. These divans were intended to be covered, perhaps with velvet cloth or, as here, with a rug. The rug is a Qasqa’i, made in Iran by a confederacy of nomadic tribes. There are embroidered and deep-pile velvet cushions piled on it. Another rug (unidentified) hangs on the wall above and above that, a lithograph of the painting Une Lecon Clinique a la Salpetriere by Andre Brouillet (1857-1914), showing Charcot displaying to colleagues his patient Blanche Wittman in a state of hypnosis.

The general effect is a blend of the domestic and the clinical. Before Freud, the patient’s life and illness were kept separate and patients themselves were seen solely as objects of study by the doctor. By listening to his patients, Freud linked their subjective experiences to the objective moment of therapy. The fact that dreams and everyday matters were the currency of this treatment made it accessible to everyone.

He listened to them; he made them physically comfortable, he didn’t like to be stared at; as he grew older post-operative infections damaged his hearing on the right side so that he had to reverse the position of the couch and chair in order to hear his patients. A powerful symbol, yes. But the real, actual couch also provides a reminder of Freud’s and his patients’ human beingness.

Thanks to Ivan Ward and Michael Molnar for their assistance.

www.freud.org.uk