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On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud
How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing.
The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing.
Kravis draws on sources that range from ancient funerary monuments to furniture history to early photography, as well as histories of medicine, fashion, and interior decoration, and he deploys an astonishing array of images—of paintings, monuments, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, New Yorker cartoons, and advertisements.
Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today's psychoanalysts—some of whom regard it as “infantilizing”—the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.
The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing.
Kravis draws on sources that range from ancient funerary monuments to furniture history to early photography, as well as histories of medicine, fashion, and interior decoration, and he deploys an astonishing array of images—of paintings, monuments, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, New Yorker cartoons, and advertisements.
Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today's psychoanalysts—some of whom regard it as “infantilizing”—the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.
- GenresPsychoanalysisNonfiction
224 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2017
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About the author
Nathan Kravis
1 bookNathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 27, 2025
Does not offer much in the way that a paper on technique might, but this is a good starting point. Solid object-history of the couch as signifier and general exploration of its semiotic networks (from bourgeois-sanatorium health spas to the erotic implications of recumbent speech). Also just a beautiful book that is very well produced. Freud’s throwaway comment that he had patients lay on a couch because he couldn’t stand being stared at for 8 hours a day is such a great little bit of psychic repression, glad someone is digging into this sort of thing.
December 16, 2025
Good overview and some interesting facts. I wanted a bit more about the history of the analytical couch but I really enjoyed the general history of the couch. I loved the art.
June 10, 2018
At the heart of this book is a symbol -- Freud's own psychoanalytic couch -- one of the iconic images of the 20th Century. Freud himself said he adopted the couch for psychoanalysis because he couldn't stand to be stared at by his patients all day. But the truth, as Dr Nathan Kravis makes indelibly clear in this unique book, goes far deeper. In true psychoanalytic fashion, the symbol of the couch obscures as much as it reveals.
One of a psychoanalyst's key capacities is to notice unexpected details. Here the key details are not verbal, but visual: the actual physical appearance of the couch itself. Freud's own couch, Kravis points out, was an oriental-style divan -- an item of furniture whose history goes back a few centuries in Europe, and in some ways even further to classical Greece and Rome.
In its original Freudian embodiment, the couch was decidedly more sensual. And psychoanalysis itself was originally a step-child of clinical hypnosis, a practice with decidedly erotic overtones. As Kravis writes, "the couch -- and recumbent speech itself -- resonates with a culturally rich and intriguingly ambiguous interplay of traditions of luxury, healing, intimacy, and erotic freedom." ("Pillow-talk," if you will). The point is driven home by a remarkable series of images of naked or semi-naked bodies lying on luxurious couches -- from ancient Rome, to Titian, Ingres, David, Boucher, Renior, Sargent, Manet, 19th Century photographers, Henri Rousseau, and Picasso.
On the Couch is as beautiful as any living-room-table guidebook to an exhibit at the Met. Working together with distinguished picture editor Leora Kahn, Kravis has put together a breathtaking collection of images that clearly situates Freud's couch within a visual tradition of the erotic.
Confronted with this astonishing series of images, it's hard not to wonder that no one thought to connect these dots to Freud, until Dr Kravis. But that's the case with all great insights, of course: In retrospect, they seem obvious.
Let's not forget that to the early 20th Century mind, "Freudianism" meant only one thing: that everything -- towers, forests, cigars -- was connected to sex. In its early days, psychoanalysis attracted more than its share of bohemian spirits. What became of this clearly sensuous ritual as the 20th Century proceeded, was that the design of psychoanalytic couches became decidedly more austere -- as if to deny the original sensual impulse behind psychoanalysis itself. Practitioners seemed to be more uneasy with the harem-like eroticism embodied by Freud's original couch.
Kravis rightly points out the original eroticism of the psychoanalytic procedure -- and connects the couch with other currents in Western culture as well. The result is a tour-de-force of historical scholarship, brilliantly argued. I only wish it could reach a broader intellectual audience. Its use of technical language (such as "analysand" for "patient on the couch"), while conventional in psychoanalytic writing, limits the degree to which the book will be understood by lay readers. I hope the author will choose to adapt this work so it can be more widely read!
One of a psychoanalyst's key capacities is to notice unexpected details. Here the key details are not verbal, but visual: the actual physical appearance of the couch itself. Freud's own couch, Kravis points out, was an oriental-style divan -- an item of furniture whose history goes back a few centuries in Europe, and in some ways even further to classical Greece and Rome.
In its original Freudian embodiment, the couch was decidedly more sensual. And psychoanalysis itself was originally a step-child of clinical hypnosis, a practice with decidedly erotic overtones. As Kravis writes, "the couch -- and recumbent speech itself -- resonates with a culturally rich and intriguingly ambiguous interplay of traditions of luxury, healing, intimacy, and erotic freedom." ("Pillow-talk," if you will). The point is driven home by a remarkable series of images of naked or semi-naked bodies lying on luxurious couches -- from ancient Rome, to Titian, Ingres, David, Boucher, Renior, Sargent, Manet, 19th Century photographers, Henri Rousseau, and Picasso.
On the Couch is as beautiful as any living-room-table guidebook to an exhibit at the Met. Working together with distinguished picture editor Leora Kahn, Kravis has put together a breathtaking collection of images that clearly situates Freud's couch within a visual tradition of the erotic.
Confronted with this astonishing series of images, it's hard not to wonder that no one thought to connect these dots to Freud, until Dr Kravis. But that's the case with all great insights, of course: In retrospect, they seem obvious.
Let's not forget that to the early 20th Century mind, "Freudianism" meant only one thing: that everything -- towers, forests, cigars -- was connected to sex. In its early days, psychoanalysis attracted more than its share of bohemian spirits. What became of this clearly sensuous ritual as the 20th Century proceeded, was that the design of psychoanalytic couches became decidedly more austere -- as if to deny the original sensual impulse behind psychoanalysis itself. Practitioners seemed to be more uneasy with the harem-like eroticism embodied by Freud's original couch.
Kravis rightly points out the original eroticism of the psychoanalytic procedure -- and connects the couch with other currents in Western culture as well. The result is a tour-de-force of historical scholarship, brilliantly argued. I only wish it could reach a broader intellectual audience. Its use of technical language (such as "analysand" for "patient on the couch"), while conventional in psychoanalytic writing, limits the degree to which the book will be understood by lay readers. I hope the author will choose to adapt this work so it can be more widely read!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews