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Since the very inception of psychoanalysis, the couch has become the most recognisable visual icon of psychological healing. Described by Professor Sigmund Freud, the progenitor of this profession, as either the Divan or the Diwan, the Kanapee, the Ruhebett or the Sofa, the couch has provided a refuge for untold numbers of analysands over more than one-hundred-and-twenty-five years. Although much lionised as a truly essential piece of equipment in our consulting rooms, this simple item of furniture has, in recent years, begun to evoke suspicion in the wake of the growth of relational psychoanalysis, whose practitioners claim that the Freudian day bed has become both authoritarian and infantilising and that it prevents patients or clients from engaging more intimately with their psychotherapists.
At present, discussion about the couch tends to be restricted to the subjective viewpoints of individual clinicians. We lack any substantial empirical evidence which might offer more than a personal intuition as to whether the couch facilitates the psychoanalytical process better than the chair, or whether it serves as an inhibition, or as an obstacle, or, indeed, whether it makes no difference at all.
Surprisingly, in spite of the long-standing importance of the couch, very few psychoanalytical practitioners have written about this vital topic. Although the word “couch” appears in the supratitles of numerous books, including, for instance, Madness on the Couch (Dolnick, 1998), Hollywood on the Couch (Farber and Green, 1993), Celebrities on the Couch (Freeman, 1970), Enemies on the Couch (Volkan, 2013), and many others besides (e.g. Damousi & Reynolds, 2003; Freund, 2006; Guderian, 2004; Lohser & Newton, 1996; Marchevsky, 2003; Perry, 2010; Raphael-Leff, 2002; Stern, 1978; Strean & Freeman, 1988; Wolf et al., 1970), no one has yet written a proper history of the psychoanalytical divan.
Happily, Professor Nathan Kravis, an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has recently pr