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Nathan Kravis's On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud was not what I was expecting—and in a fascinating way. In its pages you will not find a history, repressed or otherwise, of the rationale for use of the couch in psychoanalytic practice, nor will you find a summary of arguments made over time for or against its use. Instead, Kravis draws together several interpenetrating influences that, he posits, heavily predisposed Freud, likely at an unconscious level, to adopt the couch as a standard instrument of analytic practice. These influences include art, fashion, philosophy, furniture design, and medicine, along with prevailing cultural trends in Freud's time and before. Kravis uses this multidisciplinary kaleidoscope to explain how the couch became a universal symbol for interiority in general and, in particular, an iconic shorthand for the practice of psychoanalysis. Generously sprinkled throughout the book's pages are beautiful photographs and humorous cartoons featuring the couch in its many incarnations and with its various connotations.
One such connotation, of course, is the association between the couch and the pursuit of self-knowledge. The familiar reasons offered for its use—that it is a holdover of the hypnotic method, or that it stems from Freud's discomfort at having patients stare at him all day—have always been unsatisfying. Some argue (e.g., Starr and Aron 2011) that the emphasis on the couch's central place in hypnosis as the basis for its use in psychoanalysis obscures Freud's association with the little explored practices of electrotherapy and genital stimulation practiced by his colleagues as treatments for hysteria. Others hold that Freud's preference for the