On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis. Published by the  MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2017;  204 pp, £24 hardback

Freud had surprisingly little to say about the couch. It was a remnant of the hypnotic method and a way of sparing himself the patient's gaze; it was ‘a certain ceremonial … to isolate the transference and to allow it come forward’ (Freud, cited on p. 7). That is about it. Yet both for professionals and in the popular imagination, the couch has become an icon of self-awareness, a talisman and synecdoche for psychoanalysis itself. How has this come about? What is the deeper background to its use?

These are fascinating and original questions, and Nathan Kravis, a New York analyst, is well placed to address them: he is also a professor and historian of psychiatry. But it is above all his erudition and insight as a social historian and historian of furniture that come to the fore in this beautifully and copiously illustrated book. Kravis's aim is to situate the analytic couch ‘within the social history of recumbent posture’ (p. 8), and from the outset he emphasizes how lying on a couch was an indicator of social values and status: higher-born citizens of ancient Greece had their