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In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in their Offices by Mark Gerald is a wide ranging and thoughtful summation of the author’s almost 20 years of immersion in a special project, the photographing of a broad, representative sampling of contemporary psychoanalysts in the rooms where they do their work. This effort involved contacting and visiting almost 100 analysts across the United States, Central and South America, and Europe. Gerald, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, trained at the NYU Postgraduate Center for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapy, and currently on the faculty, is a relational analyst (this perspective informs much of the discussion in the book), but his subjects are from many analytic schools, racial and cultural backgrounds, genders, and ages. As a whole Gerald’s images are a rich tapestry representing the profession of psychoanalysis.
But the book is more than a photo album. While he has been looking intensely, Gerald has also reflected and thought deeply about his project. At the heart of the book are 60 photographs, each a portrait of an analyst, at a moment in time in their office. These images and a brief report on their making are embedded in a deeply felt and thoughtful commentary, by an experienced and knowledgeable psychoanalyst, about the nature of psychoanalytic work, the offices we construct and inhabit. Along the way Gerald engages in wide ranging reflections on the history of the analytic office and its contents, the nature of photography, the death of fathers, mourning and creativity, and many other topics. In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch is part photo album, part memoir and reverie, theoretical treatise, and commentary on the contemporary practice of psychoanalysis from the perspective of the analyst’s relationship with their office. This is not your typical academic study or psychoanalytic text, it is a discursive personal meditation on issues connected to the analyst’s relationship to space, time, art, nostalgia