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Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows traces of her workings apart from the beaten path…. For it has been found, in almost all things, that what they contain of useful or applicable nature is hardly perceived unless we are deprived of them, or they become deranged in some way.
How droll that one of psychoanalysis's two clinical fundamentals should receive more attention as an icon than a technical dimension. In fact, even in most indexed references, the term couch is used to mean psychoanalysis itself. Is it that collaboration with the recommendation to lie down while revealing one's inner thoughts and feelings is a universally eventless, rarely complicated procedure? That would be surprising, considering the frequency with which we hear informally of patients' struggles with using the couch. And even Freud's (1913) first recommendation of this procedure cited resistance. Yet the couch seems more or less taken for granted and receives only cursory mention in textbooks and rare clinical articles.
What goes into the importance of the couch to the analyst? It is axiomatic that not looking at each other frees each analytic partner. In both participants, processes of inner realization are facilitated, in one by not viewing and in the other by not being viewed. Also, there is