You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The use of the couch for the treatment of mental disorders has a history that long antedates Freud's initial employment of it. The ancient Greeks apparently practiced an equivalent form of psychoanalysis that was characterized by the use of the couch; dream analysis; and the employment of rhetoric, dialectic, and catharsis (Entralgo, 1970; Simon, 1978). It is not clear what their rationale was for the use of the couch. As we now know, Freud's suggestion that the patient use the couch was largely for personal reasons. He did not want to be observed while thinking about the patient's free associations, and he also believed that the patient, by feeling more comfortable lying down, would be able to tap into deeper layers of preconscious phantasies.
Freud apparently never realized that he had, in effect, discovered the right brain hemisphere! When a person lies down and does not make eye contact with the other person in the discourse, he or she seems to activate a cerebral hemispheric shift in terms of modes of data processing from the left to the right in right-handed persons and vice versa for left-handed persons. Interestingly, researchers in infant observation also noted that there was a noticeable difference in infant alertness when the infant was observed sitting up as contrasted with lying down. This shift in the alertness of consciousness corresponded to electroencephalographic changes in states of alertness and also to a hemispheric shift. The shift is from a highly controlled, organized,