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In the “talking cure,” a revolutionary departure from the earlier “authoritarian, hypnotic, suggestive” atmosphere of the psychoanalytic relationship, Freud maintained the spatial arrangement of the patient on the couch, because not only did he dislike being stared at for prolonged periods of time, he also wished to encourage the flow of childhood memories and of transference emotions. Most probably he hoped to avoid the transference-countertransference conflagration of Breuer and his patient, Anna O., wherein she developed pseudocyesis and accused Breuer of impregnating her. Freud (1915) seemed haunted by Breuer's experience and was thereafter intensely preoccupied in relation to his female patients, with “keeping the countertransference in check” (p. 164) rather than acknowledging, exploring, and understanding its nuances: “Our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not suddenly go further than we intended.…Analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands. The treatment must be carried out in abstinence.”
Here Freud asserts he is not for the “deprivation of everything that the patient desires for perhaps no sick person could tolerate this.…It is a fundamental principle that the patient's need and longing should be allowed to persist in her…to serve as forces compelling her to do work and make changes” (p. 165).
From Freud's letters, clinical vignettes, and the memories of his former patients, we glean that the ambiance in which he worked was not one of unalloyed austerity. In his articles, Freud (1913) occasionally alluded to the analyst's “sympathetic understanding” of