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These reflections have sprung from the arrangement adopted by most psychoanalysts according to Sigmund Freud's reccomendation. To sit so far behind the head of the couch, so that the analysand is quite unable, or only with great effort, to see the analyst.
Freud says in his article from 1913: On beginning the treatment:
“I hold to the plan of getting the patient to lie on the sofa while I sit behind him out of his sight. This arrangement has a historical basis; it is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psycho-analysis was evolved. But it deserves to be maintained for many reasons. The first is a personal motive, but one which others may share with me. I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more). Since, while I am listening to the patient, I too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my facial expressions to give the patient material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me. The patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the instinct for looking (acopophilia) plays an important part in his neurosis. I insist on this procedure, however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient's associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance. I know that many analysts work in a different way, but I do not know whether this deviation is due more to a craving for doing things differently or to some advantage which they find they gain by it” (Freud, 1913).
As a result of Freud's recommendation, indeed insistence on this point, many psychoanalysts are taking this arrangement as a matter of course. In addition to his reasoning, we may also argue that this arrangement promotes regression in the analytic situation and thus also the transference.
The importance of this fact is rarely d