How this couch changed everything

There’s a new exhibition about the work of Sigmund Freud. It features an extremely important couch.

You lie back and stretch out, close your eyes or look straight up at a white ceiling. Behind you, but out of sight, a small owlish gentleman asks you questions about your parents.

And there’s a couch.

For many people this is the first image that comes to mind when they think of psychiatry.

In reality, a consultation typically won’t really look anything like this. So how did a piece of furniture that should belong in the bedroom or the sitting room end up in the psychiatrist’s room?

The answer can be found in a trip taken by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, says psychiatrist Dr Trevor Turner.

“The idea of the psychoanalyst’s couch really took off after Freud gave a series of lectures.”You can even see Freudian references in films as early as the late 30s,” says Turner. “The term ‘on the couch’ became accepted as a symbol representing what psychiatrists do.”

The first psychoanalyst’s couch was reportedly given as a gift to Freud by a grateful female patient.

“It’s a piece of furniture that you more readily associate with poorly Victorian women, says Freud Museum curator Ivan Ward.”The idea that a cured patient gave it to him was like his patient saying ‘I’m better, I don’t need this anymore.

Source: BBC

N.H.Khider