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  • On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis
  • Sander L. Gilman
Nathan Kravis. On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017. xviii + 204 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978–0–262–03661–0).

Nathan Kravis, who is both a practicing psychiatrist with psychoanalytic training as well as a distinguished historian of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has produced a masterpiece of visual history rooted in his reading of Freud. What does it mean that Freud insisted that his patients (at least) lie down as they free associated during their therapy? In the Freud Museum, housed in his last home in London, the pride of place is to the Ruhebett, covered in kilims, on which they had also reclined in his Viennese apartment. Kravis departs from the questionable translation of Freud’s Ruhebett as a sofa to sketch a history of reclining in the West and its antithesis, sitting up (too) straight, as a means of exploring how we as human beings interact in time and space. The phenomenological act of being recumbent is tied by Kravis to the very objects on which we recline awake and their history. The tension between the object (the bed) for nocturnal unconscious somnolence and those objects created for our horizontal but conscious lives parallels the tension between dreaming and the day residue that colors and forms our dreams, at least according to Freud. We are how we recline and when we recline and why we recline.

From Greco-Roman dining practices (intimately linked, as Petronius illustrated, to sex, violence, and social status) to the Victorian obsession with reclining and its rejection as too sexual, too violent, as well as too redolent of social status, Kravis’s study answers the question of why the “sofa” becomes a site of therapy. He also picks up on the meme that Freud’s sofa became, illustrating a wide range of parodies and adaptions of the sofa with and without its self-consciously Victorian (perhaps more accurately “k.u.k.”; i.e., Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian) context. Indeed, in complex ways the power of this study lies in the ubiquity of Freud’s couch/day bed /sofa in our popular imagination, from Kravis’s opening image of a subway ad by the Catholic Church urging the substitution of the pew for the couch to dozens if not hundreds of New Yorker cartoons where the couch came to represent a twentieth-century self-ironic urbanity.

I noted in my recent Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture that writing about posture meant seeing posture.1 And Kravis accomplishes this goal brilliantly with hundreds of full-color plates as evidence for his argument about the dialectic of lying and sitting. He uses these as evidence, not as illustrations for his argument. [End Page 697] None of the images serve as illustrations alone, since they are intrinsic to Kravis’s analysis of Freud’s argument about the nature of the analytic process. Freud rejected looking at his patients since he had experienced in his time in Paris Jean Martin Charcot’s analysis of his patients’ visual signs and symptoms, photographed as evidence of the patients’ psychopathologies. Freud later came to dismiss Char-cot as a mere voyeur. The Ruhebett, as Freud employed it, demanded the patient be placed so as not to be able to look at the analyst. He demanded then that the analyst listen rather than look at the analysand. We sneak around the corner into Freud’s examining room with Kravis and peak at the world of recumbence, able to observe the prejudices and presuppositions inherent in our act of seeing and reading Freud along with Kravis.

As in my own argument about the multifaceted moral claims of posture (from Plato to Jordan Peterson), the word “lying” for Kravis has a double meaning: does recumbent posture imply moral values or indeed immorality? Kravis, even more than Bernd Brunner in his examination of The Art of Lying Down, is attuned to the radical shifts in Western understanding of our horizontal life.2 Brunner’s epigraph is...

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