On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.48 (641 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0262036614 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-09-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. Nathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
A fascinating volume. (Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree)In this original integration of psychoanalysis, art history, furniture history, and history of medicine, Nathan Kravis achieves an unexpected and entirely fresh perspective on the origins of the use of the analytic couch. (Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine)With subtlety, acuity, and joy, Kravis's analysis of the analyst's couch reveals the aesthetic and relational conditions which make recumbent speech
Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.. From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing.Kravis draws on sources that range from ancient funerary monuments to furniture history to early photography, as well as histories of medicine, fashion, and interior decoration, and he deploys an astonishing array of images -- of paintings, monuments, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, New Yorker cartoons, and advertisements. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today's psychoanalysts -- some of whom regard it as "infantilizing" -- the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. It has been this