How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing. The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). 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. 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. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.

A major new, myth-busting introduction to one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis, is one of the most famous thinkers of modern times. But despite (and perhaps because of) his notoriety, his work is frequently encumbered by mistranslations, clichés, and misconceptions. In this landmark assessment of the great theorist, Professor Beverley Clack reveals a more complex Freud than the one with whom we are commonly presented. Casting new light on a man often unfairly derided as obsessed with sex and rigid theory, Clack argues that he was as concerned with “the death drive” as the “sex drive” and that his fierce critique of religion masked a fascination with spiritual, existential, and philosophical questions. Revealing how the work of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche influenced Freud far more than he cared to admit, Clack explains his key ideas and case studies in the context of his eventful life. Including a detailed exploration of hysteria and its foundational role in his theories, this myth-busting introduction is a vital insight into why Freud’s thought is still so relevant today.

In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Offices uses text and images to form a complex portrait of psychoanalysis today. It is the culmination of the authors 15-year project of photographing psychoanalysts in their offices across 27 cities and ten countries. Part memoir, part history, part case study, and part self-analysis, these pages showcase a diversity of analysts: male and female and old-school and contemporary. Starting with Freud’s iconic office, the book explores how the growing diversity in both analysts and patient groups, and changes in schools of thought have been reflected in these intimate spaces, and how the choices analysts make in their office arrangements can have real effects on treatment. Along with the presentation of images, Mark Gerald explores the powerful relational foundations of theory and clinical technique, the mutually vulnerable patient-analyst connection, and the history of the psychoanalytic office. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as psychotherapists, counsellors, and social workers interested in understanding and innovating the spaces used for mental health treatment. It will also appeal to interior designers, office architects, photographers, and anyone who ever considered entering a psychoanalyst's office.

This book investigates what psychoanalysis and Buddhism can learn from each other, and offers chapters by a Buddhist scholar, a psychiatrist-author, and a number of leading psychoanalysts. It begins with a discussion of the basic understanding of both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, viewed not as a religion but as a psychology and a philosophy with ethical principles. The focus of the book rests on the commonality between the psychoanalyst's neutrality as he listens to his freely associating patient, and the Buddhist monk's non-judgmental attention to his mind. The psychoanalytic concepts of free association, the unconscious, transference and countertransference are compared to the implications of the Buddhist principles of impermanence, non-clinging (non-attachment), the hard-to-grasp concept of the "not-self", and the practice of meditation. The differences between the role of the analyst and that of the Buddhist teacher of meditation are explored, and the important difference between the analyst's emphasis on insight and thinking is compared to the Buddhist attention to awareness and experience.

Ever since Freud put religion on the couch in "The Future of an Illusion," there has been an uneasy peace, with occasional skirmishes, between these two great disciplines of subjectivity. As prime meaning givers, God and the unconscious have vied for supremacy in our thinking about ourselves, especially our thinking about our human nature, our moral stature, and our destiny. Freud, in his bold manner, found projection, fear, and denial to be the wellspring of religion's domination over man. In analogous fashion, those giving primacy to the soul over the unconscious have long dismissed psychoanalysis as mechanistic, reductionistic, and hence inadequate to the examination of spirituality. Soul on the Couch is premised on the belief that discourse about the soul and discourse from the couch can inform, and not simply ignore, one another. It brings together scholars and psychoanalysts at the forefront of an interdisciplinary dialogue that is vitally important to the growth of both disciplines. Their essays are not only models of reflective inquiry; they also illuminate the syntheses that emerge when analysts and scholars of religion bridge the gap that has long separated them and speak to one another.

This book is a relevant and timely contribution to the current debate about both the nature and validity of psychoanalysis and its body of knowledge.

At just the moment when many people are ready to throw Freud on to the ash-heap of intellectual history, Sex on the Couch rescues from Freud's theories a fascinating series of reflections on the nature of sexuality and gender. Richard Boothby presents here a fresh and engaging view of Freud. Sex on the Couch offers new insights into our concepts of masculinity and femininity, placing them in relation to Freud's theory of the Life and Death drives. Richard Boothby also engages feminist critiques of Freud, putting forward new and specific responses to questions that have shaped contemporary understanding of feminism and psychoanalysis. Boothby's Freud, far from being pass, is in possession of insights that enrich our understanding of modernity and its distinctive character. In a refreshingly readable style, Richard Boothby writes here not only for the scholarly reader but for the student and lay reader curious about Freud's theories and their use in contemporary world.