On the Couch - (Mit Press) by Nathan Kravis (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing.</b><p>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 <i>On the Couch</i>, 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 <i>symposion</i> (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman <i>convivium</i> (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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>An interesting and attractive perspective on the roots of an analytic tradition.--<i>Inside Higher Ed</i>--<br><p><i>On the Couch</i> is in many ways a unique an exceptional book, offering the reader a richly informative, superbly written and beautifully illustrated study of an essential but rather neglected issue.</p>--<i>Psychoanalytic Journal</i>--<br><p>Kravis's work is a unique and needed contribution to the history of psychoanalysis.</p>--<i>Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences</i>--<br>
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