99% Invisible - 169- Freud’s Couch

Episode Date: June 17, 2015

Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice and popular culture, by a single piece of furniture: the couch. Producer Ann Hepperman explores the role of this canonical object in … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1889, Sigmund Freud was still relatively new in his field. He's what we'd call a pre-Froidian Freud. He was 33 years old and he was working as an assistant to another psychiatrist. And he hadn't had any of his big ideas yet. But he was about to. That's producer Ann Heperman. Freud was mostly practicing hypnosis at the time. It was cutting edge, though still kind of a controversial treatment. So one day Freud gets a new patient. Very wealthy woman, Fannie Moser.

That's Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, and a Freud historian. Freud's new patient was struggling from all kinds of ailments, hysteria, sleeplessness, pain, and odd ticks. Fannie Moser had lots of doctors. So Fannie Moser would come in and Freud would have her lay down on the couch, just like he did with his other patients. You're honest, you're getting heavy. Freud wasn't the only person using a couch during hypnosis, but he particularly needed it to get people into a more relaxed state. Heavy or unhappier, you're breathing deeper and deeper.

But he wasn't a very good hypnotist. He was kind of a clumsy hypnotist. So once Moser was on the couch, Freud would be saying, you know, you're getting sleep, you're getting sleep, and she'd be like, no I'm not, I'm not sleepy at all. So while Fanny is laying there, not getting sleepy, she talked. At first, Freud would interrupt her with his theories, but Fanny just wasn't having it.

She wanted to talk. First let me tell you my stories. And then, you know, being the light goes on, Freud has a revelation. If you just let patients talk and don't say anything, they will let down their defenses, and the unconscious will be revealed. This is the moment when the pre-fradiant Freud becomes the Freudian Freud.

And the Freudian Freud's new techniques and theories for therapy would come to be called psychoanalysis. Most new theories in the world do not get assigned their own piece of furniture but this one ultimately inexorably did, the couch. If psychoanalysis had a flag, oh you know it would have a picture of a couch on it. You can actually go visit Freud's couch. It's in his last home in London. Freud had the couch shipped from Vienna after fleeing the Nazis in 1938. Good call, Sigmund.

Freud saw patients on his couch right up to his death a year later. We sent our de facto London correspondent, the Illusionist's Helen Zoltzman, to check it out. This is Helen Zoltzman reporting outside from Freud's old study. Freud actually had a couple of couches. But the one we now associate with him was a gift from a patient, a madame Ben Vanisty. She told Freud that if she was going to have her head examined,

she might as well be comfortable. Apparently she found the couch Freud had at the time sorely lacking, so she got him a cozier one. It's really a very cozy looking couch. It's not a clinical looking at all. It looks like a great place to take a nap. Freud studies full of rugs and books and artifacts from other cultures. It has sort of an Indiana Jones vibe to it, and his couch is in keeping with that. It's a Devon style sofa. Some people

might call it a swooning couch, and it's covered in exotic red Persian carpets and piled with velvet pillows. So you can't actually tell what the couch beneath it is really like, whether it's stained with human experience. What's underneath is a surprisingly plain, Jane beige sofa. All clean lines and rectangular forms. It's almost boring. The couch is what's known as a beatomire sofa, a very popular style back when Freud got

it in 1891. It was like something you'd find in a Viennese lady's bedroom, domestic. a beat of myrsofa, a very popular style back when Freud got it in 1891. It was like something you'd find in a Viennese lady's bedroom, domestic. A piece of furniture designed for relaxing and dreaming. But the more patience Freud saw on the couch, the more he wrote about those patients. The more the couch became thought of as an essential instrument in Freudian psychoanalysis. Look, the couch was central to the idea of getting to the unconscious. That's Dr. Arnold Richards, a psychoanalyst who practices on New York's Upper East Side.

In traditional analysis, Richard says the couch is a tool. A patient lies down on his or her back looking up at the ceiling. You're staring up, you're staring into yourself. You're looking inside, rather than outside. Traditional psychoanalysts believe the couch helps a patient relax and open up and understand their unconscious conflicts and inhibitions like... Why you can't, you know, finish your paper, why you can't work, what are your symptoms and what are your inhibitions and you want to understand that. And that's what psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis therapy is about. And some of these therapists believe that even the placement of the couch, like where it

is in the room, makes a difference. I know there was one analyst who would put the couch in the middle of the room because he felt that the patient shouldn't be close to a wall, that the wall would make him secure, and he wanted the patient to be insecure, he wanted to promote the regression. The analyst typically sits in a chair out of sight from the patient on the couch, and though some analysts believe this positioning helps the patient feel freer to open up, Freud may have had more selfish reasons.

He once remarked, I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day. In any case, when an object plays such a central role to the work that you do, choosing the right one becomes a big deal. It's like a right of passage. It's like you've made it. Which means good business for the guys making those couches. We had to have a separate factory just to make the couches because we also made sofas

and club chairs. Fred Braffman used to run Imperial leather furniture company in Queens, New York. It's a family-owned business that's been selling psychoanalytic couches since the 1940s. His father-in-law, Irving Levy, actually patented a version of a psychoanalytic couch he designed with his business partner. Alicia Brafman says her father was extremely proud of it. Every time anybody walked into the store,

he'd saunter up to them and say, you know, he would say, we make Freud's couches, which of course they didn't. The couch they sold wasn't Freud's exotic, cozy pile of cushions. Their psychoanalytic couches were like the one you're probably thinking of. Low to the ground, sleek. Braffman sold these psychoanalytic couches all over the country and around the world for decades.

And the psychoanalysts buying them had some particular aesthetics. Most of them were being made in leather. But tuffing with buttons, a big no-no from nervous patients. They would pick at it because they were edgy, nervous, and it would present the maintenance problem. Basically, constructing the perfect psychoanalytic couch is like building a sofa for goldilocks. It can't be too soft, and it can't be too hard.

So we used to use a special spring and special cotton and horse hair, hog hair, combination to make it the, as they said, just right. Fred's business boomed in the 40s, 50s and early 60s. What some have called the Golden Age of Psycho Analysis. It was very good. It was a very good business. But then in the late 60s, things changed. People started to experiment with alternative therapies

and the first generation of antidepressants offered faster relief. Traditional psychoanalysis fell out of favor. And you might be able to guess what happened to analytic couch sales. Now, couches aren't being used all that much. They sit up in club chairs or lounge chairs and they talk to the psychoanalyst. And even within psychoanalytic circles, people became less certain that the couch was a good tool. Different schools of thought started cropping up.

Whether or not you use the couch, you know, can determine, you know, what you're doing and why you're doing it and what your theory is. You could say that two camps formed in psychoanalysis. Team couch and team no couch. Some would say it's easier to have a conversation, you know, sitting face to face.

And some people, some analysts, I could ever insist on not using the couch. They said they prefer sitting up. Richard hasn't really chosen a team. In his office, there's a couch and a chair. I do whatever it seems to, what works best for the patient. There may be a team couch and a team no couch, but even Freud wasn't that dogmatic about it.

He had patients he treated on the couch and some he didn't, like the famous composer Gustaf Moller, whom Freud treated while strolling around the park. But here's the thing, while Freud wasn't dogmatic about using the couch, and while use of the psychoanalytic couch has declined, you wouldn't know it from popular culture. The analytic couch has become shorthand for therapy, particularly in one place. Hi, I'm Bob Mancoff, I'm cartoon editor of The New York Magazine. Bob Mancoff is surprisingly qualified to talk about this. Well, I have a background in experimental psychology.

He wasn't a psychoanalyst exactly. I was an animal behaviorist, so to put little rats and pigeons on couch is extraordinarily difficult. Mancoff says the couch is fantastic as a symbol. It is just what a joke needs. I think the couch immediately establishes the power relationships here. The psychiatrist is in control. You are sort of helpless.

Childlike, lying on the couch. Even though real therapists aren't using the couch all that much, cartoonists still need it. When we look at the cartoons now, we do see that they're all on the couch. Of course, it's not just the New Yorker. We've seen the couch all over popular culture. Like, it's hard to imagine when he's Alan without the couch.

You've been seeing a psychiatrist for 15 years. You should smoke some of this. You'd be off the couch in no time. And then there's the sopranos. Tony's soprano spends a lot of time with his therapist. And even though he's always sitting in a chair, when the camera pans out, there is a very typical brown analytic couch in the background.

As if the set designer wanted to reassure our subconscious about what he was doing there. And when I asked Mancoff to imagine having to make New Yorker therapy jokes without the couch as a device? Oh, don't make me cry. Oh. I've made Bob Mancoff cry, I would just like to... I can't believe it.

I can't believe it was the couch. It was the couch. Okay. No, I mean, not while I'm running this thing. Thousands of people have made pilgrimages to see Freud's couch. It's a relic to how Freud revolutionized how we understand the human mind. The couch, especially Freud's couch, it came to symbolize an invitation to open your mind.

You know, to let someone see inside. That's Freud's color, Michael Roth again. It's a reminder that we have the ability to reveal ourselves. And that's irresistible, right? I mean, it's like a magic carpet. I can get on the couch and suddenly I'll say things that reveal what I really love.

Because my whole life I've been pretending to love other things. But I get on the cash and suddenly I say, my mother, she ruined my life. Not my mother. Look. You should say that again, make sure on my. Not my mother, she hears this story, she killed me.

Michael Roth loves his mother, but if he didn't, and he does, it might be revealed on the couch. Freud has given us the ed, the ego, the super ego, the Freudian slip, a whole number of complexes, but beyond creating a vocabulary of the mind, he gave us a place to rest, the felidies. To share our desires, our inhibitions, our dreams, a place just to lie down and talk. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Anne Heperman With Katie Mangle, Sam Greenspan, Avery Trophiman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced are the offices of Arxan, an

architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook or on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Spotify R-E-I-D-R-K.