On The Couch

Psychoanalysis engages two people, an analyst and a analysand, in a therapeutic relationship and a unique situation.  Traditionally, one, the analysand, lies down while the other, the analyst, sits close, out of sight or within the first’s peripheral vision.  Use of the couch originated to facilitate free association and to decrease the inhibitions formed from conventional face-to-face, eye-to-eye contact. Both people have to be somewhere in space, ideally in actual geographic proximity to each other, so we continue to make therapeutic use of the couch.  On the couch, the analysand is aware of the analyst but also invited to be free of that conscious awareness.  Indeed, both participants are more free for their thoughts to wander, to meander in and out of direct observation, to intermingle and find the unique unconscious experience that creates the specific analysand’s inner life.

Consider, as well, the unconscious sources of our emotional, behavioral, and relational symptoms.  Given their personal historical nature, we can never really look them in the eyes, dead-on.  Slaying them in effigy also won’t do.  So we must re-live them in the context of this unique relationship emotionally, as well as we can, without the interference of seeing eye-to-eye with what can ever only be a remote proxy.  Lying down, looking into a non-horizon far away, ultimately brings us closer to home.