On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis (review)

Nathan Kravis, who is both a practicing psychiatrist with psychoanalytic training as well as a distinguished historian of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has produced a masterpiece of visual history rooted in his reading of Freud. From Greco-Roman dining practices (intimately linked, as Petronius illustrated, to sex, violence, and social status) to the Victorian obsession with reclining and its rejection as too sexual, too violent, as well as too redolent of social status, Kravis’s study answers the question of why the “sofa” becomes a site of therapy. Kravis, even more than Bernd Brunner in his examination of The Art of Lying Down, is attuned to the radical shifts in Western understanding of our horizontal life.2 Brunner’s epigraph is from Marx (Groucho not Karl) to the effect that a thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing; Kravis’s is from Aristophanes’s comic Socrates urging his student to just lie down and work out his problem.