Claudia Guderian - Freud's Consulting Room

 

Guderian writes: "The centre of Freud’s last consulting room at his home in Maresfield Garden, is a worn old piece of furniture, covered with a carpet, dating back at least to the year 1891: The legendary couch with the armchair next to it. Together they form the so-called psycho-analytic setting, an invention of Sigmund Freud which had never existed before in the history of mankind. While Freud’s consulting room is a well known site, less is known about the rooms of analysts today. What has become of the couch in the analysts’ daily toil?"


A Note on the Exhibition
by the artist


The centre of Freud’s last consulting room at his home in London, 20 Maresfield Gardens, is a worn old piece of furniture, covered with a carpet, dating back at least to the year 1891: the legendary couch with the armchair next to it. Together they from the so-called Psychoanalytic setting, an invention of Sigmund Freud which had never existed before in the history of mankind.
Freud put his patients on a couch and sat behind their heads without eye-to-eye contact for two main reasons:

1. He felt irritated in the process of thinking or half-thinking, half-feeling his way into his patient’s psyche when there was a pair of eyes clutching to him.
2. The analysand reports different events when lying down. Freud learnt that when studying hypnosis with Charcot in Paris. Modern neurology has found that right-handed people use their left brain hemisphere when standing or sitting upright. It is responsible for thinking logically and reasonable. When lying down the brain automatically switches to the use of the other half, and its main activities are dreaming, associating and floating rather than reasoning through memory.

This is how Freud came to arrange the furniture in this peculiar way. All over the world, analysts now speak about the analytic setting and still use it.
While Freud’s consulting room is a well known sight, less is known about the rooms of the analysts today. Claudia Guderian is the first to have explored modern consulting rooms with her camera - a sight that many still regard as overstepping the limits of privacy. She has visited nearly 100 psychoanalytic consulting rooms. Her photographs were taken in England, New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.
The photos are published under the title Magie der Couch and include detailed specification of the furniture as well as interviews with the analyst concerned. Why did you arrange your furniture the way you did? was answered in many different ways. And a great many analysts approve of the fact that, yes, there is some magic to the couch which helps one remember events that may have been forgotten for decades.
http://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/10536/magic-of-the-couch/