From the
American Psychoanalytic Association´s website concerning
The Use of the Couch in psychoanalysis:
"Following Freud’s practice, many psychoanalysts recommend the use of the couch for their patients in psychoanalysis. To some onlookers, the practice appears arcane or puzzling. Why the use of the couch?
Most psychoanalysts find that the couch is helpful because it takes analytic patients’ focus off the external. Instead, patients turn their attention inward, to fantasies, daydreams, feelings. Dr. John Munder Ross (1999) notes that, in lying down, peoples’ perspective changes. They focus less on objects in the environment and more on images that arise from their own minds. Not bound by an awareness of the analyst’s facial expressions and gestures, the analytic patient is more readily able to imagine what the analyst is thinking or feeling, too, which enriches the experience of analysis.
In addition, many analysts find that they, themselves, work more productively when their patients use the couch. Not constrained by social conventions— maintaining eye contact, for instance— analysts can relax more fully. Therefore, they can focus better on what the patient is saying and feeling and resonate more fully with the patient’s spoken and unspoken communications. The couch, in essence, helps analysts and their patients immerse themselves in the extraordinarily rich world of the mind."
