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Abstract:
The use of the couch in psychoanalysis is unstudied and under-theorized. Yet the couch is iconic, a universally recognised underpinning, though not necessarily its practical utility. The couch has become the emblem of a cultural narrative of self-knowledge. An inquiry into the origins of the use of the couch in psychoanalysis reveals links between recumbence and evolving notions of leisure, pleasure, comfort, privacy, and interiority. The complicated and changing social meanings of recumbent posture are examined with special attention to traditions of recumbence in the healing arts. the meaning and function of recumbent speech cannot be understood outside of its social history.
Speaker Biography:
Nathan Kravis MD is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Kravis received his BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in psychiatry at Cornell and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. After completing his residency training at the Payne Whitney Clinic of The Psychiatry's DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, where he now serves, teaches and supervises, he has also served on the faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and has been an adjunct professor in the psychiatry departments of NYU and Mt Sinai and in the English Department of Columbia University. He has lectured and published widely. He paper, "The Analyst's Hatred of Analysis," was one of the most frequently downloaded articles published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2013. Among his awards and honors, he is the recipient of the Beller Award of the Columbia Whitney Clinic (2001) and psychoanalytic candidates at Columbia (Klar Award, 2005), and the George E. Daniels Merit Award of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (2011). He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is currently on the editorial boards of International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He has been in private practice in Manhattan since 1987.