BBC Masterpieces of Vienna_2of3_Freud's Couch
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00:00On this couch, something extraordinary happened, nothing less than a revolution in the human
00:12mind.
00:14The couch really embodies the whole self-consciousness that has been one of the hallmarks of the
00:1920th century, the ability to analyse ourselves, think about ourselves, the whole culture of
00:24therapy which flourished in the last century.
00:27Here, a series of neurotic Viennese patients lay somewhere between dream and waking, describing
00:33their symptoms to one of the most famous thinkers of the 20th century.
00:37It was a kind of experimental instrument for dreaming and it became really for its patients
00:43a kind of magic carpet on which they could move across time as well as space into the
00:49past.
00:50Beside this couch sat Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.
00:55For 50 years, Freud's patients were on the couch, putting their dreams and anxieties
01:00into words.
01:01This is a place every student of psychology learns about.
01:05He sat them on the couch and then he made them relax, lie down and relax, so that they
01:11were in a relaxed setting and they could discuss things like verbally and they could be more
01:16open with themselves if they were relaxed.
01:19The patients on this couch gave us the Freudian slip and the Oedipus complex.
01:25Freud's couch has come to symbolise all that is weird, wonderful or repulsive in the human
01:30mind.
01:32It has had narrow escapes from danger and has been driven into exile along with its
01:39owner.
01:40Today, in its London home, the couch is admired by pilgrims from around the world.
01:5620 Mayersfield Gardens, Hampstead, is the couch's final resting place.
02:02It arrived here in 1938 after being crated up and dispatched from Vienna.
02:08The couch occupies the pride of place in the room where its owner spent the last year of
02:12his life.
02:13Long after the death of Freud, the couch remains the key symbol of psychoanalysis, an invitation
02:19to reveal everything.
02:22It looks so inviting, so comfortable, you'd immediately want to lie down and dredge out
02:25all your thoughts about the past.
02:27You feel you couldn't even stop them pouring out.
02:30The couch stands in for therapy, it stands in for psychoanalysis.
02:34It's an iconic image.
02:35It's been in hundreds of cartoons, hundreds of jokes.
02:40It's everywhere.
02:50Being on the couch means telling the unvarnished truth, revealing your most embarrassing fears
02:55and secrets.
02:56I'm just getting really fed up.
02:57Do the bit about Alas, poor Yorick.
02:58No, I'm sick of it.
02:59I want to do something else.
03:03I want to make something of my life.
03:05No, I don't know that bit.
03:06I want to get away from all that.
03:08Be different.
03:09Well, um, what do you want to be?
03:13A private dick.
03:14Private dick?
03:15Yes, a private dick.
03:20The couch's illustrious career began in 1891 when it met a young Viennese neurologist,
03:30Dr. Sigmund Freud.
03:36Vienna was the capital of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire.
03:40Eleven different nationalities argued with each other in eleven different languages.
03:46Interest in women and sex was a top priority for Viennese writers and intellectuals.
03:53Freud's couch would not have acquired life.
04:02At that time, a couch was a normal part of every Viennese doctor's consulting room.
04:08These couches were adjustable so that patients could be examined in different ways.
04:13It was a piece of furniture which you could find in almost all practice rooms of physicians.
04:21And as Freud started his career as a physician, it's a kind of souvenir of his medical background.
04:34In 1891, one of Freud's patients, Madame Benveniste, staked her claim to immortality when she gave
04:40Freud a new couch.
04:42His own common examination bed was, as far as she was concerned, rather uncomfortable.
04:49And she thought he could do better by having this more domestic object and more comfortable
04:54place to sit on and lie on.
05:00Freud's couch is usually buried under piles of cushions and oriental carpets.
05:05So if we undress the couch, what exactly lies beneath?
05:11Freud's couch is not the type of couch you would have seen in a doctor's surgery or for
05:16medical use.
05:17Medical couches were adjustable, adjustable heads, adjustable feet.
05:22You could raise and lower the seat.
05:24But Freud's couch is quite distinctive in design.
05:27It's much more like a piece of domestic furniture which he's adapted for use in his consulting
05:32room.
05:37The style that dominated Austrian domestic furniture in the mid-19th century was known
05:42as Biedermeier.
05:46Freud's couch is typical of pieces inspired by Biedermeier furniture, with this rectangular
05:52form of the seat and the classically inspired bolster at the end, and the rectangular blocks
05:57underneath.
05:58And Biedermeier furniture was all about clean lines and rectangular forms inspired by classical
06:04design.
06:06The domestic couch was a piece of furniture that suggested the intimacy of a lady's bedroom.
06:12In polite society, ladies were not seen publicly reclining on couches.
06:18Couches like this were very much used by women, particularly, actually, in bedrooms during
06:24the lying-in period after childbirth, when the new mother would receive guests lying
06:29on the couch.
06:30It wouldn't have been common to see women reclining on couches like this in social situations
06:36because, of course, they were used in private rooms, in bedrooms, in boudoirs, and occasionally
06:40in sitting rooms.
06:43The couch was to become the focal point of Freud's practice, appropriate for a doctor
06:47who never saw any blood.
06:50If we think of Freud and his science as a medical science, which some people don't,
06:54but if we think of it in that way, it's something which is halfway between the rather surgical
06:59examination table, cold, clinical, upright, hard to lie on, where the patient may feel
07:05indeed that she, he is about to be opened for inspection.
07:08So it's halfway between that and the kind of boudoir chaise longue in which the woman
07:15reclines when she's feeling a little tired, a little melancholy, perhaps.
07:25Patients were lured onto the couch because, in keeping with the fashion of the time, it
07:28was covered with a beautiful Persian carpet.
07:32This couch was reassuringly bourgeois.
07:36Certainly, anyone who saw that couch would have no fears that somebody with fleas and
07:41an unwashed person would be lying there, agonising over his thoughts.
07:45No, it was something for the well-to-do.
07:48With the rugs on, it looks quite a luxurious piece of equipment, and in a way, that was
07:55the purpose of it, was to inspire confidence.
07:58A young practitioner had to inspire confidence in his potential clients.
08:08The rug we see on Freud's couch was a kashkai, woven by women from a nomadic tribe in southern
08:13Iran.
08:14Vienna was a major centre for trading in carpets from the East, and these exotic textiles conjured
08:20up Orientalist visions.
08:24All Persian, all Oriental rugs are a whole set of symbols.
08:30They're schematic landscapes, actions, so there's that other level where you can use
08:36them like Rorschach ink plots, that you look at them and you dream something into them
08:43or out of them.
08:45It has emblems of plants, it also has female emblems in it, and probably behind the plants
08:53and these female symbols is the idea of fertility.
08:57So again, this comes back to luxury, to riches, to success.
09:07The couch felt luxurious, but even when Freud embarked upon his psychoanalytic project at
09:12the turn of the century, it looked curiously old-fashioned.
09:16All over Vienna, doctors were switching to more modern antiseptic examination couches.
09:22Freud started as a doctor at a time when there were no hygienic concerns about bacterias
09:32which could live in the carpets and in the couches, and only 20 years later, at the turn
09:39of the century, a new form of furnishing doctor's rooms began.
09:46But as Freud worked in a completely different way, or in a different direction, he kept
09:53this old form of furniture, so it's a relic or a souvenir of early medical furnishing.
10:03Many of the first patients to lie down on Freud's couch were surrendering to hypnotism.
10:18It was a technique for exploring the mind that Freud had studied in Paris.
10:24But there were problems with hypnotism.
10:27When patients surfaced from their trance, they couldn't remember anything, and Freud
10:31discovered he wasn't much good at hypnosis.
10:37Freud famously said the day when a patient said, I'm not, I'm not asleep.
10:45This is the moment when he realised that trying to bully patients into a hypnotic state was
10:51not what he was good at and wasn't necessary, because all he had to do was get them into
10:57a certain state of psychic relaxation, and then he could work with the material that
11:02flowed from that.
11:06The couch enabled Freud to take a new approach to neurotic and hysterical symptoms.
11:11Psychoanalysis.
11:13People talking about their everyday lives.
11:16I think for Freud, the idea of a couch might have been partially accidental, but also it
11:21allowed him to introduce into his practice the whole notion of domesticity.
11:26What is Freud about but about our intimate everyday lives?
11:29He isn't about the great, or the man of action, or politics, or history in that sense.
11:35He is about the tales women gossip about.
11:38He is about what we tell each other around the kitchen table.
11:44In 1892, the couch welcomed Fräulein Elisabeth von Ahr, one of the earliest and most important
11:51case studies in psychoanalysis.
11:54She was a 24-year-old woman who was experiencing excruciating pains in her legs, at times
12:00adding up to a state of paralysis after nursing her father through a long illness.
12:07Freud elicited from Elisabeth von Ahr a story of how her dying father had pressed down on
12:12her leg when she had changed his dressing, and also a story of how she had fallen in
12:18love with her sister's husband, a love that had given rise to feelings of terrible guilt.
12:26Freud tells us that as Elisabeth von Ahr connected her memories with her physical symptoms, she
12:31got better.
12:33The act of lying on the couch and speaking about difficult experiences had become the
12:38talking cure of psychoanalysis.
12:42The marvellous thing about the couch, the reason that it has stayed with us all these
12:46years, is because it contains within it what is the essence of psychoanalysis.
12:52Human consciousness is an immensely powerful organ or system.
12:58When you bring human consciousness to bear on any aspect of your life, suddenly you get
13:04the power to sort it out, to reconstruct it in a way that's less damaging.
13:13Freud's couch became the basis for a new approach to the human mind.
13:17When Freud wrote up the case of Elisabeth von Ahr, he noted that it was similar to a
13:21work of fiction.
13:25Freud does say, I'm really, really sorry that this story is, if you like, a little like
13:29a couch, it's just a little domestic novelette, it's just a little tale of love, it's just
13:34a little, you know, flurry, but in fact it is also a case history, it is also science,
13:39it is also the way in which we understand the human mind.
13:46Men and women suffering from hysterical and neurotic symptoms were drawn to Freud's couch
13:51to talk about their problems.
13:54There was something about lying on a couch that opened people up, as generations of patients
13:59have discovered since.
14:04I think we do embody our emotions a lot, and when you're in that position, which is quite
14:08childlike and actually in a way quite vulnerable, you can go one of two ways, you can be either
14:14very defensive or actually you can open up, if you trust your therapist.
14:20And in fact, one's vulnerability, in my case, my vulnerability actually enabled me to speak
14:25more freely.
14:27Like Alice in Wonderland, patients find themselves falling down a rabbit hole, descending into
14:33a vortex of memories, dreams and free associations.
14:38Losing the control over one's mind or one's thoughts is one of the basic principles of
14:46psychoanalysis, of saying all the things which come to your mind without any censorship or
14:53without any control is one of the idealistic basic principles of psychoanalysis.
15:05The couch was positioned against the wall of the consulting room.
15:09At one end was a chair where Freud would sit, unseen by the patient.
15:14Freud thought his seating plan was important, and he explained why in a famous essay.
15:22I hold to the plan of getting the patient to lie on a sofa while I sit behind him out
15:26of sight.
15:27This arrangement has a historical basis.
15:30It is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psychoanalysis was evolved.
15:35But it deserves to be maintained for many reasons.
15:38For one thing, I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours
15:43a day or more.
15:47The second reason was even more important.
15:52Freud didn't want his patients to see his face.
15:56I do not wish my facial expressions to give the patient material for interpretation or
16:01to influence him in what he tells me.
16:05When you lie on the couch and you do not see the person you're talking to, you turn inward
16:13and your history, your own history, unfolds in front of your eyes and you can narrate
16:20it.
16:21At the same time as you're turning inwards and looking at your own life, pieces of your
16:26own history start making sense and you become more meaningful to yourself as a person.
16:36Talking to an invisible listener can be a liberating experience.
16:40It can also be deeply disturbing.
16:43Because you can't see the analyst when you're on the couch, because he sits behind you,
16:48you have all sorts of fantasies.
16:50And in analysis, the therapist doesn't say very much.
16:53They speak maybe two or three times in 50 minutes.
16:55So in those silences, of course, you wonder whether your therapist is still there, whether
17:01he is naked, whether he has set himself on fire, whether he's left the room and gone
17:06for a quick burger.
17:07You don't know what he's doing.
17:11Had the couch been animate, it would have recoiled in horror at the arrival of a man
17:17whom Freud called the Wolfman.
17:20His real name was Sergei Pankajev.
17:23He was a Russian aristocrat and he was in a bad way.
17:27He hadn't been to the toilet in the normal way for five years.
17:31He could only move his bowels with an enema.
17:34His father and his sister had both committed suicide and he felt as if there was a veil
17:39cutting him off from reality.
17:41This famous patient spent four years in analysis with Freud.
17:47Four years on the couch, six days a week, that's a lot of words to be listening to.
17:52And out of those words, you have to extract the kind of basic skeleton, not only of a life,
17:59but of an illness and the history of that illness.
18:05The Wolfman remembered a childhood dream which Freud believed was the key to his neurosis.
18:13I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed.
18:16Suddenly the window opened of its own accord and I was terrified to see that some white wolves
18:21were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window.
18:25There were six or seven of them.
18:27They had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs
18:31when they pay attention to something.
18:33In great terror, evidently, of being eaten by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
18:40Freud takes this dream to be extremely important because it was a dream the boy had
18:45the night of his fourth birthday.
18:48And from that moment on, he woke up in terror, his character changed completely.
18:53So the dream itself, in a sense, is the trauma that transformed his life.
18:58But it's a senseless trauma because why could a dream be so dramatic?
19:03Freud looks back to early experiences and reconstructs a scene of the little boy
19:10at age one and a half, probably, watching his parents copulate
19:16on a hot summer's afternoon.
19:19So the wolves in the tree become the parents copulating
19:25and he's interrupting of the parents copulating.
19:30The wolfman was so grateful for this interpretation
19:33that he made a painting of his dream which he presented to Freud.
19:38Later, critics would question whether the wolfman's dream
19:42really meant what Freud claimed,
19:44a traumatic early glimpse of his parents having sex.
19:48But Freud believed he had embarked on a great project.
19:51His technique of psychoanalysis on the couch would give him access
19:55to the most deeply buried material in his patient's mind.
20:04As word of the couch spread,
20:06and the extraordinary experiences of those who lay on it,
20:09patients made the pilgrimage to Freud's consulting room.
20:13After the First World War, wealthy American and British patients
20:17visited Vienna to undertake psychoanalysis.
20:20Freud wrote...
20:22I developed a technique to eliminate psychic material in layers,
20:26which I like to compare to the technique of unearthing a buried city.
20:31To the patient, Freud explained what he wanted to get out of them
20:35by pointing to the collection of antique objects surrounding the couch.
20:41He thought that the patient lying on the couch
20:44was like the whole history of human beings lying there,
20:48and that you could reach back into their unconscious
20:51and find the primeval, the Egyptian.
20:54And he might well point to a god or goddess sitting on his desk and say,
21:00you know, these are like the contents of your mind.
21:04They are from long ago, but they are still with us.
21:13The violence of primitive political forces
21:16erupted into Freud's world in March 1938,
21:19when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
21:22As part of their campaign of virulent hatred of Jews and their culture,
21:26the Nazis denounced psychoanalysis as Jewish science.
21:31With Hitler welcomed to Vienna by cheering crowds
21:34and swastikas decorating the facade of Freud's apartment,
21:38it was time for the couch to leave.
21:42Ernest Jones, a clever, well-connected Welsh doctor,
21:46had been a key player in the psychoanalytic movement for 30 years.
21:50Now he came to the rescue.
21:55At the ice-skating rink, Jones bonded with the man
21:58who held the key to giving Freud a visa to escape Austria,
22:02the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare.
22:05Jones was a fixer, so whatever environment he was in,
22:08he milked it for his own advantage.
22:10So there's no question, when he was a schoolboy at Landovery,
22:13he used to skate up and down the river in the winter.
22:17So he didn't do it only for social climbing, so to speak,
22:21but he saw the social value of it when he was in London.
22:26Jones explained that Freud was in serious danger in Austria
22:30and talked Sir Samuel Hoare into handing out enough visas
22:33to allow Freud, plus family, to depart for London.
22:38Freud left his couch behind in Vienna.
22:42A Nazi commissar, Dr Anton Sauerwald,
22:45was given responsibility for administering the case
22:48of Professor Sigmund Freud,
22:50and Sauerwald was the one who arranged to send Freud's goods to London.
22:57The venerable couch was crated up
23:00and manoeuvred down the stairs of the Berggasse apartment,
23:03where it had lived for 47 years.
23:06At the Westbahnhof, it was packed aboard one of the trains
23:10transporting the belongings of the Jews of Vienna into exile.
23:16Obviously, the couch had significance.
23:19This is the couch on which he'd evolved his whole practice.
23:22It is the key item of furniture, I would think.
23:27The couch crossed the English Channel safely.
23:30Freud received this letter from the Viennese removal firm,
23:34informing him that on 28 July 1938,
23:37three wagons were sent to the firm of Woodbridge Removal
23:41and Oversea Ltd, Fenchurch Street, London.
23:44The firm delivered Freud's possessions to him in Hampstead.
23:51While all his possessions, his documents and books,
23:55and of course the couch too, were in the Nazis' hands,
23:59he felt he was in some sense still a victim of them.
24:02He says, only when these things are back in my possession
24:06will I be Nazi frei, free of the Nazis.
24:12In the couch's new home in Maersfield Gardens,
24:15the furniture was carefully arranged by Freud's daughter Anna
24:19and Paula the maid, just as it was in Vienna,
24:22but with everything easily accessible on the ground floor.
24:27By this time, Sigmund Freud was 82 years old
24:31and terminally ill with cancer of the jaw.
24:34Yet in Hampstead, he still insisted on taking four new patients onto his couch.
24:41He had a large family.
24:43Some of his children couldn't find work at that point,
24:46so he had to make money.
24:48So he set up practice here in the study with the couch again,
24:54only four patients, which was of course nothing to what he used to do.
24:59He would do that in the morning in the old days.
25:11Freud died in September 1939,
25:14a few days after the start of World War II.
25:22The fame of the couch continued to spread around the world,
25:26symbolising the idea that in psychoanalysis,
25:29every problem is linked to sex.
25:32Why does anyone want to be a private dick?
25:35Fame, money, glamour, excitement, sex?
25:38Ah, it's the sex, is it?
25:40Well, that's one of the things, yes.
25:42Now, what's the sex problem?
25:44Well, there's no problem.
25:46Now, come on, you've got this girl on the bed and she's all ready for it.
25:49No, it's nothing to do with that.
25:51No, come on, there she is, she's all ready for it, she's a real stunner,
25:54she's a mantelpiece.
25:58Today, 20 Mayersfield Gardens is open to the public as the Freud Museum.
26:03Visitors from all over the world make the pilgrimage to see the couch.
26:07For many, it's an emotional experience.
26:10Some people do react a bit too emotionally when they see the couch
26:14and want to hurl themselves onto it and set the alarms off.
26:17That has happened several times.
26:20And some just stand here in silent contemplation,
26:25sometimes with tears rolling down their cheeks.
26:30From one couch in Vienna has come a movement
26:33that disrupted the sexual values of society
26:36and presented some shocking ideas for inspection.
26:39These days, critical voices are questioning the value of Freud's case studies,
26:44arguing that they have no scientific basis
26:47and the couch never revealed the truth about the human mind.
26:51You lie there and burden your thoughts, and so what?
26:55I mean, to call this a cure of depression
26:59or one of the things that go wrong in people's lives,
27:02many people who don't think psychoanalysis is any healing form of therapy,
27:07would, I think, think the couch was just false promise,
27:10a kind of happy return to infancy where everything is all right
27:14and somebody will look after you in all its comfort.
27:17Like psychoanalysis, the couch has taken a battering
27:21and is clearly sagging under the weight of all those well-fed bourgeois patients.
27:25The pad is stuffed with horsehair,
27:28and you can hear it slightly creaking as I press it.
27:32And that is fixed to the wooden frame
27:35that you can see where the top cover material has worn away.
27:39It's actually slightly dented here, I think,
27:42because this is the point at which they would probably swing their legs over the edge to get off.
27:47So the maximum weight would be on that edge.
27:50The couch may be showing its age,
27:53yet it remains an extraordinary relic of a revolution
27:56that challenged our understanding of the human mind.
28:00It could do with a little refurbishing,
28:03and maybe that's true of psychoanalysis as well, I don't know.
28:06But it still feels extraordinary,
28:08because you do have the sense of the people who have been there
28:13and the narratives and the thought that was woven around their lives
28:18and indeed around our individual lives,
28:20and the way in which we all still see ourselves.
28:23We still think that our childhood has created the adults that we are.
28:26We still give significance to the inner narrative of our lives,
28:30and I don't think that was quite the case in the same way
28:33before the couch came into being and Freud, who used it so well.
28:38And there's another masterpiece here on BBC4 tomorrow at half past seven.
29:08.