by Claire Greenwood, MA

FREUD’S COUCH 

The Buddha and his followers begged for food. In Southeast Asia today, you can still see Buddhist monks on the side of the road with large, black bowls, into which townspeople deposit rice, vegetables, and fruit. 

In Japan, where I trained as a nun, things are different. We only begged for food once or twice a year, in a ritualized format. But we did eat out of large, black “begging bowls” called oryoki bowls every day, made to mimic the shape of the original Buddha’s bowl. Eating is drastically different in 2023 in Japan than it was in the Buddha’s time, but the begging bowl remains as a symbol of what was and what could be. However, current reality is very far removed from the original intention of the object. 

This reminds me of the analytic couch. For many analysts, use of the couch is required for something to be considered “analysis.” But according to Dr. Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud, Freud’s couch predated psychoanalysis; he often treated female patients on a couch and offered them morphine, massage, and hypnosis. Sanitariums, in which people reclined on couches to breathe fresh air, were en vogue, and it was common practice to offer women a reclining couch (later named “fainting couch”) for her to rest.           

But today? Gone are the lush, blanketed daybeds of Freud’s time, offered for women’s comfort and instead we have something obligatory and physically stiff. To me the analytic couch seems like a religious artifact, its presence required for the correct ritual of psychoanalysis. 

Maybe I am particularly resentful because hearing loss limits my use of the couch. I have severe hearing loss and rely on reading lips and facial expressions (as well as hearing aids) to communicate. I find it impossible to imagine what doing a treatment on a couch would look like. This week, interviewing potential psychoanalysts to begin analysis, I had a conversation about how we could work around my disability.

“Maybe I could position my chair so that you could see me from the couch,” she offered. Why not just use a chair? I thought. 

“I suppose I could use the couch,” I offered. “But it would be a lot of me sitting up and saying, “What? Pardon?” and feeling frustrated and isolated.” What a lonely potential treatment all for the sake of fidelity to a symbol! 

Twenty-five-year-old me, who shaved her head and gave up her name to follow the Buddha, would argue that grappling with our resistance to religious symbols is important, that there’s fruitfulness even in the struggle, that we learn about ourselves through engagement with external form. But the 37-year-old me is weary of contorting myself. Why can’t tradition expand to fit me and other people like me, who don’t fit the mold? I dream of a tradition that enlarges itself to meet the needs of people, rather than demanding we make ourselves small.