Busboys and Poets Books Presents: The Analytic Couch
Date and Time
Dec 3, 2017 4:30 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Dec 3, 2017 4:30 pm
450K
Please join Busboys and Poets Books as we welcome author Dr. Nathan Kravis to discuss his new book On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud. Dr. Kravis will be joined in conversation with Harry Cooper, Curator and Head of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art.
The use of the couch in psychoanalysis is unstudied and under-theorized. Yet the couch is iconic, a universally recognized symbol of psychoanalysis. The couch’s iconic status has outstripped its theoretical underpinning, though not necessarily its practical utility. The couch has become the emblem of a cultural narrative of self-knowledge. As this richly illustrated presentation demonstrates, 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.
Books will be available for purchase and signing before and after the event.
