Masterpieces Of Vienna (20 of 38)

Masterpieces Of Vienna

Freud didn't want his patients to see his face.
"I do not wish my facial expressions to give the patient material for interpretation, or to influence him in what he tells me."
When you lie on a couch, and you do not see the person you're talking to, you turn inward.
And your own history unfolds in front of your eyes.
And you can narrate it at the same time as you are turning inwards and looking at your own life.
Pieces of your own history start making sense.
And you become more meaningful to yourself as a person.
Talking to an invisible listener can be a liberating experience.
It can also be deeply disturbing.

Because you can't see the analyst when you're on the couch, because he sits behind you, you have all sorts of fantasies.
And in analysis, the therapist doesn't say very much.
They speak two or three times in 50 minutes.
So in those silences, of course, you wonder whether your therapist is still there, whether he is naked, whether he has set himself on fire whether he has left the room and gone for a quick burger.
You don't know what he's doing.
Had the couch been animate, it would have recoiled in horror at the arrival of a man whom Freud called the Wolf Man.
His real name was Sergei Pankejeff.
He was a Russian aristocrat and he was in a bad way.
He hadn't been to the toilet in the normal way for five years.
He could only move his bowels with an enema.
His father and his sister had both committed suicide and he felt as if there was a veil cutting him off from reality.