The Couch: Thinking in Repose

The Couch was installed in the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and occupied a large, recently vacated apartment above the museum. The exhibition left the apartment in its original condition—cuffed and smudged walls, picture hooks and plumbing fixtures all intact. An elevated platform guided visitors through the space, as though in an archaeological ruin, giving Freud’s metaphor of psychoanalysis as excavation a concrete form.

A variety of furniture for reclining was displayed, ranging from the wooden divan of the 1873 World Expo to a daybed designed by Otto Wagner, while artworks by Odilon Redon, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol and Rachel Whiteread demonstrated the couch’s path from bourgeois interior design to object of contemplation for the avant-garde. Early psychotherapeutic methods were also explored, from alpine fresh-air treatments to sensory deprivation. Another room housed “listening chaises” that played recordings of Austrian psychoanalysts through built-in speakers. Finally, a screening room provided a reminder of the impact of psychoanalysis on popular culture with films and television clips.

“Museums can feel like cold, sterile places, which makes the “couch” exhibit on Freud so refreshing, with its tattered walls, projected Persian rug, crooked doors and old familiar objects. It feels less like a gallery and more like the house of an old uncle. Despite the nostalgic décor, the exhibit strikes a wonderfully modern tone, well proportioned, appropriating the architectural elements of the space—bathtubs, window frames, doorways—to house individual displays and artifacts.”