Like Kleenex is to the tissue, like Michael Jackson is to pop, the couch has become pretty much synonymous with psychotherapy. Just say you're putting something - or someone -- "on the couch", and that means an analysis of the most frank variety is coming.
About 15 months into therapy, it was time to put me on the couch. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Ms. Analyst and I had been face-to-face till then, but when we decided to go from one visit a week to three, I started thinking I should go whole hog and lie down.
From the core of my being, this was the last thing I actually wanted to do. I had always liked looking Ms. Analyst in the eye when we talked, or didn't talk. If I wanted to look away, I always had the option. I started to do research, starting with Ms. Analyst, to figure out if I should sit or lie down. Of course, I got no direct guidance there. "I want to understand why this is important to you," she'd say. Again and again.
Secretly in search of support for sitting in my online research, I got very little help.
95% of the articles I found said lying on the couch was the "right" way to do it, or simply stated that psychoanalysis was a process where the patient would lie on a couch and babble - period. About 4% said that it was the patient's choice whether to work face-to-face or lie down. A brave 1% said sitting and looking at each other was the better tack.
48 hours before analysis kicked in, I got gutsy and committed to the couch. Striding in for Analysis, Day One, I firmly told Ms. Analyst to take the seat next to the couch, instead of the one across from it. I lied down. I gazed at the geometrical picture on the wall and tried to love it. I started to speak.
I felt like I was on crack.
From there on, session after session, analysis became a painful torture test whereby I withstood the isolation that had emerged in place of the intimacy we had taken so long to build. I tried with all my heart to let go and mega-free associate. I waited for the liberation that was supposed to come, somehow, with the invisible human presence. I tried and tried to love looking at that picture as much as a person. And I couldn't do it.
When Week Six of analysis began, I strode in, sat down and made another announcement. "I've come," I said, "to ask for my old job back." To my undying relief, Ms. Analyst did not insist that I lie down. We sat and talked to each other for 45 minutes, and the next day, we were officially face-to-face again - have been ever since.
That was over a year ago, and I wish I could say I've never looked back, but whenever analysis is hard - and it was incredibly difficult today, a mystifying maze of a conversation - I wonder if I failed myself on the couch. Should I have stuck it out? Would my breakthroughs be rushing downstream if my feet were up, instead of on the floor? Why couldn't I cut it lying down? What difference has it really made?
I didn't have a way to ask other analysands back then, but now I do. Are you sitting up? Lying down? Hopping one one foot? Let me know where you stand. - Mr. Analysand
