The importance of the couch
If you go to the Freud Museum in Hampstead, you can see Sigmund Freud’s actual couch, a chaise longue given to him by the grateful patient Madame Benvenisti in 1890-ish. Once alone in the museum, with his collection of antique figures, his desk, books and paintings, I found something painfully moving about that couch, draped with Persian carpets and now empty of anyone’s unconscious. Dora, the Rat Man, Anna O, the Wolf Man (pseudonyms given to his patients) all lay there, Freud sitting behind them. This is where it all began. (Well, actually, it began in Vienna—here is where it ended when Freud died in 1939.)