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On the Couch

2005; The MIT Press; Volume: 113; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/0162287054769940

1536-013X

Mignon Nixon,

Psychoanalysis and Social Critique

OCTOBER 113, Summer 2005, pp. 39–76. © 2005 Mignon Nixon. There is a scene in Nanni Moretti’s film The Son’s Room (2001) in which a prospective patient, a middle-aged man making his first visit to a psychoanalyst, pauses upon entering the consulting room to examine the couch. It is a fine couch, he remarks, “simple, comfortable, even elegant in its way. . . . But I have no intention of lying on it.” Still, the analyst’s marine-blue couch receives many visitors over the course of the film. One woman spends the hour calculating her losses. How much does the analyst really understand—20 percent of what she is saying, or 30? There have been 460 sessions, she chides, and after every one, to assuage her disappointment, she shops. A male patient gushes dreams. They pour from him in unbroken succession, filling the analytic hour like water flowing noisily into a bath. A woman suffers from obsessional thoughts. Her time on the couch is measured as metronomically as her daily routine, in a recitation of the rituals that mete out her hours. The analyst’s thoughts drift across to the cupboard where he stores a private collection of objects, a treasury not of antique figurines such as Freud favored, but an extensive array of running shoes—fetishes not of Eros but of Nike—stacked in precisely ordered rows. While the patients talk, the tall, bearded analyst, his long limbs folded into an armchair classically positioned behind the couch, smiles, sighs, takes notes, drops and lifts his eyes, flexes his fingers, makes the occasional tactful observation, but mostly abides. In one session, he mentally counts the seconds until the patient departs. For these visitors are sufferers in need of his help, but also intruders, The setting is like the darkness in a cinema, like the silence in a concert hall.