Nathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College where he is also Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, a former Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and author of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017; Gradiva Award, 2018; German and Turkish editions, 2018; Russian edition, 2020). Other recent publications include “The Analyst’s Hatred of Analysis” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013), "Fuck Redux" (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2013), “The Googled and Googling Analyst” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017), “Charisma” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2021), and “Greenberg and the Analyst’s Heresy/Orthodoxy Matrix” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2022). He is the recipient of teaching awards from the psychiatry residents at Cornell and psychoanalytic candidates at Columbia, the George E. Daniels Merit Award of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (2011), the George S. Goldman Award of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center (2015), and the Cooper Award for contributions to psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychiatry, and historical scholarship (Weill Cornell Psychiatry, 2020). He delivered the Liebert Memorial Award Lecture in 2015 and the Cooper Memorial Grand Rounds Lecture in 2020. He has been in private practice in New York since 1987.

Publications

Kravis NM: James Braid's psychophysiology: a turning point in the history of dynamic psychiatry.  Am J Psychiatry 145(10):1191-1206, 1988

Kravis NM, Weiss CJ, Perry SW: Drug and alcohol addiction and AIDS, in Comprehensive Handbook of Drug and Alcohol Addiction.  NS Miller, ed.  New York: Marcel Dekker, 1991

Kravis NM: The "prehistory" of the idea of transference.  Int Rev Psychoanal 19(1):9-22, 1992

Kravis NM: Rapport and transference: Victor Race and the Marquis de Puységur. Hosp Comm Psychiatry 45(4):325-328, 1994

Kravis NM, Groopman LC: History of Psychiatry, in Core Readings in Psychiatry: An Annotated Guide to the Literature, 2nd ed. MS Sacks, W Sledge, C Warren, eds. Washington, DC: APA Press, 1995

Kravis NM: Review of Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker: The Expedition to America (1909) by Saul Rosenzweig.  J Amer Psychoanal Assn 43(2):576-579, 1995

Kravis NM: Review of Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis by Peter M.Newton. Int J Psychoanal 77(3):639-642, 1996

Kravis NM: Review of Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement by Paul Roazen and Bluma Swerdloff.  Int J Psychoanal 78(1):196-199, 1997

Kravis NM: Review of Writing in Psychoanalysis edited by Emma Piccioli, Pier Luigi Rossi, and Antonio Alberto Semi.  Psychoanalytic Books 9(1):57-60, 1998

Kravis NM: Reply to Dr. O'Neil [letter]. Int J Psychoanal 79(3):599-601, 1998

Auchincloss EL, Kravis NM: Teaching Freud to undergraduates: a case report. Int J Psychoanal 81(4):753-770, 2000

Kravis NM: Identification, in The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy and Culture, E Erwin, ed. NY & London: Routledge, 2002 (pp.272-273)

Kravis N: Friedman’s corpus since his Anatomy: a psychoanalytic odyssey. J Amer Psychoanal Assn 2006;54(3):945-976

Kravis N: Literary fancy [book review essay]. Bull Assn Psychoanal Medicine, vol. 40, Fall 2006, pp. 14-17

Kravis N: Making psychoanalysis: an interview with George Makari. Bull Assn Psychoanal Medicine, vol. 40, Fall 2006, pp. 71-80

Lister E, Kravis N, Sandberg L, Halpern JK, Cabaniss DL, Singer MB: “I write to know what I think”: a four-year writing curriculum. J Amer Psychoanal Assn 2008;56(4):1231-1247

Kravis N: Narcissistic injury and narcissistic defenses. In Approach to the Psychiatric Patient: Case-Based Essays. Barnhill JW (ed). Washington, DC: APPI, 2009, pp. 393-398

Kravis N: The Kohut/Kernberg controversy. In Approach to the Psychiatric Patient: Case-Based Essays. Barnhill JW (ed). Washington, DC: APPI, 2009, pp. 421-426

Kravis N: The finger-pointing over Penn State [letter to the editor]. The New York Times 11/18/2011, p. A32

Kravis N: The analyst’s hatred of analysis. Psychoanal Quarterly 2013;82(1):89-114

Kravis N: ‘Lady Analysis’ in full splendor: response to commentaries. Psychoanal Quarterly 2013;82(1):141-144

Kravis N: Fuck redux: a review and commentary. J Amer Psychoanal Assn 2013;61(3):527-534

Kravis N: Kravis on Shulman’s “The Analyst’s Pleasure.” J Amer Psychoanal Assn 2017;65 (1):NP 1-3

Kravis N: The Googled and Googling analyst. J Amer Psychoanal Assn 2017;65(5):799-818

Kravis N: On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017

Kravis N: Auf der Couch: Eine verdrängte Geschichte der analytischen Couch von Platon bis Freud. Berlin: Edition Frölich, 2018

Kravis N: Plato’dan Freud’a: Terapi Divaninin Gizli Tarihi. Istanbul: Sola Unitas Academy, 2018

Kravis N: На кушетке: Нерассказанная история кушетки психоаналитика от Платона до Фрейда. Moscow: СЛОВО/SLOVO, 2020

Kravis N: Charisma. Psychoanal Quarterly 2021;90(4):523-554

Kravis N: In memoriam: Henri Parens MD. Int J Applied Psychoanal 2022;19(4):389

Kravis N: Greenberg and the analyst’s heresy/orthodoxy matrix. Psychoanal Quarterly 2022 2022;91(4):685-708

On the Couch

Many years ago, the New York City subway was plastered with enormous couch posters, part of a 1991 ad campaign by the Archdiocese of New York. They bore the caption (some in English, others in Spanish), “Some people find the same peace of mind sitting in a pew. Come home at Easter. The Catholic Archdiocese of New York.” As a young psychiatrist and candidate in psychoanalytic training in Manhattan, I was taking the subway four times a week to my analyst’s office to lie on just such a couch. These ads were obviously not aimed at psychoanalytic trainees like me. Who, I wondered, comprised the target audience? And why was the Church so confident that subway riders would easily decode the image in front of them, and immediately understand the implied choice between couch and pew?

The couch endures as a cultural icon, a symbol of self-reflection and healing, a shorthand for the therapist in cartoons and movies even as the popularity of psychoanalytic treatment wanes. We could say the couch is more resilient than the field of psychoanalysis itself, and I would add that its iconic status in the general culture contrasts with it being held in increasing suspicion by some contemporary analysts, who display growing ambivalence about it, or even scoff at the tradition of the patient’s recumbence, seeing it as a relic of a more authoritarian era, a power play on the part of the analyst that unnecessarily regresses or infantilizes the patient and supposedly blocks the path to authentic emotional engagement. I find such a priori assertions problematic. They’re not based on any real knowledge. There’s no evidentiary basis either for mandating or disparaging use of the couch. The research simply hasn’t been done. We can’t know in advance which patients will find it liberating, and which will find it too discomfiting.

Freud famously said that he got analysands to lie on a couch because he couldn’t stand being stared at all day, but he never explained why recumbent posture should be preferred to simply arranging the chairs so that analyst and patient don’t face each other. Freud’s couch, heavily decorated with rugs, pillows, and blankets and surrounded by his extensive collection of antiquities, has the look of a Turkish divan. It speaks volumes about its owner’s taste and interests. Most contemporary analysts have distanced themselves from Freud’s aesthetic, heavily inflected with the romantic and archeological motifs so popular in his day, preferring the sparer, more spartan couch usually seen in cartoons and illustrations today. But even among analysts who have forsaken the couch as part of their treatment technique, many retain one as part of their office décor.

Pondering the disjuncture between the couch’s iconic status and its apparently diminishing role in analytic technique led me to realize that the origins of its use in psychoanalysis have never been fully explored. The analytic literature is strangely silent on this topic. Following Freud, the couch became a fixture of analysts’ offices, but no one seemed to know why.

I decided that since analysts haven’t been able to articulate a compelling clinical rationale for recumbence, it would be better to delve into the social history of posture to find explanations for the couch’s cultural importance as a symbol of self-awareness. Starting with a look at the Greek and Roman customs of reclining dining, I found that far from connoting passivity or submission to medical authority, recumbence in social settings has long served as an expression of freedom, pleasure, luxury, and intimacy. Evolving ideals of comfort and social intimacy reflected in furniture history, clothing history, manners, and the healing arts converged in the nineteenth century such that it became thinkable to lie down in the presence of another person to talk. Even though some professionals today frown upon its use, the couch retains its significance in the public lexicon of symbols for interiority because it resonates so strongly with these cultural ideals.

It’s true that no one can claim to know with any degree of certainty for whom or for what types of problem the use of the couch is best suited, and there is no substantial body of empirical research on posture, frequency of sessions, or duration of psychoanalytic treatment. I continue to recommend using the couch to most patients I treat in analysis. But I don’t insist on it, and I always try to ascertain the patient’s interest first. Ideally, both analyst and patient are better able to access deeper layers of thought and feeling once freed from having to attend to the usual social cues of face-to-face interaction, but only a trial of analysis on the couch will tell. Good analytic technique calls for flexibility and sensitivity, not for the doctrinaire insistence on one posture or another. At the same time, it seems fair to assert that reclining for the purpose of talking to someone is for many people a uniquely powerful experience that has no parallel anywhere else.

Praise for On the Couch:

"In this penetrating, imaginative, witty book, Nathan Kravis traces the significance of the psychoanalytic couch, drawing on philosophy, history, Freud’s own writings, and evolving fashions in decorative arts. What results is a penetrating commentary on how the eternal truths of psychoanalysis intersect with fashion and happenstance. This psychoanalysis of the couch itself is written with both humor and insight.”
— Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

"Nathan Kravis, who is both a practicing psychiatrist with psychoanalytic training as well as a distinguished historian of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has produced a masterpiece of visual history rooted in his reading of Freud."
— Sander L. Gilman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2018