"This arrangement conveniently spared the analyst-"I cannot bear to be gazed at for eight hours a day," Freud remarked-while allowing the patient to speak without inhibition. Supine on a Persian-rug-draped couch, Freud's patients were instructed to say whatever came to mind, "as if you were sitting at the window of a railway train and describing to someone behind you the changing views you see outside.""
"She has, however, benefitted from years of therapy based on the insights of psychoanalysis, including the notion that a particular kind of talking can lead to relief from burdensome ways of being. She recently said of seeing a therapist, "I like having someone that's got my back-someone for myself. And then there is 'Oh, my God, why am I still doing this? Or why do I still feel like that?'""
Sigmund Freud prescribed a consulting-room arrangement that had patients recline on a sofa while the analyst sat out of sight, encouraging uninhibited free association. Patients were urged to speak whatever came to mind, likened to describing changing views from a railway train. Bella Freud, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund, has attended extensive psychoanalytic therapy and recognizes its power to relieve entrenched patterns through particular forms of talking. For more than three decades she has led an eponymous London fashion label with a bohemian, elegant, ironical aesthetic, sometimes referencing her intellectual inheritance in playful garment slogans.
Read at The New Yorker
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