Nathan Kravis - On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud.

Nathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy and the Arts at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He is also a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and author of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). He is in private practice in New York City.

In On the Couch, Dr Kravis explores the social history of recumbent posture and delves into its symbolism and representations from classical antiquity to the present. He then situates current analyst ambivalence about the couch within this complex history.

Since its publication in 2017, On the Couch has been translated into German, Turkish, and Russian, and received a Gradiva Award in 2018.

His other recent publications include “The analyst’s hatred of analysis” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013) and “The Googled and Googling analyst” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017).