This rich collection of essays by twenty-five writers — including Adam Gopnik, Daphne Merkin, André Aciman, Cólm Tóibín, and Rivka Galchen — is inspired by the writings and cultural legacy of Sigmund Freud. Compiled by Andrew Blauner, On the Couch appears at a moment when Freud’s core ideas regarding the unconscious, childhood sexuality, ways of mourning, and the death drive are undergoing serious reevaluation.
In the spirit of the “talking cure” — the early term for the process of psychoanalysis — many of the contributors describe their own personal encounters with Freud, which often took place in an academic or therapeutic setting. In some cases, those encounters proved deeply problematic. In “Penis Envy,” Jennifer Finney Boylan discusses therapy’s failure to help her as she embraced her transgender identity.
By contrast, for David Michaelis, the therapeutic process was profoundly helpful. In an essay called “My Oedipus Complex,” Michaelis shares his secret desire for his mother, stirred, he theorizes, by her habit of “nude sunbathing” in his youth. Michaelis recounts his still-troubling memories with two therapists. The first was a stern, classically trained, Europe-born analyst; the second was this same psychiatrist’s shrewder, more helpful daughter. Looking back after years of talking in the safe space of the daughter’s office, Michaelis concludes that “therapy gave me relief — a kind of moratorium on time itself, with a useful tilt toward the future.” His experience highlights the latent power of talk therapy to help people move on.
Another group of narratives — those by Casey Schwartz, Daphne Merkin, and Susie Boyt (Freud’s great-granddaughter) — relate stories of physical and imagined pilgrimage to the Freud Museum, located in leafy North London. It was there that Freud lived his last years, after escaping Nazi-occupied Vienna on June 4, 1938. The museum recreates Freud’s legendary office, showcasing his analytic couch and his collection of ancient, exactingly arranged figurines. Upstairs, visitors can view the living quarters and office of Anna Freud, his devoted daughter and the famous child analyst.
In “Searching for Martha Freud,” Daphne Merkin speculates on the impact Freud’s wife may have had on her husband’s psychoanalytic theories, a question that most Freud biographers do not consider. Merkin is fascinated by what she calls “the couple’s divergent attitudes toward Judaism” — a tension, she surmises, that “remained a source of underground conflict.” After Freud’s death in 1939, Martha began to light Shabbat candles, a ritual practice that her religiously agnostic husband had forbidden. For Merkin, Martha Freud looms as an underappreciated figure in the history of psychoanalysis.
In perhaps the most moving of the “pilgrimage” essays, “A Night at the Freud Museum,” Susie Boyt sleeps uneasily in Anna Freud’s bed as she tries to imagine Freud’s final months. Surrounded by the smells, textures, and artifacts of her great-grandfather’s house, Boyt tries “to think about what it would be like to lose your home, your state, your patients, your siblings, the city where your mother tongue is spoken, half your books, and many other aspects of your identity at eighty-two.”
The most Freud-inspired, theoretically informed essay in the collection is Michael S. Roth’s “Playing the Game.” Roth engages with Freud’s theories about the death instinct, the challenge of mourning, and the necessary process of working through depression in the wake of loss. “Change and loss are fundamentally entangled, for Freud,” Roth explains. His deep reading of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), drafted in the aftermath of World War I, reveals the relevance of Freudian ideas for our own time, which is marked by the return of buried hatreds.
Collectively, this lively collection of essays confirms Freud’s continued importance.
Donald Weber writes about Jewish American literature and popular culture. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mohegan Lake, NY.
